This project was not an angry outburst by the Australian victims of an episode in 20th century history that most people in this country, particularly politicians, would prefer to forget. The catalogue for 'Mentioned in Dispatches' described it as 'a group exhibition by visual artists who are also veteran personnel [and their family members and colleagues] of Australia's longest war and are culturally engaged in its myths and history'. References to the war were often fairly oblique, and viewers were allowed to form their own conclusions about what these objects mean to their makers.
Now that Saigon (the present Ho Chi Minh City) no longer exists and Hanoi is a place where young Australian artists are eager to go for studio/residency programs and not a place upon which Henry Kissinger would like to drop nuclear bombs, the war in Vietnam has ceased to be the hot subject it was in Australian art thirty-five years ago. Australian veterans of that war who came home to a population that did not want to know about their experiences now find that if they make art about it we do not much want to know about that either. Peter Daly, the organizer of this exhibition and several like it over the past ten years, has generally encountered resistance from institutions and funding bodies. This project was hastily put together to coincide with the Queensland Museum's showing of the travelling VietNam Voices exhibition and was dominated by his own works simply because of the need to gather enough to fill the space in the time available.
He describes the works as a way of questioning the experience of the war and its aftermath, without necessarily