The Aboriginal Diggers Who Fought In Vietnam Before Australia Officially Recognised Them As Citizens
May the 27th, 1967, Fuoktu Province, Vietnam. The light came up gray through the rubber. He was 20 years old. He was a private. He carried a 45 lb pack and an SLR rifle. He had been in country 11 weeks. The section was moving south of Newat, 3 km from the wire in the rubber plantation that the Australian task force had occupied the year before and never fully cleared.
The trees were planted in straight lines. The visibility was 40 m at best. He was at the rear of the patrol. He was watching the back trail. His mouth was dry. His webbing was wet through with sweat already, and the day had not properly started. He was, by the legal definition, operative under the Australian Constitution, as it had stood since federation, not a person his country was required to count.
May the 27th, 1967. Australia. This was the day the referendum was held. There were two questions on the ballot. The second concerned section 127 of the Australian Constitution which had stated since federation in 1901 that in reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, Aboriginal natives shall not be counted.
The same day’s vote also concerned section 51 paragraph 26 which had reserved to the states the power to make laws about the people of any race other than the Aboriginal race. in any state. The question put to the Australian voter was whether those words should be removed, whether the Commonwealth Parliament should be given the power to make laws for Aboriginal Australians, and whether they should be counted in the population. 90.
77% voted yes. It was the highest yes vote ever recorded in an Australian referendum. It remains so to this day. Every state returned a majority. The country had decided 66 years after Federation and 179 years after the first fleet that the people whose ancestors had been on the continent for 60,000 years should be counted in the census and that the federal parliament could now legislate for them at all.
The private in the rubber plantation south of Nuidat did not learn the result for several days. The mail was slow. By the time the news reached him, his patrol had been in two contacts and the section had taken one wounded evacuated by a number nine squadron Irakcoy lifting out of a clearing the engineers had hacked open with C4.
He read the letter from his mother written from a community in northern New South Wales where she had voted yes for a constitution she had grown up under and had never been counted by. and he folded the letter and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt and he picked up his rifle and he went back to the war. This is the story of the men who fought for Australia before Australia was prepared to count them.
Around 200 Aboriginal soldiers in the regular infantry battalions, 300 and more across the army, navy and air force, two countries, one man in both. and the years of combat that bracketed the moment his nation finally said his name in law. For the purposes of this script, the names of individual Aboriginal infantrymen will be cross-cheed against the Australian War Memorial’s indigenous service list, the work of which has been led for years by the memorial’s indigenous liaison officer, Michael Bell. The list is not
finished. Names are still being added. As of the most recent figures published by the memorial, 10 Aboriginal and toouristrate islander servicemen are confirmed killed in Vietnam and at least three are confirmed wounded. The true wounded figure is almost certainly higher. The work is ongoing because until very recently the Australian Defense Force did not record the heritage of those who served.
The men were Australian soldiers. Their headstones say so. The records of who they were inside that uniform have had to be reconstructed family by family by historians and by the families themselves. October the 18th, 1965, Australia. The National Service Act had been passed the year before. It introduced a birthday ballot.
20-year-old men registered for selective conscription. Marbles bearing the dates of the year were drawn from a barrel in Canbor. If your birthday came out, you were called up. If you went and the unit you ended up with was bound for Vietnam, you went to Vietnam. The act contained a provision that exempted Aboriginal men from the obligation to register.
It did not, however, prevent them from volunteering. Around 75 Aboriginal National Servicemen would eventually serve in Vietnam, having put their hand up under a scheme they did not have to put their hand up for. October the 18th, 1965, a mission community in northern New South Wales. He was 18.
He had finished what schooling was available to him in the local school the year before. He had been working with his uncle on a pastoral station east of the river, breaking horses for fence wages and saving what was left after rations. The recruiter for the regular army did not require him to register under the National Service Act.
He walked into the recruiting office in town in his clean shirt and he signed the papers and he sat for the medical and he was pass fit. He was sworn in. He was sent to Kapuka near Waga Waga for basic training. From Kapuka he was sent to Ingelburn in New South Wales to the infantry center. From Ingelburn, he was sent to a battalion based at Enoa in Brisbane that had been raised the previous June and was training hard for an eventual deployment.
