There are books which we read because they provide the best available history of a subject, and there are books which remain worth reading because they tell us something about the period in which they were written. Vietnam and Australia: History, Documents, Interpretations falls very firmly into the second category. I came across my copy almost by accident in a Salvos op shop, which is one of the pleasures of rummaging through second hand bookshelves, since occasionally something rather more interesting than the usual collection of forgotten bestsellers and outdated travel guides emerges from among them. In this case the discovery was a particularly worthwhile one, because this rather unassuming volume provides a fascinating window into the Australian debate over Vietnam at the very moment that debate was gathering momentum. Indeed, the debate on conscription I lived through. and fortunately my marble didn’t fall.
Produced by the University Study Group on Vietnam and published in 1966, the book appeared at precisely the moment when Australia’s involvement in Vietnam was changing from a comparatively limited commitment into a substantial military, political and social issue. The Australian War Memorial catalogue records the volume as a 150 page monograph, complete with map and bibliography, published by the Group at Gladesville in New South Wales.¹ The timing of its publication is critical to understanding both its strengths and its limitations, since its authors were attempting to explain a war whose outcome was unknown and whose consequences for Australia were only beginning to become apparent.
The University Study Group on Vietnam had been formed by academics associated with the University of New South Wales in the middle of 1965, against the background of the Australian Government’s decision to commit combat troops to South Vietnam.² The group belonged to a broader intellectual response to the war in which academics, clergy, students, political activists and others increasingly questioned whether the official explanation of events provided Australians with sufficient historical context to understand why their country was becoming involved in another Asian conflict. The purpose of the book was therefore educational as much as political. Its authors sought to place historical information, documents and differing interpretations before Australian readers so that the debate about Vietnam could proceed from something more substantial than government statements, newspaper headlines and the increasingly rigid political positions surrounding the war.³
That objective gives the book a rather different character from the enormous body of Vietnam War literature which subsequently appeared. This is not primarily a battlefield history and anyone looking for a detailed account of Australian operations will find relatively little here. The book instead begins by attempting to explain Vietnam itself, moving through Vietnamese history, French colonialism, the Second World War, the struggle against France, the Geneva settlement, the development of South Vietnam and the emergence of renewed insurgency before turning more directly towards Australian involvement. Contemporary descriptions of the contents confirm this broad chronological structure, extending from Vietnamese history before the colonial period through French rule and the conflicts of the twentieth century to Australia’s commitment.⁴
This historical approach was particularly important in 1966 because much of the public justification for Australian involvement depended upon presenting the conflict within the framework of international communism and the strategic problems of the Cold War. The Study Group instead encouraged readers to consider Vietnamese nationalism, colonialism and the consequences of the French war as essential parts of the explanation. This does not mean that communist ideology becomes irrelevant within its interpretation, but it does mean that Vietnamese communism is placed within a much longer struggle over colonialism, nationalism and political authority. From the perspective of later scholarship this may appear fairly conventional, yet it was considerably more challenging when presented to Australian readers during the rapid expansion of the war.
The use of documents is one of the book’s most interesting features. Rather than asking readers simply to accept the authors’ interpretation, the volume attempts to provide material from which political arguments and historical claims can be examined. This is one reason the Australian War Memorial catalogue classifies the work not merely under the history of Australian and Vietnamese relations, but also among sources relating to the conflict.⁵ The result is not a neutral documentary collection, since the selection and arrangement of documents inevitably influence the conclusions which readers are encouraged to reach, but the attempt to combine historical narrative with documentary evidence gives the book greater substance than a simple political pamphlet.
At the same time, there is little point pretending that the volume is politically detached. It emerged from an academic environment increasingly critical of the assumptions behind Australian participation in Vietnam, and the organisation responsible for it regarded better public understanding as a means through which Australian policy might be questioned. Subsequent research into Australian peace activism identifies the Study Group as part of the intellectual mobilisation surrounding Vietnam and demonstrates the increasing involvement of academics in public discussion of the conflict.⁶ This perspective is evident throughout the project and needs to be recognised when using the book as a historical source.
Recognising that perspective, however, is not the same thing as dismissing the book as propaganda. One of its more impressive qualities is precisely its attempt to support political criticism through history and documentation rather than relying solely upon moral outrage. Its authors believed that the origins of the conflict mattered, that Vietnamese history mattered, and that Australian citizens should understand the assumptions upon which their government’s policy rested. Whether one agrees with their conclusions or not, this represents a serious attempt to challenge policy through historical argument.
There are nevertheless significant limitations when the book is judged from the perspective of six decades of subsequent scholarship. The authors could not know what would happen after 1966, which means that virtually everything that later became central to popular understanding of the Vietnam War lay in their future. The Tet Offensive, the expansion of the Australian antiwar movement, the moratorium campaigns, the progressive withdrawal of Australian forces, the Paris negotiations, the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 and the subsequent opening of Vietnamese, American, Australian and other archival collections were unavailable to them. Nor could they benefit from the enormous body of military, diplomatic, political and social history produced after the war. Their interpretation therefore represents an argument made from inside the conflict rather than a retrospective explanation of it.
This becomes particularly important when considering the internal politics of South Vietnam and North Vietnam. Later scholarship has considerably complicated interpretations that treated the conflict principally as either foreign aggression or national liberation. Vietnamese political divisions, regional loyalties, religious movements, competing nationalisms, communist organisation and the agency of successive governments in Saigon all require greater attention than was generally available in Australian writing during the middle 1960s. The political failures of South Vietnam were certainly substantial, but later research has also made it much harder to reduce the Republic of Vietnam simply to an American creation lacking any independent political existence. Equally, recognising the nationalist component of Vietnamese communism should not obscure the authoritarian character of the communist state or the importance of ideological commitment to its leadership.
