A wry satisfaction to be enjoyed in reading histories of events of your youth is that it uncovers your prejudices at that time. It reassures you that you have grown wiser but also makes you wonder whether your present attitudes will need revisiting. The retelling of a complex past can be illuminating, too, as you reflect on similar situations today.
Save Our Sons, Carolyn Collins’ detailed and even-handed study of women’s campaign against conscription during the Vietnam War, offered such pleasures. It recalled dimly remembered events and characters, entered their own experience and perception of the events, and brought back my own immediate response and the wider view of the world on which it was based. It also reminded me how far my attitudes have changed.
In 1965, when the story begins, I was in favour of the Australian involvement in the Vietnam war. That was partly because my fellow Catholics had been persecuted in North Vietnam and faced a similar lack of freedom were the Vietcong victorious. As a child I had lamented the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu. For many Catholics there was something tribal in the war, as there had been in the Spanish Civil War for a previous generation.
I had also accepted in general terms the popular geopolitical justifications offered for the invasion: the image of communism as a homogeneous and united world movement, the image of coordinated communist subversive forces in every nation, of Communists as an incredibly relentless and energetic force, the fear of dominoes falling, the belief that those who opposed communism were more noble and superior ethically to their opponents, and the image of communism as a relentless and inhuman force. This led easily to the view that Australia should be involved in war against the communist forces in Vietnam, that conscription would be justifiable, and that peace movements and protests were controlled by shadowy communist agents.
At that time I did not make any distinction between women who protested against the war and those who protested against conscription. I imagined them to have been manipulated, and their public protest to be unfeminine, and certainly not what I would have liked my own mother to be involved in. Mothers were supposed to bear courageously and silently the sacrifices their sons made.
The Vietnam war and its aftermath undermined these adolescent views. I saw that communism was inherently divisive and did not unite nations in a common cause; most insurgencies were predominantly local in character; communists were human beings with the virtues and the vices of the rest of us; anti-communist leaders were as capable of brutality and of lying as communists and were as likely to abandon their promises to those they would save; people who weighed war in large strategic terms of alliances, enemies and worst case scenarios were dangerous guides who eroded trust. The first question to be asked about war concerned the people who would suffer in it, and then only about those whose gain might justify inflicting that suffering.
I found Save Our Sons fascinating because the women who protested against conscription started with the question to which I came only much later: who suffers in war and can the suffering be justified? The book, too, focuses on the women themselves, not as paragons of femininity or as warriors for justice, but as persons with different backgrounds, personalities and gifts who came together amicably to try to have prescription repealed. The book presents vividly their ordinary lives and limited resources, their fears, weariness and humour, and the personal cost in rejection by relatives and neighbours. It also highlights their resilience in seeking to end conscription for over seven years despite repeated disappointment in the elections and other events which showed popular support for the war. Their commitment, compassion, humanity and perseverance were admirable. In advocating for a cause, I cannot imagine people whom I would welcome more as companions.
'Their commitment, compassion, humanity and perseverance were admirable. In advocating for a cause, I cannot imagine people whom I would welcome more as companions.'
The story of the campaign, too, is fascinating in portraying the theatrical aspects of public advocacy. The women opposing conscription constantly adapted their message to fit the image they wanted to project, while seeking to influence as wide an audience as they could. A sit down demonstration in a government office, for example, was tailored to represent the image of mothers supporting their sons, but also designed to attract newspaper and television reporters. Initially the demonstrations highlighted the mothers who protested at sending their sons to their deaths. From these ‘ladylike’ pleas to spare young men from involvement in a bloody war, they later became part of a larger protest against the war itself and against the suffering it brought to Vietnamese mothers and sons.
On the stage of protest the women faced more powerful opponents who were engaged in maintaining support for the war by presenting it in the best possible light and discrediting its critics. In that sense both sides tried to manipulate public attitudes to the war and to protest against it. The North Vietnamese hosts of an Australian woman’s delegation in Hanoi had their counterparts in government press offices in Australia as they commended their opposed representations of the war. The charge levelled against the women of being duped by the communists could be met with greater justice by the counter accusation that supporters of the war were duped by government propaganda.
As I was reading Save our Sons I was preoccupied with the future of another cause that seems as dead now as the protest against conscription must have seemed at many points. Despite protests, strong criticism, detailed proposals for change and revelations of the human harm caused by it, the Australian treatment of people who have claimed protection from Australia has become steadily more brutal over the last decade.
At the same time the public attitude to refugee suffering has become more insouciant. Australians generally have tacitly supported excluding them, detaining them indefinitely, sending them to the horrors of Manus Island and leaving them without support in the community. Calls for a humane policy towards refugees that includes welcoming them when they seek protection from persecution, supporting them when their cases are processed and including them under the protection of law them under the canopy of law, go unheard and protests are unavailing. The cause seems dead. We might then be led to ask what place is left for advocacy of a better policy, and what value is there in public protest?
Collins’ conclusions to her study offer paradoxical answers to these questions. After celebrating the work of the Women against Conscription she concludes that there is no proof that it had a significant effect in changing government policy, changing minds, stopping conscription or shortening the war. Its usefulness remains disputed.
Its value, however, is even clearer in retrospect. It lies in the human truth of its commitment to peace in the face of war and to saving lives in the face of taking them. It celebrates the value of people who are persistent in the face of apathy and hostility, hang in in the face of disappointment, show courage and good humour in working together, and above all hope against hope that an apparently intractable injustice will eventually become intolerable and be repealed.
As a matter of strategy it was important to weigh the immediate effectiveness of different courses of action. But as a matter of integrity it was then, and remains now, more important to testify faithfully to the value of each human life, and especially in times when it is regarded as expendable.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street, and writer at Jesuit Social Services.
Main image: World Peace Day March near the Hotel Australia, King William Street, North Adelaide, 1969. People have signs, which read, "End Conscription", "Save our Sons", and "Bring our boys back". (Hal Pritchard/State Library of South Australia)