The Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia, Vol.8 No.

2, 2017

“Wars Don’t End When the Fighting is Over”1:

Adib Khan’s Homecoming and the Australian Literature of the Vietnam
War

Geoffrey V. Davis

Abstract: The Bangladeshi-Australian writer Adib Khan’s fourth novel Homecoming (2003)
marked a significant change of direction in the author’s work. No longer concerned to give
fictional representation to the diasporic experience which had preoccupied him since his own
migration to Australia in 1973, he now embarked on a work which addresses one of the most
controversial issues of his new country’s recent history, its involvement in the Vietnam War
and the traumatic consequences for those who fought in it. As an Asian-Australian writer
engaging with the legacy of the war, Khan offers an alternative view from a new perspective.
His novel presents a compelling psychological study of a veteran’s struggle to confront his
experience and reconstitute his identity. This article seeks to locate the novel within the wider
tradition of Australian war literature, to examine Khan’s representation of the war and its
aftermath for Australians and Vietnamese alike, and to identify the particular contribution
this Asian-Australian novelist has to make to central concerns of his adopted country.

Keywords: Adib Khan; Homecoming; Asian-Australian writing; Vietnam; war literature

“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield,
the second time in memory”
(Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies. Vietnam and the Memory of War 4)

“The shadows of Vietnam hover over us”

(Adib Khan, Kosmopolis 02 7)

Europeans, one may suppose, may not be particularly well informed about Australian military
history and may therefore be somewhat surprised to learn that, as one historian has written,
“Australia has been involved in more major conflicts for more years than any other industrial
nation” (Kent 155). The country was the first of the British colonies to take part in the wars
of the “old world;” Australians fought on the British side in the New Zealand land wars of
1863-1864;2 they saw action in the Sudan in 1885, and then in the Anglo-Boer War in South
Africa between 1899 and 1902. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 demonstrated
how dependent on Britain the country was, for, as the celebrated historian Manning Clark put
it, “as the British had declared war, Australia was therefore also at war” (442) and, since it
was London which determined quite where Australian forces were to be deployed, he added
cantankerously: “Australians were not makers of their own history” (450).

1
This is a phrase Frank’s Vietnamese wife Maria attributes to her father (Homecoming 68).
2
As reported by Peter Pierce (“Perceptions of the Enemy in Australian War Literature” 166).

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While thousands upon thousands of Australians volunteered for war service, neither they nor
the many enthusiastic supporters of the war suspected what lay in store for them. Not until
the numbers of the dead and wounded became known in Australia, did it become clear just
what was happening “on the other side of the earth” (Ward 165). Eight thousand Australians
were killed at Gallipoli in 1915 before defeat was conceded and the retreat ordered;3 a further
7,000 were to die on the Somme one year later. Continuing dire news from the European
front gave rise to criticism of the manner in which the war was being conducted by the
British. The heavy losses at Gallipoli and on the Somme were ascribed to inadequate
planning on the part of the British military; Australians soon began to doubt whether the
country should be sacrificing “all its finest young men on the altar of the British Empire”
(West 217). When the numbers of volunteers declined, the introduction of conscription was
proposed to deal with the problem, but it was rejected—after heated debate—in two
referenda. Nothing illustrated the division of the country more graphically than the extremely
tight result of the 1916 referendum (1,100,033 votes to 1,087,557).

The issue of conscription was less contentious during the Second World War, since the entry
of Japan into the war posed the first real threat of military action on Australian soil itself.
Although in the end this did not happen, Australia did witness naval encounters off its coast
for the first time; some harbours in the north-west of the country were bombed and Japanese
submarines did penetrate into Sydney Harbour. What the geopolitical circumstances of World
War Two changed—quite fundamentally—was “the time-honoured concept of complete
reliance on Britain” (Ward 188). In 1942, the fall of Singapore, long regarded as the
“impregnable pivot of Australian security” (Ward 190), led to the country taking an active
role in the war in the Pacific and forced it to introduce basic changes in its foreign and
defence policies by reorienting them towards an alliance with the United States. The
readiness of later Australian administrations to send troops to Korea in 1949 (Millar 62) and
to Vietnam in 1965 may be seen as an expression of the Australian desire to be regarded as a
“worthy ally” of the US (Burstall xxi).4 Since then, Australian troops have also seen action in
American-led coalitions in Afghanistan, where they have been active for the last fifteen years
(Williams), and Iraq, where they were involved in the attack to free Mosul from the so-called
Islamic State (Miranda).