The treatment of Australian policy also needs to be read in the context of the time. Australian involvement cannot adequately be explained solely through the battlefield situation in Vietnam. Concerns about Indonesia, memories of the Malayan Emergency and Confrontation, the importance attached to the American alliance, perceptions of Chinese power, the experience of earlier Asian conflicts and the strategic assumptions associated with forward defence all influenced Australian decision making. Later historical work has provided a much richer picture of these calculations than could reasonably have been expected from a study published in 1966. The book remains valuable because it demonstrates how those policies were being questioned while they were being implemented, but it should not now be treated as the final word on why Australia entered the war.
There is also an unavoidable imbalance created by the circumstances of publication. The authors possessed much more information about Western governments than they did about decision making in Hanoi or within the communist movement in South Vietnam. This was a common problem in contemporary Western criticism of the war. American and Australian policies could be scrutinised through parliamentary debates, newspapers, official statements and an expanding body of public documentation, while communist decision making remained considerably less accessible. The resulting interpretation could therefore subject Western claims to intense criticism while sometimes accepting opposing claims with less opportunity for equivalent examination. This is not necessarily evidence of deliberate distortion, but it is a methodological limitation which modern readers need to recognise.
Where the book becomes particularly valuable today is as a primary source for the history of Australia rather than simply as a history of Vietnam. It demonstrates that serious criticism of Australian involvement did not suddenly appear with the great moratorium demonstrations at the end of the decade. Academics were already organising, publishing and attempting to influence public discussion during 1965 and 1966. Studies of the Australian peace and antiwar movements consequently continue to identify organisations such as the University Study Group when examining the development of organised opposition to the war.⁷ The book captures an important stage at which criticism of Australian policy was moving beyond established political organisations and becoming part of a much wider public and intellectual debate.
There is something else which makes the book worth reading. We know how the Vietnam War ended, while its authors did not. That difference fundamentally changes the reading experience. Every assessment of military intervention, Vietnamese politics, American strategy and Australian policy was being made without knowledge of the eventual outcome. Arguments which now appear remarkably perceptive sit beside others which subsequent events exposed as incomplete or mistaken. Rather than diminishing the book, this makes it an unusually useful historical document because it allows us to see what informed Australians could know, and what they thought that knowledge meant, at a particular moment in the war.
As a general history of the Vietnam War, therefore, Vietnam and Australia has inevitably been overtaken. Anyone seeking to understand the military operations, Vietnamese politics, American decision making or Australian combat experience now has access to vastly superior archival material and historical scholarship. The book should not be read in isolation and certainly should not be used as though historical research stopped in 1966. Its political sympathies should be recognised, its selection of documents should be treated critically, and its interpretations should be compared with the evidence which became available after the war.
Yet judging it only by what later historians discovered would rather miss the point. The real importance of Vietnam and Australia lies in its attempt to make history relevant to a contemporary political decision. Its authors believed that Australians being asked to support a war should understand something about the country in which Australian soldiers were fighting, the colonial history which preceded the conflict, the agreements which followed the French defeat, and the competing explanations for the renewed war. That remains an admirable principle regardless of whether one accepts every conclusion the Study Group reached.
I found the book most interesting when read in precisely this way. It is no longer the history of the Vietnam War that I would recommend to somebody wanting a single introduction to the conflict, and there are interpretations which require substantial qualification in light of later scholarship. As a snapshot of Australian intellectual engagement with Vietnam in 1966, however, it is fascinating. It takes us back to a time when the outcome was uncertain, Australia’s commitment was expanding and the great domestic arguments over Vietnam and conscription were still developing.
For the historian, that makes Vietnam and Australia something rather more useful than simply an old book whose scholarship has been superseded. It is both history and historical evidence, an attempt to explain Vietnam and an artefact of the Australian debate about Vietnam. Perhaps there is something rather appropriate in finding it unexpectedly on the shelves of a Salvos op shop some sixty years after its publication. What might easily have been passed over as an obscure and dated little volume instead provides a remarkably interesting window into the arguments Australians were having while Australian soldiers were actually fighting the war. Read critically and alongside later scholarship, that is ultimately where its greatest value now lies.
Footnotes
- University Study Group on Vietnam, Vietnam and Australia: History, Documents, Interpretations (Gladesville, NSW: University Study Group on Vietnam, 1966), x, 150 pp.; Australian War Memorial, catalogue entry for Vietnam and Australia: History, Documents, Interpretations, call number 959.7 U58v.
- Jon Piccini, Global Thought, Local Action: The New Left and the Vietnam War in Australia, discussion of the formation of the University Study Group on Vietnam in 1965 and the involvement of academics associated with the University of New South Wales.
- University Study Group on Vietnam, Vietnam and Australia; Piccini, Global Thought, Local Action, discussion of academic attempts to broaden Australian public understanding of Vietnam.
- University Study Group on Vietnam, Vietnam and Australia; Australian War Memorial, catalogue entry for the 1966 Gladesville edition.
- Australian War Memorial, catalogue entry for Vietnam and Australia: History, Documents, Interpretations, collection LIB16929.
- Piccini, Global Thought, Local Action, discussion of academic and intellectual opposition to Australian involvement in Vietnam.
- See studies of the Australian peace movement and opposition to the Vietnam War for the broader development of academic and organised criticism of Australian policy during the 1960s.