The grim legacy of a landmark campaign

The Grim Reaper AIDS awareness campaign of 1987 stands among the most controversial and the most memorable moments in 50 years of television in Australia.

This week the architects behind the campaign are commemorating its 20-year anniversary by looking back at the legacy of the country’s most effective public health advertisement.

Tasked with warning people of the growing threat, the National Advisory Committee for AIDS approved an advertisement that depicted men and women of all ages as bowling pins, knocked down by cowled Grim Reaper figures.

Ita Buttrose, then chairperson of NACAIDS, said the advertisement ran for only six weeks but once seen it was never forgotten.

When I first saw it, it absolutely chilled me to the bone, it had an impact on me too, she said.

It was a controversial campaign, I suppose, in that it really shocked people. That was its intention, to wake up Australia out of its apathy.

Because it got people talking, it generated its own publicity.

There’s never been quite as effective a campaign in Australia. More than 90 percent of people had seen it, discussed it and changed the way they thought about their behaviour, she said.

More importantly it alerted people to the fact that people with HIV/AIDS were people, human beings.

Buttrose said AIDS fundraising was nearly impossible before the Grim Reaper campaign.

I think it’s very easy to forget how much prejudice there was -“ it wasn’t fashionable to fight HIV/AIDS back then.

Professor Sue Kippax from the National Centre of HIV Research at the University of NSW said the advertisement put HIV on the map.

Everybody in Australia knew within two weeks what HIV was -“ that was a remarkable thing to do.

Kippax said it was important to acknowledge the event because it marked a government commitment to fund and take HIV seriously.

That campaign made it very clear the government was concerned and would put effort into controlling the threat, she said.

Along with the Grim Reaper and the campaigns that followed it was a commitment to fund the AIDS organisations, and setting up the partnership that is Australia’s response to HIV, Kippax said.

Bill Bowtell from the Lowy Institute said were it not for the Grim Reaper there would not have been funding for AIDS Councils and researching institutions.

The Grim Reaper kicked off 20 years of sustained effort by governments, researchers, clinicians, keeping rates of HIV in Australia very low, he said.

Crediting the Australian success to the partnership between government, community and clinicians, Bowtell said the 60-second spot played an important role, but was just the tip of the iceberg.

The Grim Reaper was a visible symbol on TV, but underneath there was a massive mobilisation of information, he said.

There were 10 million inserts into Reader’s Digest and a massive mail drop to every household in Australia.

Publications in Sydney Star Observer, Dolly magazine, the Bulletin, everybody else responded editorially, putting in information about AIDS for their readership, he said.

If it had just been a memorable ad without the information it would have been worthless.

Every poll indicated that people’s knowledge went up, discrimination went down, and behaviour changed. We used condoms. We had access to needle exchanges.

It was already apparent that gay men had started to protect themselves, but that information kept the new infection rate plummeting and kept it very low for 20 years.

Paul Kidd, editor of Positive Living, said the campaign was really effective in making straight people aware of the threat, but did little to help the gay community.

In 1987 we were already terribly aware of what AIDS was doing in the gay community, he said.

The people who were already at risk, gay men, had already stopped having unsafe sex -“ we invented safe sex.

Rather than humanise those with HIV, Kidd said the campaign helped demonise them.

They said the Grim Reaper was supposed to represent HIV the virus but a large number of people saw gay men in those grim reapers.

Certainly that made people aware there was a disease they could get from gay men and that created a real division between the gay and straight worlds.

The sentiment was confirmed by one of the campaign architects in 2002, when Professor Ron Penny said the campaign unintentionally demonised the gay community.

The downside was that the Grim Reaper became identified with gay men rather than as the Reaper, Penny said to reporters.

Bowtell, Kippax and Buttrose all disagreed, saying the Grim Reaper demonised the virus, not gay men.

If you look at instances of discrimination in the four years before the Grim Reaper and the four years after, as soon as people had honest information, those problems dived, Bowtell said.

HIV is a demon, it’s understandable for people to be fearful of HIV, but I think it made people realise that anyone was at risk of getting it, Kippax said.