In the year between his enlistment and his arrival in Vietnam, every aspect of his legal status as an Australian was in motion. The Commonwealth Electoral Act had been amended in 1962. Aboriginal Australians had been granted the right to vote in federal elections. They were not compelled to enroll as other Australians were, but they could vote if they chose.
In Queensland, until later state legislative changes, Aboriginal Australians remained barred from voting in state elections. In Western Australia, citizenship was conditional under the Native Citizenship Rights Act of 1944, a so-called certificate scheme that required the holder to adopt in the wording of the legislation the manner and habits of civilized life and not to associate with Aboriginal people other than parents, siblings, children or grandchildren, and which could be revoked at any time.
That regime was not fully dismantled until 1971. The Northern Territory had its own framework. South Australia had its own. New South Wales had its own. The country in whose uniform he had now been issued was a federation of states with sharply different positions on whether he was a full citizen. The Nationality and Citizenship Act of 1948 had made him an Australian citizen on paper alongside every other person born on Australian soil.
The provisions of section 127 of the constitution had simultaneously meant he was not to be counted in the census that established how many Australians there were. He was a citizen. He was uncountable. He learned to strip an SLR with his eyes closed. He learned to set a claymore. He learned to call a contact report. He learned the radio voice procedure that every infantry soldier in every army in the English-speaking world was using in those years.
He went on long route marches through the Brisbane heat with the company. The corporal who taught him fieldcraft was a man from Mai who would later be one of the men he carried out of a creek line. The Dutchman in his section had arrived in Australia at the age of 8. The Irishman had come over at 15.
The Aboriginal man two beds down was from a community in far north Queensland and had enlisted for the same reasons he had. Work, a wage, something to be that was not nothing. April the 8th, 1966, Fuoktui Province, Vietnam. The sixth battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, had not yet arrived. The first Australian task force base at Newat was being built.
Engineers from one field squadron were clearing rubber, laying wire, digging weapon pits, and setting up the artillery positions that would hold off a regiment. 4 months later, Fiotu Province lay on the coast east of Saigon with the South China Sea to its south and the long high hills to its southeast.
The province had been chosen for the Australian effort, partly because the Americans had agreed it could be Australian, partly because it was small enough to be worked and partly because it contained the port of Vangau through which Australian ships could land their stores. April the 8th 1966 Canbor the federal parliament was beginning the process that would lead after 18 months of further negotiation to the unanimous passage of the constitution alteration Aboriginals bill.
That bill when it eventually passed in 1967 would put the referendum question to the people. The Liberal Country Party government of Harold Halt had committed to the change. The Labor opposition under Arthur Cowwell had committed to it. There was no organized no campaign. The campaign that did exist was a yes campaign. The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Toouristrate Islanders, which had been formed in 1958, had spent years pushing the question into the political conversation. Faith Bandler, a South Sea
Islander Australian, was one of the public faces of that effort. The leaflets being printed in church halls and union offices and Aboriginal advancement leagues across the country said in language designed to be unmissable. Vote yes for the sake of fairness. The fairness in question had not yet reached the men in the rubber.
May the 24th, 1966, the flight deck of HMAS Sydney off the Queensland coast. He stood on the deck of an Australian aircraft carrier converted to a troop transport and he watched the green of the coast past a starboard. He was 19 years old. The battalion had embarked at Brisbane 2 days before.
The voyage to Vangao would take 12 days. He shared a mestec with men he had trained with for the better part of a year. There were three Aboriginal men in his rifle company. They knew each other well enough to nod. They did not, in the language of the period, make a thing of it. He wrote his mother a letter on the carrier’s letterhead.
He told her the food was good. He told her the seas had been calm. He told her he was thinking of her and the kids and to give his love to the others. May the 24th, 1966. His home community in Northern New South Wales. His mother was 38 years old. She had four children younger than the soldier who had just left the country.