***
Australian involvement in the Vietnam War began with the dispatching of thirty military
advisors to South Vietnam in 1962, where they formed what was known as the Australian
Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV). In April of 1965 the Liberal Prime Minister,
Robert Menzies, announced that he would commit Australian combat troops to fight
alongside the United States with the stated aim of “containing communist aggression” (Ham
5); in the following two months, the first contingent of eight hundred men was sent. At the
time a Morgan Gallup poll established that 56% of Australians were in favour of the country
participating in the war; many were not, however—and almost immediately opposition began
to form. The first arrests at an anti-war demonstration in Sydney took place in October of that
year. In March 1966 Harold Holt, who was a fervent admirer of US President Johnson,
succeeded Menzies, and promptly increased the Australian commitment. A further 4,500

3
Clark accordingly describes Gallipoli as a “sacred site” (461).
4
This would also adversely affect not only Australian relations with the other countries of Asia but
also the internal political stability of Australia herself, as witness the many demonstrations against the
deployment of conscripts in Vietnam (Cf. Kent 155).

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men, of whom, significantly, some 500 were conscripts, were sent to Vietnam. This decision
gave rise to further mass protest marches; the Seamen’s Union refused to load ships with
supplies for the troops (Ham 275; Doyle et al. 161). Throughout the period of their
deployment the Australians were stationed at Nui Dat in the Phuoc Tuy province of South
Vietnam. Their major engagement—the Battle of Long Tan—took place near there on 18
August 1966. As in the case of the First World War the issue of conscription then became
contentious. Although in November 1966 a poll had found that 68% of the population were in
favour of conscription and 37% approved of sending conscripts to Vietnam, an anti-
conscription campaign starting in the universities soon gathered pace.

By the end of 1967 Australia had 8,300 troops on active service. The war they were fighting
was, however, increasingly perceived as “unpopular and futile” (Pierce, “Australian and
American Literature of the Vietnam War” 111) and, by 1969, the Australians, disturbed by
US policies, were keen to withdraw. In April 1970 the withdrawal of the first battalion of
Australians was announced. This was followed by three successive anti-war Moratorium
marches, in each of which over 100,000 demonstrators took part. Aimed at securing the
withdrawal of Australian and all other foreign troops from Vietnam and at the repeal of the
National Service Act which had first permitted conscription for overseas service, the
Moratorium marches have been described as “the largest and most sustained public protest
movement in Australian history” (Ham 517). The last Australian troops finally left the
country in December 1971. For many of them, as Robin Gerster writes, “return to Australia
… was just as traumatic as the battle experience itself” (232). When Gough Whitlam came to
power as Labour Prime Minister in 1972, national service was ended. Over the whole course
of Australian participation in the war some 60,000 men had seen service in Vietnam; 520 of
them had been killed and some 3,000 wounded (Ham 663). In 1976, in the aftermath of the
war, the first Vietnamese boat people arrived in Australia.5 The so-called Welcome Home
parade for the troops who had served in the war did not take place until October 1987.

***
In view of Australia’s regular involvement in wars overseas, it is unsurprising that the
country has a long tradition of writing about war, both non-fictional and fictional. The former
category includes writing by war correspondents, the memoirs of participating soldiers and
the journals of prisoners of war, as well as official military histories. The latter includes such
varied work as the minor poetry which emerged from the Anglo-Boer War, the novels born of
the experience of active combatants in the First World War, the poetry and fiction of the
Second World War, the literature of protest against Australian participation in the Vietnam
War6 and the body of fiction which that war has generated—and continues to do.

With regard to the fictional writing just mentioned, there is an important distinction to be
drawn between writing by former active combatants, which often appeared in the immediate
post-war period and was largely inspired by personal experience of the war, and fiction by
non-combatants, published considerably later. Each new generation must form an image of
the wars that have shaped its times and must assess the way in which those wars have
impacted on their own society. Conscious of how much has remained hidden and is gradually
being forgotten, it must seek to grasp the nature and significance of events of which it has had

5
Cf. Nam Le, “The Boat” in The Boat (2008).
6
There is a useful overview in The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature. 2nd ed. Oxford UP,
1994, pp. 785-796.

