This year's David Hack meet was up to the usual standard.
There was the usual variety of classic machinery, both automotive and aircraft, and I took a few shots. They're presented here, gentle reader, for your edification.
1942 Buick
Hudson Terraplane Ambulance
Jag XK 150
Yep - it's a Caddy - 63 I think.
Lovely little Datto (Fairlady)
ND Mazda MX-5 Cockpit
Ford Galaxie - just for Cav
Lancia Monte Carlo
63 Valiant. My high school chemistry teacher drove one of these.
Beautiful interior in this Model A Ford.
WW 2 GM Blitz (RAF livery)
Blitz again. Note Holden badge above and left of instrument cluster.
There were lots of planes - Victa Airtourer.
Apparently this thing flew - I don't know how well - 1932 Stipa-Caproni.
Thailand is a beautiful and tolerant land, but watch that
tolerance evaporate if you criticise the royal family.
A few visiting Australians have discovered that.
This country also has a reputation for easy going tolerance,
but there are some mythologies that are so powerful, that challenging them is
not for the faint-hearted. The Anzac Myth is one of those.
Just ask Yassmin
Abdel-Magied.
She had the temerity (or perhaps the effrontery) to use the
phrase ‘lest we forget’ in reference to asylum seekers and Syrians on Anzac
Day.
That was nearly a week ago, and the howls of outrage
continue to reverberate. What she posted was at most insensitive, and at least
careless, but it created such a tidal wave of offence taken, that something
more than bizarre has been revealed in our national psyche.
We heard (in quick succession), calls for her to be sacked
and/or deported, and the abusive pile-on was taken up by shock jocks and
opinionistas all over the place. Apparently, it caused deep offence. It did not offend me. Nor
as far as I can tell did it offend the ex-service personnel I marched with on the One Day of the Year.
The conversation in the ranks when I marched on Anzac Day
was not about Abdel-Magied. We put shit on each other as we usually do, inquired about the health of those not fit enough to march, and made comment
about the flyover.
It was a very good flyover in our provincial city this this
year, nine choppers (Kiowas, Tigers and MRH-90s) in groups of three flew over
the memorial during the service. There weren’t any Iroquois – they’re all
decommissioned, but the Kiowas with their two-blade rotors do pretty good Huey
impressions if you close your eyes and listen to the sound.
But I digress….
I shouldn’t have been surprised – about the reaction to
Abdel-Magied’s post, that is.
Let me say up front that Anzac Day is for me, very
important.
For a hiatus of fifteen years post-Vietnam, like many other
Nashos, I ignored the commemoration. Somehow, marching with the other returned
service men and women (including my father) didn’t seem right, when both the
war and those who fought in it were treated with disregard because it
culminated in a defeat for the side we supported. We were, for a while,
airbrushed out of the history.
The “Welcome Home” march in 1987 seemed to change that.
These days I always march, and have traveled as far as
Sydney to do so with members of my rifle platoon. There are no members of my
unit living in home city, so marching here lacks something. I did, however,
encounter an ex-Nasho who marched for the first time last week. For him and his
family, this crossing of the threshold of grief and bitterness was very
important.
I would be the first to admonish anyone whom I believed was
dishonouring the memory of the people I served with, but Abdel-Magied’s brain
snap wasn’t doing that.
She was, like many Australians including myself, expressing
shame at the cruelty inflicted on asylum-seekers (or country shoppers if you
like) who are locked up offshore without any real future. She was also
referring to the millions in Syria who have been dispossessed by the conflict
there, a conflict whose roots lie in serious historical miscalculations by our
allies and our governments in 2003.
What I find much more offensive than an ill-considered
Facebook post, are the many venues, holiday accommodations and sporting clubs
who exploit Anzac Day to improve their bottom line. One motel in Brisbane was
running an “Anzac Weekend” accommodation campaign with intensive TV ads for about a week
during the lead up.
Much of this exploitation seems to be tolerated. If I was
cynical I’d assume that gender and religion had something to do with the
pile-on directed at Abdel-Magied.
But I’m not cynical. What set the hounds baying here was a
perceived attack on the myth.
By way of explanation, I’ll recount a personal encounter with the
mythology that is happening as I write.
I was invited to give a talk on Anzac
Day at my old school, Downlands College. I prepared diligently, researching the
Anzac Day commemoration website.
On that page I came across the statement - "But there were probably few, if any, who were actually forced to go to Vietnam". I found this passing strange,
given that my experience and that of most of the men in my intake was very
different.
As a teacher, what is on that website is not good enough for me. If we are
developing resources to be used in schools, (and that is the purpose of the
website) those resources need to be accurate. Anything else is indoctrination.
