Appendix
[1] My maternal grandmother.
[2] ‘Expelled from childcare centre in Kincumber,’ The Canberra Times, 13 October 1985, p 3.
[3] N.T McLennan, “Van Grafhorst, Eve (1982–1993),’ Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed October 2, 2021, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/van-grafhorst-eve-27059/text34532, published online 2017, accessed online 25 September 2021.
[4] Paul Sendziuk, ‘Bad Blood: The Contamination of Australia’s Blood Supply and the Emergence of Gay Activism in the Age of AIDS,’ Journal of Australian Studies 25, no. 67: 75-85, https://doi.org/10.1080/14443050109387641.
[5] Dorothy Nelkin, ‘Blood and Bioethics in the Biotechnology Age,’ in Signs of Life: bio art and beyond, ed. Eduardo Kac (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007), 118-120.
[6] Ronald Bayer, ‘Private Acts, Social Consequences: AIDS and the Politics of Public Health,’ Bioethics 4, no.4 (October 1990): 340-50.
[7] ‘Policy Document, Blood Donation Deferral,’ AMSA the Australian Medical Students Association, accessed October 2, 2021, https://www.amsa.org.au/sites/amsa.org.au/files/Blood%20Donation%20Deferral%20%282020%29.pdf .
[8] Deferral periods for potential blood donors can be permanent or temporary and are determined by the Therapeutic Goods Administration of Australia (TGA) to ensure that Transfusion Transmittable Infections (TTIs) are screened and prevented from compromising the safety and supply of national blood products. Current deferral periods applying only to specific populations; as described by Mike Kesby and Matt Sothern in ‘Blood, Sex and Trust: The Limits of the Population-based Risk Management Paradigm,’ (2014) continue historic presumptions that all Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) are at risk of HIV and other TTIs, whilst heterosexual populations are somehow free of blood borne risk.
[9] Policy Document, Blood Donation Deferral,’ AMSA
[10] Dale Smith, ‘New Program Allowing Queer Men to Donate Plasma is a First Step Toward Ending the Blood Ban,’ Xtra*, October 18, 2021, https://xtramagazine.com/power/blood-ban-plasma-donation-gay-men-210706
[11] Loise Bourchier, Sue Malta, Meredith Temple-Smith and Jane Hocking, ‘Do We Need to Worry About Sexually Transmissible Infections (STIs) in older Women in Australia? An Investigation of STI trends between 2000 and 2018,’ Sexual Health, CSIRO Publishing 17, (2020): 517-524, https://www.publish.csiro.au/SH/pdf/SH20130 .
[12] ‘Popper’ refers to a 250ml refreshing juice box generally used for packed lunches, as opposed to the inhaled alkyl nitrites used by some MSM during sexual intercourse to give a mild high and to relax the involuntary smooth muscles of the throat and anus.
1.
A village nestled on a mountain pass,
Thick with monsoon air.
Sweating up thunderstorms.
A slap of lightning, torn by sheets of rain.
Inside this smear of land and sky, nothing seems to die.
Throw a stick at the ground, and it sprouts a tree.
Spit out melon seeds, and be choked by sticky vines.
Bà Ngọai [1] never walked barefoot.
Even feet can strike root in the mud, and if you get caught out in the rain,
You’ll get struck by lightning before the feast of Saint Têrêxa.
Not even our holy patrons can stop these demons.
Feeding and nourishing the village, the monsoon demanded payment.
Every rainy season brought endless funeral processions.
And with each burial, followed a period of supernatural waiting.
We all took turns to sit and pray,
guarding the graves for ba tháng mười ngày [3 Months, 10 Days].
100 days and nights,
Those slapped by the sky needed to be swaddled and consoled,
Wrapped in fertile soil.
To be settled, absolved by the earth.
The living spent time to watch and wait, keeping away grave robbers.
Invisible spirits, wild animals and shamans lured by lightning burials.
Disturbed from their loamy bed, these charred remains could be resurrected.
The bony toes and fingers of children struck,
Are charged with the most powerful magic.
2.
7000 kilometres away, another demon wakes.
November 1984: Three babies are reported to have died from the HIV-infected blood of a homosexual man.
