Agent Orange - #1

In a previous posting, in which I gave some background information about my poetry, I mentioned my involvement in the Agent Orange issue. On my website you can read my history of the origins of the Agent Orange issue in Australia, entitled The Decade of Silence: Vietnam Veterans in the 1970s. I was quite gratified a year or so ago when I found that this history had become part of the South Australian secondary schools curriculum for Australian Studies.

Unfortunately, there exists in Australia a false history of the Agent Orange issue, published by the Australian War Memorial and Allen & Unwin. It was the subject of a seminar paper I gave at the Australian National University in 2002. I called the paper Lies, Damned Lies and History, and it is available on my website.

The Agent Orange history appears in a book entitled Medicine at War, a volume of the "official" history of Australia's involvement in wars in South East Asia. The author of Medicine at War is Brendan O'Keefe. The Agent Orange history however, is not written by Brendan O'Keefe, but by F B Smith. Now, readers might well ask themselves why a volume written by one author would include a single chapter by a different auther. Some readers might suspect that the author of the larger volume may have been unwilling to compromise his professional integrity in order to write a history with the political slant required by the publishers, and that the publishers therefore had to seek out a more compliant historian to write that single chapter. That suspicion is further strengthened by the appearance at the beginning of Medicine at War of a disclaimer by Brendan O'Keefe, emphasising that he had nothing to do with Smith's chapter of his book.

In his Agent Orange history, Smith claims that he came to the Agent Orange issue free of any preconceptions. Unfortunately for the credibility of Smith and his publishers however, the views expressed the Agent Orange history (published in 1994) were previously expressed by Smith, in public and in print, at the 1991 conference of the Australian Society for the History of Medicine. The conference was held in Perth, and its proceedings were published. I found a copy in the library of the Australian National University, and it should be freely available at all Australian university libraries. The conference was called The Impact of the Past on the Present.

In the process of researching my paper, Lies, Damned Lies and History, I wrote to the publishers of Medicine at War, pointing out the errors and falsehoods contained in Smith's Agent Orange chapter. Unfortunately, even though they are now well and truly aware of these issues and the anger they have provoked in the veteran community, the parties to this reprehensible publication refuse to take any action to make amends.

In 2004 I gave expert evidence to a parliamentary inquiry in New Zealand on the subject of Agent Orange and birth defects in the children of New Zealand Vietnam veterans. I also provided a written submission, which can be accessed on my website. It is called Agent Orange: A History of Deception. Although produced in response to circumstances in New Zealand, this report contains a lot of information for anybody interested in the Agent Orange issue.