She lived in a house allocated by the Aborigines welfare board with no running water inside on a piece of land the board administered on terms it determined. She was not on that day entitled to vote in New South Wales state elections in the manner she would have been if she had not been Aboriginal, although the federal franchise had reached her four years earlier.
She kept her son’s letter in a tin under the bed. She wrote back the same week. The letter took 11 days to reach Vangao and another four to reach the task force area at Nuiidat. August the 18th, 1966. Long tan rubber plantation, Fuoku Province. A company strength Australian element from deco company of the sixth battalion was caught in monsoon rain by a regimenal-sized Vietkong force in the long tan rubber plantation.
The fight lasted 3 and 1/2 hours. >> >> The Australians supported by artillery from New Dart firing through the storm and by an armored personnel carrier relief force that arrived at last light held. 18 Australians were killed. 24 were wounded. Among the wounded was a man from Kes of Aboriginal and South Sea Islander descent who served as a corporal and section commander in D Company.
His name was Thomas Henry Leer known to his platoon as Buddy. He was shot three times while trying to drag a wounded sergeant, Sergeant Paddyy Todd, out of the fire and back through the mud to a place where he could be treated. Both men survived. Buddy Leah spent the next 5 months in hospital.
He went on to serve 35 years in the Australian Defense Force. He is still spoken of in the sixth battalion’s regimental history. August 18th, 1966. Canbor. The federal cabinet was working through the wording of the constitutional amendment that would the following year be put to the country. There was correspondence between the prime minister’s department and the attorney general’s department on the precise language of the question on the timing of the poll on the decision to combine it with a separate question
about parliamentary numbers. There was also internal correspondence within the Department of External Affairs about the extent to which Australia’s domestic position on its Aboriginal population was being noticed by neighboring countries, by Indonesia, by Malaysia, by the newly independent Asian states, whose good opinion the Australian government, as it pursued its forward defense policy in Vietnam, was anxious to keep.
The Aboriginal Australian wounded at Long Tan like every other Australian wounded at Long Tan was treated at the Australian Field Hospital at Vangao. The medical care he received was the same as any other soldiers. The blood that went into him through the drip line did not ask whose veins it was entering. The doctor who patched him did not stop to think about it.
The country he was bleeding for had not yet voted on whether to count him. December the 8th, 1966. Fuok 2 province. The young private from northern New South Wales had now been in country 14 weeks. The rifle company had taken one killed and four wounded since arrival. The company had run search and destroy operations in the north of the province.
Cordland and search operations on the village of Hoong. Route security work along Route 2 between Nuidat and Baha. and a long sweep through the long high hills that had ended with the section he was in pulling a booby trapped grenade out of a rice cache and then nearly being killed by it. He was learning his trade.
The corporal said he had a good eye on the back trail. The platoon sergeant said his radio voice was clear and unhurried. He was given the subsection second in charge slot for a patrol in early December and he ran it without losing anyone and the corporal nodded at him afterwards. and that nod meant more to him than anything in his life had so far.
December the 8th, 1966, Sydney. The halt government was returned at the federal election that had been held 2 weeks earlier with an increased majority. The coalition’s commitment to put a referendum to the people on the Aboriginal question had been part of the campaign. The Australian electorate had now voted twice for a government committed to that change, including the previous parliament under Robert Menses.
The momentum was political and it was real. In Red Fern in Sydney, an Aboriginal community organization that had been growing slowly since the late 1950s was meeting in a hall to plan how it would campaign for the yes vote in the months ahead. Men and women who had spent their whole lives being told their existence was an administrative inconvenience were preparing leaflets.
The leaflets had photographs of Aboriginal soldiers in Australian uniform on them. One of the photographs had been taken at Vang Tao. The men in the photograph were not named on the leaflet. They were named in the records of their battalion. February the 17th, 1967. Fuaktui Province. Operation Bribe. A Vietkong force drawn from D445 battalion and likely reinforced by elements from the North Vietnamese army had attacked a South Vietnamese regional force compound at Lang Fuokai on the coast southeast of New Dart. During
the previous night, the sixth battalion was deployed as the quick reaction force. Two companies were inserted by armored personnel carrier and on foot to block the expected withdrawal route. The contact when it came was at point blank range in dense scrub near the abandoned hamlet of Appayanne.
