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History Pages

I will be using these pages to put on display some of my historical writing.

"The Decade of Silence: Vietnam Veterans in the 1970s" is a study of the political, social and historical factors that acted to deny a public voice to Vietnam veterans in the 1970s. It is also a study of the way in which veterans found their own voice at the end of that decade. To read it, click on this link.

Decade of Silence

Under th heading "History For Sale," I will write about the relationship between Writeway Research and the Australian Department of Veterans Affairs. Writeway Research is a business name operating out of a post office box on the south coast of New South Wales. As far as I have been able to determine, it has no trained historians, no expertise, and no body of work. Nevertheless, it appears that the Department of Veterans Affairs has such a high opinion of Writeway Research that it decided to offload a significant amount of taxpayer funding to this dubious organisation for work for which they are not qualified. This the department appears to have done without resorting to such inconveniences as an open tendering process.
 
 

History For Sale

I consider this next document to be an important work on the issue of Agent Orange and birth defects. It was produced as a submission to a parliamentary inquiry in New Zealand, but it is just as relevant to Australian Vietnam veterans and their families. Its title is Agent Orange: a History of Deception - New Zealand Vietnam veterans and the McLeod Report. To read it, click on the following link:

Agent Orange Deception

Lies, Damned Lies and History: a response to F.B. Smith's "Agent Orange: the Australian aftermath", Part IV of Brendan OKeefe, Medicine at War: Medical aspects of Australia's involvement in Southeast Asia 1950-1972.

This is a paper I gave as part of the History seminar series at the Australian National University, on the 19th of April, 2002.

Lies, Damned Lies and History

Books; Actual size=248 pixels wide

I have added some new pages to this site, in which I will tell the story of my own experience in the Vietnam War.

My Vietnam Experience

"Vietnam Veterans in Australian History: A 'Trahison Des Clercs'?" is a paper I presented at the Annual Humanities Postgraduate Research Conference, at Curtin University, Western Australia, in 1999. It was published the following year in the proceedings of the conference. It is adapted from Chapter Two of "The Decade of Silence". Click on the following link to read this essay.

Trahison

I have recently had a book review published by the Journal of Australian Studies. It is a review of Robert Hall's "Combat Battalion", a history of 8RAR's tour of duty in Vietnam in 1969-70.

Book Review

Shortly before Australia decided to send its military forces to the war in Iraq in 2003, I added a page to this site to outline my thoughts on Australia's involvement in this war.
 

Iraq War

Here is another perspective on certain aspects of the debate over war in Iraq. Written in the style of Plato, it is called
"George, Son Of George: A Socratic Dialogue".

George

On the morning of the 12th of September 2001, a friend in America sent me some graphic pictures of the terrible tragedy at the World Trade Center buildings in New York the previous night (Australian time). This link has been sitting on my Home Page since then. After all this time, I've decided it is more appropriate to keep these pictures here in my History pages. To view the pictures, click on the following link. 

September 11 World Trade Center Pictures

For academic purists, I must point out the difficulties of publishing an academic text using Tripod Sitebuilder.

I am unable to alter a few words within a text block without altering the entire text block. In other words, I can't put a book title in italics without putting into italics the entire paragraph in which the title appears. The same applies to underlining. So I've had to make do with quotation marks for all titles.

Automatic footnoting is also impossible. Endnotes, with the numbers in brackets, is the only alternative I have found so far.

To exit this page and return to My Home Page, click on the following link:

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