Think of Gallipoli: Australians are accustomed to celebrating military defeat. But Vietnam is not a defeat that we are likely to celebrate — or even to remember, if we can manage to forget. This for two reasons: firstly, because, while we lost the battle on Gallipoli, we were on the side which won the war: secondly, because Vietnam is cause not for pride but for shame — shame not because we came away defeated but because we went.

The Australian presence in Vietnam was born in deceit. It was a shabby attempt to buy cheap insurance concealed behind a smokescreen of cold war rhetoric.

The purpose was not to protect South Vietnam; it was to preserve Australian conservatism. And our leaving was shrouded in lies just as was our going.

The Australian people were not told the truth about why we had entered, nor why we had left, nor that we had lost.

In the end, it was not so much political understanding (though this was growing too) as moral revulsion against the daily spectacle of the world’s most powerful nation beating hell out of a small, underdeveloped country which swung the majority against the war. The government could go on no longer; the switch in American policy merely facilitated what was already inevitable.

Vietnam did many things to Australia. It polarised opinion on Australia’s relations with the outside world, as sharply as the polarisation which took place in the last two years of World War I. As between generations, it broke the nexus of common assumptions concerning Australia’s future and much else. It forced Australia out of the political doldrums in which we had lain for two decades. It made it necessary for the new government to find a new road in foreign affairs. It destroyed one pride, and created another.

Vietnam engaged the minds and hearts of poets and painters in a way that no cause had done since Spain. It is with this in mind that Mr RH Morrison has brought these poems together for us, and to him we tender our thanks. We publish this collection both as a matter of record and because we feel that now we can — without denying it — draw a line under our shame.

Stephen Murray-Smith

Foreword

Anyone studying the Australian poetry of our time will be struck by a significant fact: the anti-war ranks in the community have enlisted some of our finest poets, but the pro-war elements are poetically silent. Is this because those who, even with the best of patriotic motives, welcomed, supported and justified Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war know at heart that they have stiffed something in their conscience? A poet who has maimed his own humanity becomes mute.

By force of circumstance this anthology has turned out to be above all a record of anguish and of protest. There was no editorial bias to exclude poems in favor of the war. Had any been found, they would have been given a fair hearing. Indeed, a leading ex-service organization was among those approached in good faith and asked to make known any poems about the war, but nothing came forward from any quarter but the voices of grief, anger, compassion, shame, sarcasm, and condemnation. It must not be assumed however that the contributors whose work follows are somehow in league, or that they would necessarily subscribe to my own assessment. They are individual and diverse. They hold to various political opinions and religious creeds. Their responsibility here goes no further than the words of the poems to which they have separately put their names.

The title of this anthology grew out of a process of elimination. Vietnam Poetry would not have been right, for some of the works chosen are hardly poems. Vietnam Verse might have seemed inadequate, because some of the contents are fine poems, and others effective prose. Vietnam Voices is meant to place the emphasis on the voices of conscience which speak to us here through a variety of forms, with different degrees of inspiration, talent, or plain sincerity. It may be only rarely that in the midst of strife and bitter turmoil the poet can make that fusion between poetic creativeness and barbarous reality which yields a true poem. Perhaps finer poems will come to be written on reflection as the Indo-China war ends will it ever end? … In the meantime we have these poems created during years of intense feeling, in the face of an issue which has divided our community as few other issues have done since the first world war.

To some the supporters of our Vietnam intervention — this collection may appear as evidence that the poets of Australia are lacking in a proper appreciation of our international obligations. To others the same collection cannot help seeming an indictment of governments which, in their view, year after year squandered Australian lives, honor, and material in the name of policy — the policy of currying favor with what they regard as some of the worst elements in the United States. One section of our citizens will say that these government have only done what they thought should be done in the interests of national security. To the other section our ‘political Cheap Jacks’ stand condemned, not only for what is considered the moral baseness of that policy but for its utter uselessness. To the anti-war party, they are not the only guilty ones. A bad government cannot for ever pervert and mislead a wholly good community. Those who favor the war may have wished it to continue. The others will hold that citizens must become aware of the evil things being done on their behalf, and resolve to rid themselves of them, as a patient recovering health throws off a disease. Whatever the merits and demerits of the opposing camps, how right it is that in a democracy our leaders — to some the honorable leaders, to others the guilty misleaders — can be removed not with the bombs, land-mines, shrapnel, and napalm whose use our governments have authorized or approved, not with scorched earth and water-torture, but with the silent casting of electoral votes.

May this anthology, by stimulating discussion, help Australia to recover its health and increase its self-respect.

Originally published in Overland issue 54—1973