Eight Australians were killed. 26 were wounded. It was the most intense fighting the Australians had been through since long tan 6 months before. The young private from Northern New South Wales was not in the rifle company that took the worst of it. He was in the cordon. He spent that day moving forward at the run, dropping prone, listening to the radio crackle of the contact 200 m ahead, hearing the sergeant of his neighboring section call in casualties one after another.
When the firing stopped, he helped carry stretchers out of the bush to the landing zone the engineers had cleared. He carried a man whose face he never saw because the field dressing covered everything from the cheekbones up. February the 17th, 1967. Canbor. The constitution alteration Aboriginals bill was making its progress through both houses of the federal parliament.
It was a short bill. It did three things. It deleted the words other than the Aboriginal race in any state from section 51 paragraph 26. It repealed section 127 in its entirety and it provided that the alterations would come into effect on a day to be proclaimed after a successful referendum. The bill passed both houses without a single vote against. Liberal members spoke for it.
Country party members spoke for it. Labor members spoke for it. The bill was sent on for royal ascent and the date for the referendum was set for the 27th of May. The Australians wounded in operation bribeby were lifted out by helicopter and treated at Vonga. Some recovered enough to return to the battalion. Some were sent home.
None of them on the day they were wounded had yet been counted. April the 3rd, 1967. Fuk 2 province. The young private section was on a clearance patrol north of the Courtney rubber plantation. The patrol crossed a small dry creek bed and his front scout, a man from Adelaide, signaled freeze.
There was a track leading up the bank. The track had been used in the last 24 hours. The patrol went into all round defense. The corporal called it in. The platoon commander brought up the rest of the platoon. The follow-up moved north for an hour and contacted the rear element of a four-man enemy party. There was a brief, brutal exchange of fire.
One enemy soldier was killed. The other three escaped into bamboo. The Australians took no casualties. The young private had fired his weapon for the first time on a confirmed target. He did not know whether he had hit anything. He spent that night sitting against the trunk of a rubber tree with his rifle across his knees, watching the dark, thinking about a kitchen table in northern New South Wales and a tin under a bed and a mother who had no idea the day he had had.
April the 3rd, 1967. Brisbane, the Aboriginal Advancement League’s Queensland branch was holding a public meeting in support of the yes vote. The hall was full. The speakers were Aboriginal community leaders, a trade unionist and a returned serviceman from the Second World War whose son was at that moment in Vietnam.
The returned serviceman gave a short speech. He did not raise his voice. He said that he had served at Tbrook. He said that he had been counted then because the army had needed him. He said that his son had been counted by the army for the same reason. He said that he wanted the country to count them when the army had no use for them as well. The hall stood.
The speech was reported in two newspapers along the ABC’s evening news. May the 27th, 1967. Fuk to province. Back to where this began. The morning patrol. The 45 pack. The 11 weeks in country. the young private at the rear of his section watching the back trail in a rubber plantation south of Nui Dart on the day his country was voting on whether to count him May the 27th 1967 Australia the polling booths opened at 8:00 in the morning local time in every electorate from Cape York to Hobart the
voting was compulsory almost 94% of eligible voters turned out they were handed two ballot papers the first concerned a proposal to break the nexus between the size of the House of Representatives and the size of the Senate. That proposal failed. The second was the Aboriginals question. The wording on the ballot paper was as follows.
Do you approve the proposed law for the alteration of the Constitution entitled an act to alter the Constitution so as to omit certain words relating to the people of the Aboriginal race in any state and so that Aboriginals are to be counted in reckoning the population? The voter wrote the word yes or the word no in the box.
The count began that night. By the small hours of the morning, the result was clear. By the following day, every state had been confirmed. New South Wales had voted yes by 91.5%. Victoria had voted yes by 94.7%. Western Australia, where the certificate of citizenship regime was still in operation, had voted yes by 80.95%.
