Vietnam: The war is the news

The war in Vietnam was played out on the nation’s television screens almost every night. The Goddard’s growing horror at the violence mirrors the state of mind of so many Australian and American families at that time.

The clever device of having Douglas Goddard (Barry Otto) as a senior bureaucrat means that we have close encounters with the policy decisions of Australia’s various conservative Prime Ministers during those years, from Robert Menzies who began Australia’s involvement, through Harold Holt, John Gorton and Billy McMahon.

Vietnam synopsis

This epic story of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War is told through the history of a middle class family, the Goddards, whose son Phillip (Nicholas Eadie) is conscripted to fight in the war and whose father, Douglas (Barry Otto), is one of the key Canberra bureaucrats responsible for the policy of Australia’s involvement in the war.

Phillip has a schoolgirl younger sister, Megan (Nicole Kidman) – already on the pill and opposed to the war in Indo China – and a housewife mother, Evelyn (Victoria Lang), who is just starting to stand up to her authoritarian and patronising husband. The family is driven apart by the war in Vietnam, the sexual revolution and the growing independence of women in Australian society. When Phillip becomes alienated from his family as a result of his experiences as a soldier in Vietnam, the family never loses the courage to keep love alive, using their new found insights to begin to know each other as they never have before.

Vietnam curator's notes

Vietnam makes evocative use of archival footage from the era to establish the verisimilitude of the mid 1960s. It’s a backdrop of Beatlemania, flower power and a growing horror as the nightly news presents the carnage of the war in Vietnam. The directors even go so far as to inject Megan (Nicole Kidman) and her mother Evelyn (Veronica Lang) into archival news footage from the early 1970s as they join hands with hundreds of thousands of others who are opposed to the war in Vietnam.

The late 1960s in Australia was a time of great social and political upheaval. Since the end of the Second World War, Australia had had full employment. A whole generation of young people who had experienced the possibility of a university education, were now experimenting with sexual freedoms, new forms of music and political views that would bring them into sharp conflict with their parents’ generation. One of the issues that polarised Australian society was the Vietnam war and the use of conscription to call up young men whose birth date was drawn out of a barrel, like winning a lottery, except that for them it was to go to war.

Notes by Janet Bell

Education notes

This clip, from a television miniseries, shows Douglas Goddard (Barry Otto), his wife Evelyn (Victoria Lang) and daughter Megan (Nicole Kidman) in the living room of their home watching a black-and-white television news broadcast of the war in Vietnam. The broadcast depicts violent scenes, including a South Vietnamese police officer summarily executing a man in the streets of Saigon. The middle-class Goddard family are shocked and their responses reflect their differing political views about the war. Douglas and Megan argue and when Evelyn enters the discussion, Douglas’s patronising attitude towards her further angers Megan. The scene concludes with Megan walking out of the house into the night with Pachelbel’s ‘Canon in D’ playing in the background.

Educational value points

• The clip portrays family conflict arising from polarised views about the legitimacy of military intervention in Vietnam and Australia’s involvement in the war. The Vietnam conflict (1954–75) stemmed from the war for Vietnamese independence fought against colonial France. The conflict became a civil war between North Vietnam, which wanted the entire country to be communist, and South Vietnam, which was aligned with the capitalist West. The USA became involved in the war because it saw the defence of South Vietnam as being part of the Cold War taking place between itself, a capitalist country, and communist Russia and China. The USA withdrew its troops in 1973, North Vietnam overcame the South in 1975 and Vietnam became united once more in 1976.

• Megan’s strong opposition to the Vietnam War was typical of many people at the time and illustrates how the War polarised families and the community. Opposition to the Vietnam War by Australians began in 1965. A number of antiwar organisations were formed including Save Our Sons and Youth Campaign against Conscription. The first moratorium (protest stoppage) took place in May 1970 when 200,000 people across Australia marched in the streets to protest against the War.

• The Vietnam War was the first war brought into people’s living rooms by television. The images of the War brought its horror home to Australians and contributed to the success of the antiWar movement. The depiction of the shooting of a suspected Vietcong guerrilla in 1968 by South Vietnamese police general Nguyen Ngoc Loan is one of the most shocking and well-known images of an individual’s execution in wartime. In recognition of the power of television in the Vietnam War, the Australian War Memorial Museum has re-created a 1960s lounge room with a black-and-white television showing images of the War.

• The Tet Offensive mentioned in the television news broadcast was the turning point of the Vietnam War. In January 1968 during Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year and its festivities, communist troops attacked many towns in South Vietnam including its capital, Saigon. The communist losses were enormous and although in the short term the Offensive was a defeat, in the long term the sight of communist troops attacking the US Embassy in Saigon gave strength to the antiWar movement in the USA, which ultimately resulted in the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam in 1973.

• Nicole Kidman (1967–) is an Australian and an Academy Award winning actress. Her first film role was in BMX Bandits (1983) and she appeared on television in the soap opera A Country Practice (1981–93). Her role in Dead Calm (1989) led to her first Hollywood role, in Days of Thunder (1990). She was nominated for an Academy Award for Moulin Rouge (2001) and received an Academy Award for her role as English author Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) in The Hours (2002).

• The Kennedy Miller production company created Vietnam (1988). George Miller (1945–) and Byron Kennedy (1952–83) met in 1971 and formed Kennedy Miller Productions, which produced the three Mad Max feature films. From 1983 to 1989 Kennedy Miller produced miniseries for television that explored stories about Australian identity. These were The Dismissal (1983), Bodyline (1984), The Cowra Breakout (1984), The Dirtwater Dynasty (1988) and Bangkok Hilton (1989).

Education notes provided by The Learning Federation and Education Services Australia