First Nations Superhero ‘Condoman’ Was a World Leader in HIV Prevention, Gracelyn Smallwood’s Aunt Made It Happen

When HIV first reached Australian shores within the early Nineteen Eighties, politicians and medical examiners feared the virus would spread to distant Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. This didn’t occur – due to the hugely successful health promotion campaigns and public health programs implemented across the country by Aboriginal-led health services since 1987.

The most famous of them was “Condom”, the First Nations superhero whose safe-sex directive, “Don’t be ashamed, be brave: use condoms!” won hearts and minds across the continent.

Aunty Gracelyn Smallwood, a proud resident of Birrigubba, Kalkadoon and the South Sea Islands and a registered nurse/midwife, played a key role on this public health response, working together with her colleague and friend Phillip Mills and other medical examiners across the state.

Her educational profession began in her hometown of Townsville and culminated at the very best level of Australia’s HIV and AIDS service, where she played a task in shaping a world-leading approach to combating the virus.

Don’t be ashamed, be brave!

In 1987, Aunty Gracelyn joined the National Advisory Commission on AIDS (NACAIDS) as the brand new Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representative. The chair of the commission was media personality Ita Buttrose and it was made up of, in Aunty Gracelyn’s words, “white middle-class people” who “really didn’t know our world”.

Infamous Grim Reaper Campaign depicted a specter in a black coat in a bowling alley “hitting” so-called atypical Australians. Aunt Gracelyn explained to her colleagues that while this will likely have had something to do with non-Indigenous Australians, for the communities she represented it was simply a daunting and off-putting “skeleton walking around with a big knife.” Furthermore, within the distant communities and missions where a lot of Aunt Gracelyn’s community lived or got here from, there have been no bowling alleys.

As a result, Aunt Gracelyn got some modest funding from the federal governmentjust A$5,000 to assemble a team of health and social staff from community-controlled health organisations across Queensland.

Together they visited Aboriginal and Islander communities across the state, then returned to Townsville. There she and her team walked the streets, gathering community leaders. They knew they might first should discuss with the Elders concerning the health program they desired to run.

They held workshops and discussions for several days. From those first workshops, Condom was born when one among the Elders said, “We can have our own Black hero and call him the condom man.” The idea was sketched by a graphic designer and based on popular comic book character The Phantom.

The Condoman campaign was originally designed for northern Queensland but after its initial launch in 1987 it was quickly taken up by Aboriginal communities across the continent. The campaign was so successful that in 1988 Aunty Gracelyn was asked to handle the World Health Organisation conference in London.

Here she hung out together with her family friend, Burnam Burnam, an Aboriginal activist who had been planted the Aboriginal flag on the cliffs of Doverlaying claim to England on behalf of the Aborigines. She even managed to smuggle a replica of Burnam Burnam’s writings right into a ceremony at Buckingham Palace by leaving a replica under the tablecloth.

After the conference, she took Condoman on a world tour, visiting black and Native American communities within the United States.

Black Earth, Black Health, Black Power

Aunt Gracelyn was born in Townsville in 1951. When 90% of Australians voted in favour within the 1967 referendum, 90% of Townsville residents voted “no”She grew up determined to fight racism.

From a young age, she was immersed in stories of her family’s experiences with racism and resistance. Her father and his siblings were torn from their family and homeland at a young age and sent to Palm Island, a mission that was incredibly cruel. Decades earlier, in 1957, her father’s uncle had Palm Island Hunger Striketogether with six other freedom fighters.

Aunt Gracelyn spent most of her childhood in Garbutt, Aitkenvale and West End, on the outskirts of Townsville, in northern Queensland. The family lived in a series of homes that were because of be demolished. One was a tin shed, with no electricity and a clay floor. Every day within the Queensland heat, the family’s children went out to gather copper wire and bottles to complement their parents’ meager earnings.

As Aunt Gracelyn entered maturity, militant indigenous rights movement entered the political scene. In 1966, the shepherds and servants of Gurindji got here down from Wave Hill Station within the Northern Territory, refusing to work for quotas and animating the fight for land rights. They began a seven-year struggle, eventually regaining their land. The fight for land and justice spread across the continent.