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no direct experience and can often hardly begin to imagine. David Malouf, speaking of the
First World War, formulated this statement that would apply equally well to subsequent wars:

I assume that the obsession of my own generation with the First World War, the
attempt to fill the gap in experience with poems and novels that were not written
then but have been now, is a way of giving us the experience imaginatively, so
that we can at last assimilate it and use it. (“Statement” 267)

Among works which fulfill that purpose are some of the most significant in Australian
literature, such as Malouf’s own Johnno (1975), Fly Away Peter (1982), and his The Great
World (1990), for example, or George Johnston’s My Brother Jack (1964), Randolph Stow’s
The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965), and Roger McDonald´s 1915 (1979). Such works
written in opposition to war, a long tradition in Australian literature, have been influential in
shaping the attitudes of subsequent generations of Australians to their country’s history.7

***
Australian participation alongside the United States in the Vietnam War has generated a great
deal of writing, military,8 and historical, much of it highly critical of Australian government
policies. It would seem, too, that some of the fiction published subsequent to the war, which
does not appear at first sight to be concerned with Vietnam at all, might well be regarded as
pertinent to it. Thus one critic has suggested that the authors of works set during the First
World War, such as 1915 and Fly Away Peter, “may have chosen the divided, angry and
anguished climate of that time as their setting as a means of dealing indirectly with
Australia’s part in the Vietnam War, where similar social schisms greeted Australian
involvement” (Dennis et al.). Likewise, it has been suggested that “the Vietnam War is the
hidden subject” of several novels set in Southeast Asia, such as Christopher Koch’s The Year
of Living Dangerously (1978) and Blanche d’Alpuget’s Turtle Beach (1981) (Dennis et al.).
Besides, the Australian literature of the Vietnam War itself continues to grow. To give an
idea of its great variety and of the kind of tradition Khan has situated himself within I want to
refer briefly to several representative works.9

7
It is perhaps no coincidence that several of them appeared during or in the wake of the Vietnam
War, since that conflict, it has been suggested, also generated much interest in its predecessors. Cf.
Jay Winter, “Producing the Television Series The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth
Century,” Profession 1999 (New York, Modern Language Association, 1999, pp. 15-26). Winter
suggests that “the appearance of a rich historical literature on the 1914-1918 conflict was in large part
an echo of the Vietnam War” (18).
8
Among the military histories are Gregory Pemberton, All the Way: Australia’s Road to Vietnam (St
Leonards NSW, Allen & Unwin, 1987); John Murphy, Harvest of Fear: A History of Australia’s
Vietnam War (St Leonards NSW, Allen & Unwin, 1993); Ian McNeill, To Long Tan: The Australian
Army and the Vietnam War 1950-1966 (St Leonards NSW, Allen & Unwin in association with the
Australian War Memorial, 1995); Chris Coulthard-Clark, The RAAF in Vietnam (St Leonards NSW,
Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1995); and Paul Ham, Vietnam: The
Australian War (Sydney, HarperCollins 2007).
9
I am not myself aware of novels written by Vietnamese migrants in Australia which deal directly
with the war. However, there are two articles on Vietnamese writing that have been published by
Australian scholars. Both predictably run up against language problems. Michael Jacklin, in his article
“Southeast Asian writing in Australia: the case of Vietnamese writing,” assumes, no doubt rightly,
that few Australians have any knowledge of literature in Vietnamese written in Australia, regrets that
such scholarly work as exists on the subject tends to focus exclusively on the small body of work

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An important early, and very powerful, collection of anti-war writing edited by Shirley Cass
and others is We Took their Orders and Are Dead: An Anti-War Anthology, whose title is
taken from A. D. Hope’s poem “Inscription for any War” (89) and which brought together
contributions by 77 writers. One of these is Bruce Dawe, who is represented by a moving
threnody which, like Khan’s novel, bears the title “Home-coming” (74-75). The first novel of
consequence to be published was Morris West’s The Ambassador (1965). It takes the form of
a first-person narrative by an American ambassador (based on Henry Cabot Lodge) who was
posted to South Vietnam during the war against the Viet Cong and is essentially a
psychological study of a politician attempting to come to grips with the cultural and religious
traditions as well as the complex political realities of the country. The novel traces his
struggle with his conscience, as he is caught between a myriad policy options, inveigled into
abandoning support for the president of the country, whom he respects, in the cause of
cynical diplomatic real politic, and ultimately has to recognize his own moral responsibility
and that of the US in destroying the country.

Both John Rowe’s novel Count Your Dead: A Novel of Vietnam, which appeared in 1968, and
William Nagle’s The Odd Angry Shot, published in 1975 and later filmed, were written by
Australians who had actually served in Vietnam. Rowe vividly portrays the realities of the
war through the eyes of an American economics graduate whose concern to rebuild Vietnam
is frustrated by the military’s policy of wholesale destruction. The novel mounts a sustained
critique of American policy in Vietnam, particularly through frequent heated debates between
the protagonists on such issues as the ruthless violence of the American forces, the poor
prospects for reconstruction, and the strained policy differences between Australians and
Americans. An especially memorable display of American arrogance is the moment when
one of their soldiers characterizes Australian dependence on the US with the remark: “If we
wanted Australia, we could take or destroy it tomorrow. Christ, what are you compared to us.
You’re not a country, you’re a tennis court” (113).

