Few living Australians have been untouched by the Vietnam war and the conflict it represented, at home and abroad. This may seem like an odd statement, since proportionately very few – around 50 000 – Australians saw military service in Vietnam; far fewer visited there with a peaceful purpose. Even today, Australian travellers to Vietnam are rare. Few Vietnamese had been to Australia before 1975; just over 300 (mainly students) lived here. Yet, Australia’s involvement in Vietnam has come to be defined in a very wide sense: as a symbol for Australia’s role in the period of Asian decolonisation. It also has come to be intimately associated in the public mind with many wider issues of that era: long hair, public protest, the explosion of rock music, drug use, distrust of authority, countercultures, sexual freedom, and numerous other aspects of our society, many persisting today long after the war has ended. Indeed, such developments were directly related to the war. Both our military involvement in Vietnam, and the resulting dissent, were the products of far more profound international and domestic processes, already at work long before the first Australian soldiers were involved. In this book, for the first time, all aspects of Australia’s Vietnam conflict, abroad and at home, are covered. Although a supposedly ‘limited war’ in a military and political sense, Australia’s involvement in Vietnam and its aftermath touched all aspects of Australian society. Until now no book has attempted this ambitious task, because the basic groundwork of scholarship of the many and varied aspects of the complex story of Australia’s Vietnam were still to be completed. This book is one of the results of that work.