I began to do some research of my own through the Australian
War Memorial. The anecdote trotted out most frequently to support the “every
Nasho was a volunteer” narrative talks about “opt-out parades”.
It goes like this
– prior to embarkation, a unit parade of National Servicemen would be called
and those who did not want to serve in Vietnam would be asked to take one pace
forward. If they did so, they would be marched out to join a unit not warned
for Vietnam service.
I had no memory of this, and the Nashos I served with,
although they had heard the story, vowed that it had never happened to them. I
then began the arduous task of ploughing through the battalion records held
on-line at the AWM. Every parade, including those held prior to embarkation, was recorded for every
infantry unit.
Nowhere was there a record of such a parade. I gave up after
looking through the parade records of four of the nine battalions in existence
at the time. It was an entirely fruitless search.
This is hardly surprising. If these parades had been held,
the Commanding Officer of the unit in question would have been in breach of the National Service Act. Perhaps there were “unofficial” parades mounted by some
units – but to say that “every” Nasho was a volunteer is simply not truthful.
“Every” means “without exception”.
Armed with this evidence, I wrote to the secretary of the commemoration committee and inquired as to the source of that information.
As this is written, I have an email acknowledgement which reads -
Thank
you for bringing this to our attention. Our researchers are looking into it and
appropriate action will be taken.
I'll keep you posted.
The reason for this variation from the reality and the
insertion of it in a resource intended for school use is, I believe, caught up
in the Anzac myth. The notion of noble sacrifice doesn’t sit well with conscription,
so conscripts become “volunteers”. It adds a layer of sweetening to help the
harsh medicine go down.
Until we embrace the reality of our history, warts and
all, our nation will not develop beyond its adolescence. That reality saw Australian
conscripts killed in Vietnam.
To deny that truth dishonours those men. It assumes that there was a
distinction in the field between Nashos and volunteers, and that the
service of Nashos was somehow less honourable because they did not
volunteer.
Why else would the myth seek to convert us to volunteers?
When it come to the Anzac myth, it’s time we grew up and
confronted the reality of war in all its ugliness. Truth and remembrance go hand in hand.
This pragmatism is reflected in the way they play Rugby. If you’ve
ever watched the All Blacks, you’ll know that they play a no-frills minimalist
game. That’s why they win.
Their soldiering is similar. Australians who served with
Kiwis in Vietnam will remember that well. Their politics is also pretty straightforward
and no-nonsense.
Back in 2006, Helen Clark, the then New Zealand Labor Prime Minister,
stood up in their parliament and made a public apology to New Zealand Vietnam
veterans for their treatment during and after the conflict. She was followed by
John Keys, the then leader of the National opposition, doing exactly the same
thing.
The apology was bi-partisan, and strongly supported by the
Kiwi media and returned service organisations. It went down very well across
the ditch, but barely raised a ripple in the Australian media.
Certainly, John Howard spoke on the floor of parliament on 17th August 2006, expressing regret at the way in which Vietnam veterans have been treated, and Kim Beasley (then leader of the Opposition) read a letter from Graeme Edwards, Vietnam veteran, and then member for Cowan to express bi-partisan support.
It was not however a dedicated apology, and I doubt most Australians would be aware that it happened. It was not given much prominence in the national media.
In this country, during the last decade, apologies have been
made to indigenous people, victims of institutional child abuse, and members of
the stolen generation. These apologies have generally been well accepted, with
the exception of ill-informed commentary from a few shock-jocks and politicians
mired in their own self-importance.
Which brings me to consideration of our Australian Vietnam veterans.
This cohort of our community was abused by government and
community for a very long time – fifteen years, at least. This abuse remains a
stain on our national psyche. The “Welcome Home” march served to assuage some
of the national guilt, but that didn’t happen until 1987, and Australians had
been in Vietnam since 1962. A lot of damage was done in those fifteen years.
For some veterans, it continues to rankle.
Those abuses include
the political rationale imposed for the commitment in the first place, the use
of conscripts to provide the capacity to make that commitment viable, and the
treatment handed out to the soldiers by both sides of politics and the wider
community during and after the war.
To analyse the substance of these abuses, we need to consider
the historical context.
Bob Menzies (who resigned his commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Melbourne University Rifles during the First World War, when so many of his peers volunteered) introduced the National Service Act in 1964. It was a unique piece of
legislation. For the first, last and only time in our history, it made it legal to send conscripts to fight
overseas. We were at peace at the time.