Within 24 hours, the Queensland Government criminalises false declarations by donors about their homosexual activity or drug use.
The media claiming ‘promiscuous’ gays were maliciously donating ‘bad blood’ to contaminate the national supply.
Within a month, all Australian states and territories followed Queensland to mandate these unprecedented laws against gay men.
3.
The demon keeps on spreading.
When three-year-old Eve van Grafhorst bites another child at her childcare centre in Kincumber, all hell breaks loose. Eve was diagnosed with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) contracted from blood transfusions. She was expelled from her childcare.
Neighbours erected high fences around the family.
Some even sold their homes to move away from the cursed child.
Rampant hysteria — not so different from the supernatural disquiets of a monsoon village.
Eventually evicted from their rented home, [2] Eve van Grafhorst and her family escaped to New Zealand, where she became a child ambassador advocating for HIV awareness. Eve passed away in November 1993. [3]
4.
Arriving in Australia as an eight-year-old in 1989, I was unconcerned of the demons here. AIDS and HIV were spectres only on television and the news. All I knew was that gay men were banned from donating blood, and that if I ever had sex with another man, I could never be a blood donor.
As a teenager, giving blood became a self-defined rite of passage; a migrant obsession, what Paul Sendziuk describes as ‘the civic right to give blood’. [4] One of the few social markers of approval to prove to myself that I was a legitimate citizen, giving blood was a demonstration of my Australianness. My blood, flowing through the Blood Bank, could be life-giving.
Perhaps my own blood coursed through the veins of racists throughout this country. The mystic, symbolic and scientific complexity of blood as a tool of purity, exclusion, racial discrimination and genocide, described by Dorothy Nelkin, [5] was neutralised by my bodily presence in the national blood supply. This supernatural and transgressive co-mingling of blood, reminiscent of John Donne’s ‘The Flea’.
‘It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead.
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do’.
5.
Before starting university, I had managed to swell the Blood Bank a few times. But when a phlebotomist struggled to insert the needle into my ‘slippery veins’, leaving both my arms bruised and unable to bend, I decided that this would be the final time that my arms or any part of me could be kept straight. This was simultaneously a moment of liberation and grief.
My civic right to give blood became a civic threat. Summed up by Ronald Bayer ‘as the threat to blood — symbolic of life itself — […] a profound threat to the social standing of those who would be classed as a danger to public health’. [6] According to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (1998), the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (2007) and the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Tribunal (2009), blood donation as a gay man was legally ‘characterised as a gift that could be refused,’ [7] an unwanted gift, a public rejection, something non-discriminatory.
6.
Between 1996 and 2000, the Australian states and territories started to relax the sexual deferral period [8] for men who have sex with men (MSM) from lifelong to twelve months.
This meant that by the year 2000, men who have sex with men in Australia were finally permitted to donate blood, so long as they refrained from penetrative anal and oral sex for at least twelve months prior to blood donation. This ensured enough time for transfusion transmittable infections (TTIs), including HIV, to be accurately screened and detected. With innovations in the sensitivity and accuracy of screening and diagnostic technologies, the Australian Red Cross Lifeblood started pushing the Therapeutic Goods Administration of Australia (TGA) to further reduce this MSM 12-month abstinence period.
It took twenty years for the deferral period to be brought down to three months. In August 2020, Australia was brought into line with the scientific literature and legislative changes already made by the US (April 2020), Canada (June 2019) and the UK (July 2017).
7.
Although blood donor equality is moving in the right direction, much needs to be done to eradicate the demons of stigma that exist in the psyche of public health policy.
For men who have sex with men, the current deferral period of at least 90 days after sexual contact gives our bodies physiological time to develop antibodies to HIV and other TTIs that are clinically detectable. According to data from Lifeblood (see table in appendix), HIV infection can — in most cases — be detected within just six days, indicating that deferral periods more reflect the rituals and social superstitions of cleansing, waiting, and abstinence, than providing a necessary medical buffer.
