Veterans return to Vietnam
At the Vung Tau RSL
By Mark Dapin
As soon as World War Two ended, diggers returned to the battlefields and POW camps to retrieve makeshift crosses and small memorials, lost keepsakes and buried memories. But after the fall of Saigon, in 1975, it was impossible for an Australian veteran to go back to Vietnam for the things he’d left behind. Vietnam had closed its borders to the non-communist world. The pilgrimages of for
Rare meat
Policing Cambodia’s wildlife trade
By Daniel Otis
Along the narrow highway linking Phnom Penh to the Gulf of Thailand, military police tear through a corrugated iron and plank shack. When the gendarmes – members of Cambodia’s Wildlife Rapid Rescue team – were here four months earlier, they found monitor lizards, quartered muntjac and wild pig meat.
Outside, Australian team adviser Dean Lague waits in the shade of a mango
Bonfire of sole
By John Bryson
Reviled as a traitor for his leftist agitations, war correspondent Wilfred Burchett held the one dinner menu he would allow at our table in La Closerie des Lilas, Boulevard du Montparnasse, ready to order for the four of us, confident of his own fine judgement. He chose according to a secret view he had of our personalities, so he was playing a game. The restaurant was plush: red upholstery, gold capping, soft lighting. He guessed most
