Australia’s Vietnam War in context – and other recent posts on Honest History

We have recently run a series called ‘Australia’s Vietnam War – and keeping it in context’. The series proved popular and timely, given the issues over the Long Tan commemoration and the official blind spots regarding aspects of the war (the nature and degree of opposition to it, the simplistic references to how the Vietnam contingents were treated on their return to Australia, and the lack of recognition of the role of nurses in Vietnam).

There were seven articles in the series, covering photographs from ‘the other side’, Agent Orange, the Australians’ return home, the Long Tan commemoration, Australians’ insensitivity about commemoration in other people’s countries, nurses in Vietnam, and how Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans do commemoration.

We have just today added an eighth article, from Willy Bach, who has previously written for Honest History on Agent Orange and Anzac commemoration fatigue. His latest article is also about aspects of commemoration 50 years on from Long Tan. Willy Bach is a great supporter of Honest History in Brisbane, as is Neville Buch, whose piece on professional historians we also published today.

In the six weeks since our last newsletter we have posted dozens of links and some original material.

• Under our Top Recent Posts thumbnail there is Anzus, disarmament and the Maralinga tests, Pauline Hanson, social cohesion and the extreme right, cities and sport, the treatment of Indigenous Australians, detainees and soldiers with PTSD, and the Great War and Hiroshima. And a famous crash and the fallacy of Presentism in history.
• Under our First Peoples thumbnail you can find material on Indigenous lexicography, the Wave Hill walk-off, treaty and/or recognition, exclusion, abuse and illicit love.
• Under our Inequality thumbnail we have added yet more material on studies of inequality in Australia (including Greg Jericho on the economic context) and we ask, yet again, when does the research translate into policy options that make a difference?
  

Honest History: information-brokers and purveyors of original and – we fervently hope – provocative material. ‘Ask you what provocation I have had? wrote Alexander Pope. ‘The strong antipathy of good to bad.’ Makes sense.

30 August 2016