Further, Australia remains the only country to explicitly exclude MSM who are currently using pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) therapy from the 3-month deferral period. [9] PrEP is a regimen of anti-HIV drugs that protect the user from infection with HIV during sex, even when condoms are not used. It has profoundly changed the experience and the sense of agency users feel around HIV prevention. However, the very therapy keeping people safe from HIV is itself a new barrier to giving blood.
In excluding PrEP users, many hear echoes of the original sin of public health: demonising gay, queer and bisexual men as inherently ‘promiscuous’ and therefore dangerous to the nation’s blood supply. In the context of increasingly accurate diagnostic technologies and contemporary shifts in social attitudes towards sexuality, a number of countries — including Spain, Italy and Portugal — have moved to behaviour-based risk assessments of blood donors. They ask individual donors about their personal risk activities rather than categorising them into broad assumptions about their sexual identity. The Canadian Blood Services are moving to expand their plasma donor eligibility, asking clear but gender-neutral screening questions to all donors — and not just MSM and trans people. For example, they ask, ‘in the last three months, have you had a new sexual partner, and has this/these partner/s had sex with another partner?’ [10]
Emerging population trends will need to shape how Australia maintains the viability and vitality of its future blood supply — especially in how we engage with attracting new blood donors. As both gender and sexual fluidity become increasingly normalised and integrated into the social fabric of contemporary life, experimenting with multiple partners and seeking sexual activities associated with higher risks can no longer be assumed as exclusive to the sexual behaviours of MSM. This will be increasingly relevant to the mainstream donor pool.
The rising popularity and accessibility of internet hook-up apps and online facilitated sexual encounters in both heterosexual and sexually diverse communities, in tandem with an ageing population, are disrupting obsolete assumptions about promiscuity and sexuality. The CSIRO (The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) has noted that, although the greatest burden for treatable sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is highest among younger women, [11] chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis are appearing at much higher rates (and also potentially being underdiagnosed) for increasingly sexually active older adult women in Australia. [12] Conventional assumptions of sexual activity will also need to address communities of monogamous same-sex couples, and those sex workers shifting to contactless professional services online. Large population-based assumptions are inadequate at addressing the diversity of sexual behaviour and diversity of risk across contemporary populations.
As testing, treatment and screening technologies inevitably improve from the experience of COVID, the TGA will have to be more responsive and engaged with how it communicates and formulates health recommendations to a public now profoundly conscious of population health, diagnostics, medical equity and justice. Privately, Australians will have to also recalibrate our personal superstitions and fears about the experience of contracting and living normally with HIV as with any other chronic condition. Knowing the structural prejudices built into accessing therapy, employment and quality of life for those managing HIV, like how we manage a new COVID normal, Australians need to learn what it means to live beyond fear and prejudice.
8.
For now, I will be following the recommendation of Bà Ngọai to abstain from sex and PrEP to ba tháng mười ngày [3 Months, 10 Days]. I look forward to finally getting my complimentary popper [12] and sausage roll at the local Blood Bank. The mystical 100 days of waiting will surely be enough for my body to be medically and spiritually prepared and cleansed for the national blood supply. Perhaps my migrant blood will again course through the veins of those racists and homophobes in need of my life-giving bodily fluids.
James Nguyen is currently a Gertrude Contemporary studio Artist. Nguyen’s research practice is engaged in decolonial practice and minoritarian language and language-brokering. This is explored in the ways that Vietnamese migrants use poetry in performance, cinema, sculpture, and the documentary medium to have conversations that trouble settler-colonialism, mistranslations, the diasporic absurd, and of course, gambling. Nguyen has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honors) from The National Art School, a Master of Fine Art at the Sydney College of Arts (University of Sydney), and a PhD from the University of NSW. He has taught experimental drawing at the National Art School, Anthropology and Film at UNSW, and Sculpture at VCA Melbourne. Most recently, Nguyen was the winner of the Nillumbik Prize for Australian Contemporary Art, and received support from the Australian Council for the Arts, and ArtsNSW. In addition to his artistic practice James also has a background in Pharmacy, working in community pharmacy and as a Specialist Palliative Care Pharmacist Practitioner at Braeside and Liverpool Hospital.
1.
A village nestled on a mountain pass,
Thick with monsoon air.
Sweating up thunderstorms.
