Positive Adelaide wraps after a year documenting HIV life in South Australia

Animations, quilts and certificates: a community-led project put lived experience on the record, in participants' own words and on their own terms.

Told by Paige Turner · 3 October 2026

Positive Adelaide wrapped in September after a year of collecting what polite coverage calls 'lived experiences' and what it actually was: people living with HIV in South Australia saying their own names, in their own words, on their own terms.

The community-led project supported participants to make animations, design T-shirts, stitch quilts and create certificates honouring the people who have held up the South Australian HIV community. Thorne Harbour Health ran it in partnership with ViiV Healthcare, the pharmaceutical company, and the final videos are up now — not as tragedy, not as inspiration, but as the thing the project statement actually promised: education about the challenges and realities people living with HIV face today, and a direct challenge to ongoing stigma.

The videos are published. The people who made them are still here.