The lowest yes vote in any state was Western Australia. It was still 4-fifths. There has not been another referendum in the history of the Australian Federation that has carried with that majority. There has not been another single question put to the Australian people on which the country has agreed at that level.
It is the largest yes vote in Australian constitutional history. May the 31st, 1967. Fu province. The result reached the sixth battalion in mailbags bought up by helicopter from Vangao. The young private read his mother’s letter sitting on the lip of his weapon pit at the company position with his rifle across his knees.
His mother had voted yes. She was nervous about whether her vote had counted because she was not sure the welfare board had transmitted her enrollment correctly. But the booth officer had told her it was on the roll and she had voted. She wrote that she was proud of him. She wrote that she had been proud of him before this and that nothing about the result of the referendum changed that, but that she was glad the country had finally caught up with what she had always known.
She wrote that the kids were fine. She wrote that his sister had got a job at the post office in town. She wrote that she missed him. The handwriting was steady. She had practiced her letters for years before she felt ready to send him the first one. He folded the letter into the breast pocket of his shirt.
He went back to standing too. August the 10th, 1967, Australia. The Constitution alteration Aboriginals Act 1967 received royal ascent. The amendment came into legal effect from that day. Section 127 of the constitution did not exist. Aboriginal and toouristrate islander Australians were now part of the formal population of the Commonwealth in the same way every other Australian was.
The Commonwealth Parliament now had the power to make laws for them. What it would do with that power was on that day an open question. It would take 5 more years before the Commonwealth used the new power to overrule discriminatory state legislation in any meaningful way.
August the 10th, 1967. Fuok 2 province. The young private company was running a battalion level operation in the north of the province out toward the Mau secret zone. The operation had been going for 9 days. The men were tired. Section had been losing weight. The platoon sergeant had two cases of emergent foot to deal with.
The platoon commander was on his fourth set of socks. The section was strung out in single file along a dry creek line in country none of them had been in before. The young private was carrying the platoon’s spare radio battery on top of his pack because the signaler had cracked his ankle the day before and was being rotated out.
Nobody on the patrol that day on either side of the wire had heard the news from Canbor. The patrol moved north for another 6 hours. It ate cold ration packs at last light. It set up a harbor position. It stood to. It stood down. It posted centuries. It tried to sleep. The amendment that had been voted into the constitution of his country 11 weeks earlier had been law for 14 hours. He did not know it yet.
The country did not need him to know it for it to be true. The country did not need him to know it for him to be counted. That is part of what it means to be counted. The counting happens whether you are looking or not. October the 5th, 1967. Fuk 2 Province. A booby trap. A captured American M26 grenade with the pin pulled and a pressure release wired under a sandbag was triggered by the leading section of a cordon as it approached an abandoned bunker complex south of the Long High Hills. Three
Australians were wounded. One was an Aboriginal man from Queensland whose name appears in the sixth battalion’s nominal role and is on the indigenous service list. He lost most of the muscle of his left calf. He was lifted out by Irakcoy within 40 minutes. He was in surgery at Vanga within 90. He spent 4 months at the one Australian field hospital and another six at Concord Repatriation General Hospital in Sydney. He walked again.
He walked with a limp for the rest of his life. >> >> He was discharged in 1968 medically. He went home October the 5th, 1967, Sydney. The first Commonwealth funding round for Aboriginal welfare programs made possible by the new section 51 paragraph 26 power was being negotiated between the federal department of territories and the relevant state agencies. The amounts were small.
The friction was already considerable. Several states resisted the assertion of Commonwealth power into their domain. Queensland, in particular, held a position that the new constitutional power did not of itself change the operation of state aboriginal protection and welfare legislation. That position would not be fully overcome until the Whittam government’s racial discrimination act in 1975.
The wounded soldier repatriated to Concord did not know any of this. He knew that the army had paid him properly while he was in Vietnam. He knew that the army hospital was treating him properly now. He knew that when he got home, the welfare board in his home state would expect him to apply for a certificate to live with his white fiance in town.
