Vietnam War

War is one of the great paradoxes of Australia. Why should a people occupying a continent so far from the world’s trouble spots have spent so much of their history dying in often distant wars? It is one of the questions that drew me to the study of Australian history. I am little the wiser after reading this collection of Australian war writing. This is partly because editor Mark Dapin is intent simply on providing a range of Australian literary responses, and a few not so literary, to the experience of war.

For most Australians, certainly for those under the age of forty, ‘Vietnam’ is either an item on school curricula or a slightly off-the-beaten-path tourist destination. History or holiday. This may affront some, especially the small groups on either side of the 1960s cultural and political divide that cannot let go, but it is a sign of a generational shift and of the creation of the distance between ourselves and the event that is necessary for enhanced understanding and reconciliation between Australians and the Vietnamese.

Despite Australia’s heavy involvement in wars throughout the twentieth century, few notable war memoirs by Australians have emerged. Frederic Manning (The Middle Parts of Fortune) and Richard Hillary (The Last Enemy) identified as Englishmen, despite being born here. A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life and Don Charlwood’s No Moon Tonight are literary benchmarks against which Australian soldier–writers must measure themselves. Allen & Unwin is doing an invaluable job with its extensive series of Vietnam memoirs. Whether any of them will become classics, only time will tell.

How different South-East Asia looks in 2001, compared with just four years ago. The economic crisis of 1997 gave the region a terrible shock. There is an entirely new country, Timor Loro Sa’e. Indonesia, that former bastion of stability and economic powerhouse, is now racked with unrest. It may well no longer exist in its present form a few years from now. The Philippines has just ejected another president, although its eternal problem of a landowning elite and an impoverished populace never seems to get addressed. Colonial borders are a problem everywhere in the region, incorporating tribes and peoples that would likely be better off if the whole map were redrawn.

Breaking The Codes was published last August. The time that has subsequently elapsed makes it possible to comment not only on the book itself but also on some aspects of its reception.

A nation at war is a less than gripping tide, although it is suggestively ambiguous. Australia was at war in Vietnam for most of the decade covered in Peter Edwards’s book. In senses chiefly, but not wholly, metaphorical, it was also a society ‘at war’, divided over conscription and the commitment of troops to Vietnam. The excellent cover photograph illuminates the latter implication of Edwards’s title, as well as the importance of media coverage of both overseas conflict and domestic protest against it. A newsreel photographer looks back into another camera, and away from the policeman who is struggling to shift an inert demonstrator.

The celebrated journalist Peter Arnett’s new autobiography Live from the Battlefield partly solves one mystery for me. For the last eighteen months, whenever I discussed Arnett and his forthcoming memoirs with my husband (who was trying to research Arnett’s relationship with news network CNN after the Gulf War), I found myself constantly and inexplicably analysing Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and the characterisation of the ambitious, fragile Becky Sharp.

In their introduction to this collection of essays, the editors state that Australia’s war experiences in Vietnam left some lasting legacies, but ones that were either unexpected or unintended: a loss of moral authority on the part of Australian conservative governments, a breakdown in the defence and foreign policy consensus about the ‘threat’ to Australia, the revival of populist politics and resistance to conscription, and increasing resistance to orthodox political views on other issues.