Stephen Banton was 24 and had just started work as a social worker when he took his first Aids test. It was 1984, when the disease was virtually unheard of in Australia and tests were hard to come by, but as a sexually active gay man suffering from flu-like symptoms and diarrhoea, he went out of his way to get one. The test was negative.

By the following February, however, Stephen was suffering from raised glands under his chin and in his groin. Against a background of terrifying reports coming out of America about the spread of the disease, he decided to take another test.

"They told me over the phone at work it was positive," he says. "I still thought that Aids was only something that happened in the States. I was the first person I knew to test positive and they told me I had two years to live. I was still pretty healthy so I wasn't going to change my life, but I thought I had no future."

Stephen took no medication for the next three years, but then he and his long-term partner - who also tested positive - were persuaded to take part in the trial for the early Aids drug, AZT. His partner began to develop serious side-effects such as nausea, aches and a sensation of "toxic poisoning", although Stephen experienced no reaction at all.

"It was the night a close friend died that I suddenly realised that Trevor must have been getting the real drug and that I was probably taking just a placebo," he says. "So we started to share our drugs: he took six of mine and I took six of his so we were both at least getting some of the real thing."

Even that didn't stop him developing oral leukaplakia - fuzziness and ridges on the tongue considered to be a symptom of immune system collapse and full-blown Aids.

By 1990, Stephen was being put on one trial after another, as a series of "monotherapy" drugs came on stream, and his health was generally quite good. He continued to work in Sydney for the Department of Social Security, drawing up its HIV policy.

But, in early 1992, Stephen started to deteriorate rapidly after a bout of shingles - a common Aids complaint. Tests revealed that his CD4 count, which measures white blood cells, the foot soldiers of the body's defence mechanism, was down to 200 compared to a healthy 500 to 1,200 cells per cubic millimetre of blood. He was a sitting target for any passing infection and his stomach complaints were increasingly debilitating.

"I reached a real crisis point and knew I had lost it at work," he says. "I realised I was just sitting at my desk waiting for my turn to die. So I decided to leave my job and take invalidity retirement, although I soon got really depressed that I had thrown in what could have been such a promising career."

But all that soon became academic. "We had been swimming and I was drying myself when I suddenly saw a lesion on the instep of my foot. Ten years after contracting the disease I had this awful cancer. I was terrified of it spreading and disfiguring my face."

The lesions, caused by a virulent cancer of the blood vessels common among Aids patients, soon covered his legs and feet in agonising purple bubbles. Five or six new ones appeared every day and he was barely able to sit because of the pain. The lesions heralded his descent into near collapse. On top of everything else, he was suffering from such severe bloating that he was doubled over all the time.

It was then, at the age of 35, that Stephen decided to set his affairs in order. He'd been adopted - his new parents brought him to Australia at the age of nine - and he'd long had a fantasy about meeting his natural mother, a Brit; it seemed now there wasn't much time left to do it.

Against the advice of friends, who were concerned that the last thing he needed was more emotional upheaval, he hired an agency to track down his mother in Britain. As it happened, she agreed to see him by return of post.

By that stage in his illness, with his weight down to eight stone and feeble, travelling was a problem. Stephen was on a trial for new drugs known as ritonavir, the first protease inhibitors and the forerunner of today's treatments, which were not available in Britain at the time. This meant doctors in Sydney arranging for supplies of drugs to be flown in specially-designed refrigerated boxes from Chicago, where they were manufactured, to Sydney and then onto Paris, the only European city then involved in the trials, where he had to collect them. (Ironically, the drugs later turned out to be placebos.)

He arranged to meet his mother at Hampstead tube station in north London on a hot August day in 1995. It was an ordeal for both of them. She had to come to terms with the fact that the tiny baby she had given up for adoption when she was just 16 years old was now a gay man living in Sydney with his long-term partner - and dying of Aids. He almost bottled out of meeting her. "I was terrified of having to say to her: 'I'm a poofter, Mum, and oh by the way I've also got Aids.' It turned out I was the first gay man she had ever knowingly met."

But his mother picked him out immediately from the crowd, he says, and the reunion, in the end, was a good one. He was welcomed into his mother's family and introduced to her two other children. "She now has a picture of all three of us together by her bed," he says.

On his return to Sydney, Stephen had radiotherapy on his lesions which blistered his skin and left it raw and unable to heal. "I was turning purple all over, was in agony and lashing out at people when my mother came out to see me for what we thought was probably the one and only time," he says. "It was emotional torture." His mother left Australia distraught, but shortly afterwards, in January 1996, Stephen was finally put on the real ritonavir and, abruptly, the lesions stopped growing.

"I slowly started to feel better - a process that speeded up when I began to take it in combination with other drugs nine months before this sort of treatment was publicly announced," he says. "It was so quick that I was able to start work part-time just two months later. My lesions were fading fast and my stomach was fine for the first time in years.

"Suddenly my whole life turned around and like a lot of others in my situation I split up with my partner at that time. We had loved each other, but we had stayed together because of the HIV and now there was no reason to anymore. Good enough is no longer good enough when you have a future again."

Stephen decided to move to England - "a dream which I never thought would come true" - and now, a fit-looking 39-year-old, he finds himself in full-time work again and leading an active life in this country. His new partner, an Australian, has also just been granted permission by the Home Office to come to live here with him under new immigration rules which for the first time recognise gay couples.

"I was lucky," he says. "My employers at a charity are understanding about the gaps in my CV. For the first time in my life, I now think about career and promotion. I have a new partner, a new country, a new job and a new mother. But most of all, thanks to these drugs, I have a future."