A slap of lightning, torn by sheets of rain.
Inside this smear of land and sky, nothing seems to die.
Throw a stick at the ground, and it sprouts a tree.
Spit out melon seeds, and be choked by sticky vines.
Bà Ngọai [1] never walked barefoot.
Even feet can strike root in the mud, and if you get caught out in the rain,
You’ll get struck by lightning before the feast of Saint Têrêxa.
Not even our holy patrons can stop these demons.
Feeding and nourishing the village, the monsoon demanded payment.
Every rainy season brought endless funeral processions.
And with each burial, followed a period of supernatural waiting.
We all took turns to sit and pray,
guarding the graves for ba tháng mười ngày [3 Months, 10 Days].
100 days and nights,
Those slapped by the sky needed to be swaddled and consoled,
Wrapped in fertile soil.
To be settled, absolved by the earth.
The living spent time to watch and wait, keeping away grave robbers.
Invisible spirits, wild animals and shamans lured by lightning burials.
Disturbed from their loamy bed, these charred remains could be resurrected.
The bony toes and fingers of children struck,
Are charged with the most powerful magic.
2.
7000 kilometres away, another demon wakes.
November 1984: Three babies are reported to have died from the HIV-infected blood of a homosexual man.
Within 24 hours, the Queensland Government criminalises false declarations by donors about their homosexual activity or drug use.
The media claiming ‘promiscuous’ gays were maliciously donating ‘bad blood’ to contaminate the national supply.
Within a month, all Australian states and territories followed Queensland to mandate these unprecedented laws against gay men
3.
The demon keeps on spreading.
When three-year-old Eve van Grafhorst bites another child at her childcare centre in Kincumber, all hell breaks loose. Eve was diagnosed with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) contracted from blood transfusions. She was expelled from her childcare.
Neighbours erected high fences around the family.
Some even sold their homes to move away from the cursed child.
Rampant hysteria — not so different from the supernatural disquiets of a monsoon village.
Eventually evicted from their rented home, [2] Eve van Grafhorst and her family escaped to New Zealand, where she became a child ambassador advocating for HIV awareness. Eve passed away in November 1993. [3]
4.
Arriving in Australia as an eight-year-old in 1989, I was unconcerned of the demons here. AIDS and HIV were spectres only on television and the news. All I knew was that gay men were banned from donating blood, and that if I ever had sex with another man, I could never be a blood donor.
As a teenager, giving blood became a self-defined rite of passage; a migrant obsession, what Paul Sendziuk describes as ‘the civic right to give blood’. [4] One of the few social markers of approval to prove to myself that I was a legitimate citizen, giving blood was a demonstration of my Australianness. My blood, flowing through the Blood Bank, could be life-giving.
Perhaps my own blood coursed through the veins of racists throughout this country. The mystic, symbolic and scientific complexity of blood as a tool of purity, exclusion, racial discrimination and genocide, described by Dorothy Nelkin, [5] was neutralised by my bodily presence in the national blood supply. This supernatural and transgressive co-mingling of blood, reminiscent of John Donne’s ‘The Flea’.
‘It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead.
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do’.
5.
Before starting university, I had managed to swell the Blood Bank a few times. But when a phlebotomist struggled to insert the needle into my ‘slippery veins’, leaving both my arms bruised and unable to bend, I decided that this would be the final time that my arms or any part of me could be kept straight. This was simultaneously a moment of liberation and grief.
My civic right to give blood became a civic threat. Summed up by Ronald Bayer ‘as the threat to blood — symbolic of life itself — […] a profound threat to the social standing of those who would be classed as a danger to public health’. [6] According to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (1998), the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (2007) and the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Tribunal (2009), blood donation as a gay man was legally ‘characterised as a gift that could be refused,’ [7] an unwanted gift, a public rejection, something non-discriminatory.
6.
Between 1996 and 2000, the Australian states and territories started to relax the sexual deferral period [8] for men who have sex with men (MSM) from lifelong to twelve months.