The army had counted him as soon as he enlisted. The state in which he was born would still not count him as a man fully entitled to the same legal life as the man who had been in the bed next to his at Concord, who came from a sheep station in Victoria, and whose wedding the wounded man would attend the following spring, April the 16th, 1968, Fuok 2 province.
The young private, now 21 corporal, was at the end of his tour. The battalion was preparing to hand over to its successor unit and to embark for Australia. He had been in country a year and one week. He had been in two major operations and seven smaller ones. He had carried two friends out of contacts under fire.
He had killed at least one man at close quarters. He had been spared twice by the kind of luck soldiers do not talk about even when they are old men. He was thinner than he had been a year before. He was harder. He had a slow stillness around him that the new arrivals respected without quite knowing why.
April the 16th, 1968. His home community, Northern New South Wales. His mother had cleaned the house twice in the last week. She had walked into town on Tuesday to ask the post office whether they had heard anything about the date the boys were coming back. The postm’s wife, who had known her since they were both girls, said the date was supposed to be early June.
His mother went home and washed the curtains. She made a list of the things she wanted to cook him. She had not seen him in 23 months. May the 28th, 1968. Brisbane. The battalion disembarked at the Brisbane Wolves. There was no parade. There was no public reception. The men were trucked to barracks, processed for leave, paid out, and sent home.
The young private took a train south, then a bus, then walked the last 7 kilometers up the dirt road to his mother’s house with his kit bag over his shoulder. His mother was on the ver. She had been on the ver for an hour. She had not been able to sit still inside the house. He came up the slope of the road.
She saw him. She stood. She did not call out. She walked down the steps and along the patch of bare ground in front of the ver and met him at the gate. They did not speak at first. They did not need to. He came home to a country that had counted him in a census the year before for the first time since federation.
He came home to a state in which his mother had still on the day of his arrival not been able to vote in the most recent state election on the same terms as her white neighbor, although that would change before he was 25. He came home to a community on land that the Aborigines welfare board still administered.
He came home to a town in which the publicans served Aboriginal men only at a side window. He came home a citizen at last in the full constitutional sense his country had grudgingly agreed to. He came home to find that the agreement was incomplete, slow, and contested at every level below the Commonwealth.
He took a job at the local sawmill. He married a woman he had grown up with. They had three children. The eldest he named after his platoon corporal, the man from Mai who had carried him out of the creek line near the Cortune rubber plantation in November of his tour and had told him afterwards in the way men of that era spoke that he was a good soldier.
The corporal from Mai died in a road accident in 1973. The young private, no longer young, drove 800 km to the funeral. He stood at the back of the chapel in his only suit. The corporal’s mother, a woman he had never met, recognized the face from the photographs her son had sent home and walked across the room and put her hand on his arm and said the corporal had spoken about him often.
They wrote to each other every Christmas after that until she died. The Commonwealth used its new power in the years that followed the referendum to create the first funded Aboriginal welfare programs of the modern era. The Whittam government elected in December 1972 accelerated the process.
The Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 gave the Commonwealth a tool to overrule discriminatory state laws. The Aboriginal land rights, Northern Territory Act of 1976 handed back the first parcels of land in the territory to their traditional owners. The Mabbo decision of the high court in 1992 recognized native title at common law for the first time in Australia’s legal history.
The apology to the stolen generations was delivered by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in February 2008. The national apology to Aboriginal and toouristrate islander veterans for the discrimination they faced on enlistment in service and on return including the denial of soldier settlement entitlements after both world wars has been part of the slow public reckoning of the last three decades.
The men of Vietnam were folded into that reckoning late. The Australian War Memorial began the project of formally identifying Aboriginal and Toouristrait Islander servicemen across all conflicts in the early 2000s. The work has been led for the better part of two decades by the memorial’s indigenous liaison officer Michael Bell.
The indigenous service list has grown from a handful of confirmed names to more than 300 for Vietnam alone with current AWM estimates suggesting around 500 Aboriginal and Toouristrait Islander Australians may eventually be confirmed as having served across all branches of the Australian Defense Force in that conflict.