In the late Sixties and early Seventies, Redfern in Sydney and Fitzroy in Melbourne became centres of this powerful Indigenous political movement. Activists and community leaders established Aboriginal-controlled health services, introducing a policy of self-determination and community control into the sector of Aboriginal health.

Following the 1967 referendum, Aunty Gracelyn began her nursing and midwifery training and graduated in 1973, becoming one among the few Aboriginal and Islander women who, despite institutional and interpersonal racism, found a path into the nursing occupation.

From 1973 to 1975 she worked as a distant nurse specialising within the treatment of sexually transmitted infections before returning to Townsville, where her political and skilled worlds collided.

Highly politicised by her experiences of poverty and racism, and shaped by her family’s long tradition of resistance, she became occupied with the emerging politics of Aboriginal control and self-determination.

In 1974 she helped establish the Townsville Aboriginal and Islanders Health Service, the primary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander-run health service in the world. She became the primary registered nurse and midwife to work there, and he or she did so voluntarily.

Responding to HIV

In the early Nineteen Eighties, Aunty Gracelyn was a key figure within the growing Aboriginal health sector and a daily speaker at national and international conferences.

On a visit to the US in 1985, she saw how sick her HIV-positive friend was and realised the importance of HIV. Cases in Australia were still low, but Aunt Gracelyn was fearful about where this is perhaps heading. She returned home and immediately began a public health campaign.

In July 1987, an article within the Daily Telegraph reported on the AIDS education campaign that Aunty Gracelyn had been running in Townsville for the previous 12 months. It noted that “Aboriginal nurse Mrs Smallwood” had spoken to shut to 10,000 people as a part of her “direct AIDS campaign”.

The campaign included pre-match motivational talks with “shocked footballers, cricketers and basketball players.” Gracelyn’s aunt told a reporter that while “straight men on football teams […] “They keep saying you should talk to faggots,” and when she asked them in the event that they had had a couple of partner, “you could almost hear a pin drop.”

Her educational work caught the eye of the National AIDS Advisory Commission and prompted her to hitch it.

Indigenous health in indigenous hands

In 1997, ten years after Condoman was introduced, Aunty Gracelyn’s contribution to public health was recognised by Nelson Mandela.

She was invited to a ceremony commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the death of Steve Biko, a South African anti-apartheid leader who was murdered in police custody. Here she met a civil rights activist and Black Panther Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael). She used this time to fulfill with activists and provides a lecture on the townships on HIV and AIDS.

Her visit to South Africa, where the fight against racism was going down and had a worldwide impact, was a gathering of many threads of her life and politics.

The Condoman campaign was the results of a public health and health promotion approach that was interwoven with Aunty Gracelyn’s fierce anti-racism and commitment to a politics of self-determination. It is a crucial example of the highly successful community-led HIV responses that were implemented by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across the continent within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties.

Despite some fluctuations, HIV diagnosis rates amongst Aboriginal and Torres Islander people remain at roughly the identical level as amongst non-Indigenous people.

In 2018 Australian Medical Journal published a paper warning that recent surveillance data showed the potential for a “concentrated epidemic” of HIV amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The authors argued that low uptake of recent biomedical interventions (similar to Pre-exposure prophylaxis) amongst Indigenous peoples has threatened to undermine Australia’s goals to eliminate HIV by 2020.

In 2022 data from the Kirby Institute showed that after a rise in 2015–16, the HIV case reporting rate amongst Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people declined steadily between 2016 and 2021. This resulted in a return to approximate parity with non-Indigenous people.

While a few of this data was collected through the COVID-19 pandemic and is predicated on small numbers, so it must be treated with caution, the general trajectory of population decline tells a story of hope. Indigenous communities proceed to defy expectations.

It is a testament to the success of the community-led public health response to the virus. It is a crucial reminder that when Indigenous health is within the hands of Indigenous people, the outcomes could be extraordinary.

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This article is predicated on a fraction of a book by Geraldine Fela, Critical Care: Nurses on the Front Line of Australia’s AIDS Crisis (LatestSouth), published this month.