This meant that by the year 2000, men who have sex with men in Australia were finally permitted to donate blood, so long as they refrained from penetrative anal and oral sex for at least twelve months prior to blood donation. This ensured enough time for transfusion transmittable infections (TTIs), including HIV, to be accurately screened and detected. With innovations in the sensitivity and accuracy of screening and diagnostic technologies, the Australian Red Cross Lifeblood started pushing the Therapeutic Goods Administration of Australia (TGA) to further reduce this MSM 12-month abstinence period.
It took twenty years for the deferral period to be brought down to three months. In August 2020, Australia was brought into line with the scientific literature and legislative changes already made by the US (April 2020), Canada (June 2019) and the UK (July 2017).
7.
Although blood donor equality is moving in the right direction, much needs to be done to eradicate the demons of stigma that exist in the psyche of public health policy.
For men who have sex with men, the current deferral period of at least 90 days after sexual contact gives our bodies physiological time to develop antibodies to HIV and other TTIs that are clinically detectable. According to data from Lifeblood (see table in appendix), HIV infection can — in most cases — be detected within just six days, indicating that deferral periods more reflect the rituals and social superstitions of cleansing, waiting, and abstinence, than providing a necessary medical buffer.
Further, Australia remains the only country to explicitly exclude MSM who are currently using pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) therapy from the 3-month deferral period. [9] PrEP is a regimen of anti-HIV drugs that protect the user from infection with HIV during sex, even when condoms are not used. It has profoundly changed the experience and the sense of agency users feel around HIV prevention. However, the very therapy keeping people safe from HIV is itself a new barrier to giving blood.
In excluding PrEP users, many hear echoes of the original sin of public health: demonising gay, queer and bisexual men as inherently ‘promiscuous’ and therefore dangerous to the nation’s blood supply. In the context of increasingly accurate diagnostic technologies and contemporary shifts in social attitudes towards sexuality, a number of countries — including Spain, Italy and Portugal — have moved to behaviour-based risk assessments of blood donors. They ask individual donors about their personal risk activities rather than categorising them into broad assumptions about their sexual identity. The Canadian Blood Services are moving to expand their plasma donor eligibility, asking clear but gender-neutral screening questions to all donors — and not just MSM and trans people. For example, they ask, ‘in the last three months, have you had a new sexual partner, and has this/these partner/s had sex with another partner?’ [10]
Emerging population trends will need to shape how Australia maintains the viability and vitality of its future blood supply — especially in how we engage with attracting new blood donors. As both gender and sexual fluidity become increasingly normalised and integrated into the social fabric of contemporary life, experimenting with multiple partners and seeking sexual activities associated with higher risks can no longer be assumed as exclusive to the sexual behaviours of MSM. This will be increasingly relevant to the mainstream donor pool.
The rising popularity and accessibility of internet hook-up apps and online facilitated sexual encounters in both heterosexual and sexually diverse communities, in tandem with an ageing population, are disrupting obsolete assumptions about promiscuity and sexuality. The CSIRO (The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) has noted that, although the greatest burden for treatable sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is highest among younger women, [11] chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis are appearing at much higher rates (and also potentially being underdiagnosed) for increasingly sexually active older adult women in Australia. [12] Conventional assumptions of sexual activity will also need to address communities of monogamous same-sex couples, and those sex workers shifting to contactless professional services online. Large population-based assumptions are inadequate at addressing the diversity of sexual behaviour and diversity of risk across contemporary populations.
As testing, treatment and screening technologies inevitably improve from the experience of COVID, the TGA will have to be more responsive and engaged with how it communicates and formulates health recommendations to a public now profoundly conscious of population health, diagnostics, medical equity and justice. Privately, Australians will have to also recalibrate our personal superstitions and fears about the experience of contracting and living normally with HIV as with any other chronic condition. Knowing the structural prejudices built into accessing therapy, employment and quality of life for those managing HIV, like how we manage a new COVID normal, Australians need to learn what it means to live beyond fear and prejudice
8.
For now, I will be following the recommendation of Bà Ngọai to abstain from sex and PrEP to ba tháng mười ngày [3 Months, 10 Days]. I look forward to finally getting my complimentary popper [12] and sausage roll at the local Blood Bank. The mystical 100 days of waiting will surely be enough for my body to be medically and spiritually prepared and cleansed for the national blood supply. Perhaps my migrant blood will again course through the veins of those racists and homophobes in need of my life-giving bodily fluids.