Conscription has an interesting history in this country. Two
referenda on conscription were defeated during world war one, despite the energetic support of Billy Hughes, wartime Prime Minister. Opposition led by Cardinal Daniel
Mannix influenced the results. The brutality displayed by the British in their
reaction to the 1916 Easter Rising put a great number of Australian Catholics of
Irish heritage offside.
In the Second World war, when Australia was under
existential threat from Imperial Japan, conscripts were used, but only in
Australian mandated territory. Their deployment was not considered overseas
service. These same conscripts, derisively labelled “Chocos”, acquitted themselves
with honour on the Kokoda Track.
Conscription in the sixties was particularly abusive because
of its unfair random structure. It had something of flavour of the ancient
Roman military practice of executing one in ten men to keep the remaining nine
in line. Put simply, 8% of the twenty-year-old population was singled out and
treated very differently from everyone else. What made this small cohort different was their
date of birth. Of that fraction, only 18,654 (2.3%)
actually served in Vietnam.
Universal conscription would have been fair, but the army
didn’t want it, and it would probably have been more politically unpalatable
than the ballot option, so the government hit upon this unjust and inequitable compromise..
Public support for the war was initially in place, if lukewarm, but by
the time of the Moratorium marches, it had dissipated. Anyone looking across
the pacific would have been able to see this coming. Trends in Australian opinion
in relation to Vietnam always followed those in the USA by a few years.
This opposition was initially about the injustice of conscription,
but it quickly became conflated with general anti-war sentiment. The Coalition government
of the day doubled down, and accused the anti-war and anti-conscription movement
of treason. The nation was split – never a good result when troops are in the
field. The 1970 Moratorium marches (the first of which took place whilst I was in Vietnam) represented the largest mobilization of Australian public opinion in our history, if the numbers who took to the streets is any measure. One hundred thousand marched in Melbourne.
This heightened level of partisanship had many negative
outcomes, but the worst of these was the derision inflicted on returning
Vietnam veterans. Both sides of politics shared the responsibility for this
tragic state of affairs. The Coalition for the ill-considered deployment which
put the soldiers in this position in the first place, and the opposition for
their criticism of the policy which morphed into mistreatment of the soldiers,
who were not responsible.
The conflict became politicised beyond redemption, and serving
soldiers suffered as a result.
By the time of the Australian withdrawal in 1972, the die
was cast, and Veterans lived with this until 1987. Some of them never recovered
from that fifteen years of Limbo.
In summary then, I contend that an apology is necessary, and
way past time.
That apology should have a number of components. It should
acknowledge the treatment of both regular soldiers and Nashos for being asked
to put their lives on the line in a conflict which lacked the community’s
support.
It should also acknowledge the treatment given to both
Nashos and Regulars on their return. Many felt so degraded by this that they
refused to admit to their service. There was no debriefing, no pre-discharge
counselling, and rejection by ex-service organisations was common.
Finally, those Vietnam veterans who were conscripted are
owed an additional apology.
Whilst once in service, the conduct of Nashos and Regs was indistinguishable, the Regs, at least, had a choice.
Acknowledgement needs to be made that the Nashos were given no real
choice. They could opt for two year's service, or fronting the magistrate and possibly jail. They were singled out on the basis of their birth dates, and condemned on return for fighting in an unpopular war, without choice.
Those calling them "baby-killers" made no distinction between Nasho and Reg.
As Paul Ham put it – “a unique aspect of the Vietnam War is
the collective cruelty of a nation that ordered, with the threat of a two-year
jail term, a 20-year-old lad to go to war – then damned him for going”.
In other words, the country took a whole war’s worth of
young men and did the emotional equivalent of taking to their knees with an
auger bit. An apology may prevent many of these men, who are no longer young,
from taking this deep anger and hurt to their graves.
We could learn from the Kiwis in terms of the actual conduct
of the apology. Like theirs, it could be straightforward and pragmatic.
It could be made on the floor of parliament at a significant
time (say Vietnam veterans’ Day). It could be made both by the Prime Minister
and the Leader of the Opposition in tandem, and the template of the Stolen
Generations apology in 2010 could be followed in terms of ceremonial and attendance.
The Prime Minister should apologise for his party’s conscription
of twenty-year-olds in peacetime, maintaining the commitment of troops in
a conflict lacking popular support, and the disregard of the needs of veterans
1962 – 1972, and 1975 – 1983.
The Leader of the Opposition should apologise for his party’s
encouragement of the treatment given to returning soldiers by the anti-war
movement, and that same disregard of Vietnam veterans between 1972 – 1975 and
1983 – 87.
I’d be there. Let’s hope it happens in my lifetime.