Of those, at least 10 are confirmed killed. At least three are confirmed wounded. And the true wounded figure is almost certainly higher because until very recently the records simply did not exist in the form needed to find them. The work continues. Names are still being added. Families are still coming forward.
The list is not a memorial in the architectural sense. It is something more modest and for that reason more precise. It is the slow labor of a country trying to find out who its soldiers were. The young private from Northern New South Wales, the focal figure of this script, whose specific identity is being cross-cheed at the script finalization stage against the AWM’s indigenous service list for accuracy, lived a long life.
He worked the sawmill until it closed in the late 1980s. He worked council road maintenance after that. He marched on every ANZAC day from his return until his knees stopped him in the year 2009. He marched in Sydney once in 2007 with the Aboriginal Veterans Contingent for the 40th anniversary of the referendum. He stood for the last post on the steps of the Senate.
He was photographed by a press photographer that day in his blazer with his Vietnam ribbons on it. And the photograph appeared in a regional newspaper above the caption, “Aboriginal veteran marks 40 years since referendum.” The caption did not name him. The caption said only Aboriginal veteran. He did not mind.
He had spent his life being one of the men whose names did not appear under the photograph. He understood that the country was getting better at counting. It was not yet on every day getting better at naming. May the 27th, 2017, Canbor. The 50th anniversary of the referendum was marked by services at the Australian War Memorial and at the Aboriginal and Toouristrait Islander tent embassy across the lake.
The governor general attended the memorial service. The prime minister attended. There were speakers from the federal council for the advancement of aboriges and toouristr islanders which had organized the original yes campaign. There was a recorded message from Faith Bandler. There was a wreath laid by an Aboriginal Vietnam veteran.
The veteran had served with the sixth battalion. He had been at Long Tan. He laid the wreath at the foot of the Long Tan cross display in the Vietnam Gallery. He saluted. He stepped back. He did not speak. May the 27th, 2017. Fuoktu Province, now Barria Vonga Province, Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The rubber plantation south of Nui Dart is still there.
The trees have been replanted twice since the war. The long tan cross, the original, has been replaced with a replica on site. And the original is in the Australian War Memorial in Canbor. Australian veterans visit. They walk the lines they walked as young men. They show their grandchildren where the platoon harbored up.
The Vietnamese government permits the visits. There is a small marker stone. There is a tree. The country whose uniform they wore counts them now. The country in which they fought has its own record. The two countries in this script, Australia in 1967 and Vietnam in 1967, have both moved on in different directions at different speeds with different memorials into the long aftermath that all wars eventually become.
Around 200 Aboriginal Australian men served in regular infantry battalions in Vietnam. More than 300 Aboriginal and toouristrate islander people are confirmed across the army, navy, and air force with the figure expected to rise to around 500 as the memorial’s research continues. They served in the Royal Australian Regiment, in the Royal Australian Engineers, in the Royal Australian Armored Corps, in the Royal Australian Artillery, in the Royal Australian Signals, in the Royal Australian Army Service Corps, in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps, in the Royal
Australian Air Force, in the Royal Australian Navy, in the Australian Army Training Team, and in at least one detachment of the Special Air Service Regiment. They served as regulars and they served as national servicemen. 75 of the latter under a scheme they had been exempted from but had volunteered for. 10 are confirmed killed.
At least three are confirmed wounded with the true number certainly higher. Some came home and went to the sawmill. Some came home and went to the cattle station. Some came home and went to university on the veterans affairs scheme. Some came home and never quite came home and lived afterwards in the way men who carry the war in them have always lived with the particular weight of having fought for a country that was on the day they shipped out only beginning to admit they were part of it.
They were Australian soldiers. They are Australian soldiers. The records of their battalion say so. The headstones of the ones who did not come back say so. The indigenous service list of the Australian War Memorial growing year by year as Michael Bell and his team find another name and another family says.
So May the 27th, 1967, Fuoku Province, Vietnam. A young private at the rear of a section patrol in the rubber watching the backtrail. May the 27th, 1967. Australia 90.77%. the same day.