Appendix
[1] My maternal grandmother.
[2] ‘Expelled from childcare centre in Kincumber,’ The Canberra Times, 13 October 1985, p 3.
[3] N.T McLennan, “Van Grafhorst, Eve (1982–1993),’ Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, accessed October 2, 2021, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/van-grafhorst-eve-27059/text34532, published online 2017, accessed online 25 September 2021.
[4] Paul Sendziuk, ‘Bad Blood: The Contamination of Australia’s Blood Supply and the Emergence of Gay Activism in the Age of AIDS,’ Journal of Australian Studies 25, no. 67: 75-85, https://doi.org/10.1080/14443050109387641.
[5] Dorothy Nelkin, ‘Blood and Bioethics in the Biotechnology Age,’ in Signs of Life: bio art and beyond, ed. Eduardo Kac (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2007), 118-120.
[6] Ronald Bayer, ‘Private Acts, Social Consequences: AIDS and the Politics of Public Health,’ Bioethics 4, no.4 (October 1990): 340-50.
[7] ‘Policy Document, Blood Donation Deferral,’ AMSA the Australian Medical Students Association, accessed October 2, 2021, https://www.amsa.org.au/sites/amsa.org.au/files/Blood%20Donation%20Deferral%20%282020%29.pdf .
[8] Deferral periods for potential blood donors can be permanent or temporary and are determined by the Therapeutic Goods Administration of Australia (TGA) to ensure that Transfusion Transmittable Infections (TTIs) are screened and prevented from compromising the safety and supply of national blood products. Current deferral periods applying only to specific populations; as described by Mike Kesby and Matt Sothern in ‘Blood, Sex and Trust: The Limits of the Population-based Risk Management Paradigm,’ (2014) continue historic presumptions that all Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) are at risk of HIV and other TTIs, whilst heterosexual populations are somehow free of blood borne risk.
[9] Policy Document, Blood Donation Deferral,’ AMSA
[10] Dale Smith, ‘New Program Allowing Queer Men to Donate Plasma is a First Step Toward Ending the Blood Ban,’ Xtra*, October 18, 2021, https://xtramagazine.com/power/blood-ban-plasma-donation-gay-men-210706
[11] Loise Bourchier, Sue Malta, Meredith Temple-Smith and Jane Hocking, ‘Do We Need to Worry About Sexually Transmissible Infections (STIs) in older Women in Australia? An Investigation of STI trends between 2000 and 2018,’ Sexual Health, CSIRO Publishing 17, (2020): 517-524, https://www.publish.csiro.au/SH/pdf/SH20130 .
[12] ‘Popper’ refers to a 250ml refreshing juice box generally used for packed lunches, as opposed to the inhaled alkyl nitrites used by some MSM during sexual intercourse to give a mild high and to relax the involuntary smooth muscles of the throat and anus.
James Nguyen is currently a Gertrude Contemporary studio Artist. Nguyen’s research practice is engaged in decolonial practice and minoritarian language and language-brokering. This is explored in the ways that Vietnamese migrants use poetry in performance, cinema, sculpture, and the documentary medium to have conversations that trouble settler-colonialism, mistranslations, the diasporic absurd, and of course, gambling. Nguyen has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honors) from The National Art School, a Master of Fine Art at the Sydney College of Arts (University of Sydney), and a PhD from the University of NSW. He has taught experimental drawing at the National Art School, Anthropology and Film at UNSW, and Sculpture at VCA Melbourne. Most recently, Nguyen was the winner of the Nillumbik Prize for Australian Contemporary Art, and received support from the Australian Council for the Arts, and ArtsNSW. In addition to his artistic practice James also has a background in Pharmacy, working in community pharmacy and as a Specialist Palliative Care Pharmacist Practitioner at Braeside and Liverpool Hospital.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.
Runway Journal acknowledges the custodians of the nations our digital platform reaches. We extend this acknowledgement to all First Nations artists, writers and audiences.
Runway Journal is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Runway Journal receives project support from the NSW Government through Create NSW.