Nagle’s The Odd Angry Shot is quite different. A fast-paced, episodic, first-person narrative,
frequently bawdy and full of gruesome descriptions of the violence of combat, the novel
traces the careers of a group of “mates” on a tour of duty to Vietnam with the Special Air
Services. Not for nothing have they been described as “caricatures of the Ugly Australian
abroad” (Gerster 230). Surviving through humour and mateship, full of contempt for the
girlfriends who leave them, the university students who demonstrate against the war, and “the
wharfies back home [who] have refused to load our supply ships” (82), they appear to have
no respect for authority and no sympathy for the Vietnamese, they are aware that the war is
being lost, they feel they “have been betrayed for a political lie” (93), and return home where

written in English, and notes that although multicultural writing has recently gained acceptance in
Australia, writing in languages other than English produced in Australia is hardly being noticed at all.
The effect of this is that migrant writing is only regarded as Australian literature when it is written in
English. Catherine Cole and Marsha Berry, in their article “History and Postmemory in Contemporary
Vietnamese Literature,” wonder to what extent the Vietnam War has affected the contemporary
literary practice of Vietnam and the diaspora. They note that only “a relatively small number of non-
Vietnamese Australian fiction writers have written about Vietnam” (3) and attribute this interestingly
to a desire to forget rather than to commemorate the war. Devoting their article largely to issues of
postmemory, they engage hardly at all with Vietnamese writing whether of the country itself or of the
Australian diaspora.

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their only options seem reduced to “War Service Homes, … second-hand Holdens” (97),
harlots and drink (see 98).

The plot of Gabrielle Lord’s 1998 thriller The Sharp End largely derives from the experiences
of Australian soldiers both in Vietnam and at home after their return, so that the book
schematizes the traumatic psychological effects of the war on soldiers, the constant
recurrence of memories of the war, the refusal to talk about their experiences, the harassment
wives suffered from anti-war protesters while their men were away, and the broken marriages
that often ensued after the soldiers’ return. Lord’s detective and murderer are both Vietnam
veterans, “two country boys” who “went to the Vietnam war together” (58) as friends and
return estranged due to an event that took place over there, which is only revealed at the end
of the book. Harry, the detective, haunted as he is by the “ghosts” (71) of his memories, has
never spoken about them. Nor has he ever revealed anything about his friend Angus’s brutal
rape of a dying Vietnamese woman, which he witnessed. Angus, who turns out to be the
murderer, has returned to Australia suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Like Khan,
Lord encapsulates the brutalization of war in the horrific image of a rape and uses its
concealment and subsequent disclosure as the central motivation for a postwar struggle for
justice.10

My final example is The Rainy Season (2009) by Myfanwy Jones, an author of a later
generation than those previously mentioned. Jones worked as a journalist in Vietnam in the
mid-1990s, which accounts for one of the distinguishing—and perhaps redeeming—features
of the novel: the attention to authentic local detail based on intimate knowledge of the
country as it was in the 1990s. Ella, the 25-year-old narrator whose sole knowledge of the
country has come, typically for her generation, through movies, goes to Vietnam twenty-five
years after her father in an attempt to discover what had happened to him as a soldier there
and to understand what caused him to leave his family four years after his return. As it turns
out, her mother, now an alcoholic, had asked him to leave since he “was very hurt in that war,
…—his spirit. Something inside him was damaged” (300). This novel pays particular
attention to the negative reception which the veterans returning after the war met with. Ella,
for example, recalls her father’s opinion that

they sent them to war before they were old enough to vote, then gave them no
way to come home … They thought they’d come back heroes, but instead they
became our national shame: heartless and depraved, the papers said; raping,
mutilating, village-torching, baby killers. (179)

She remembers, too, watching the Welcome March of 1987 on television, hoping to see her
father:

After fourteen years of being shunned by their fellow Australians, vilified by the
press, excluded from the RSL [Returned Servicemen’s League]—because
Vietnam was not a real war and so they were not real soldiers—here, at last, the
Vietnam veterans were being brought in from the cold. (233)

***

10
Donna Coates in “Coming Home: The Return of the (Australian Vietnam War) Soldier” discusses
Lord’s novel and is useful on its representation of trauma. She does not refer to Homecoming,
however.

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That the Bangladeshi-Australian writer Adib Khan should write a novel which concerns itself
with the Vietnam War and its Australian aftermath was not perhaps to be expected. Khan,
who moved to Australia from Bangladesh in 1973 to study at Monash University after the
universities had been closed in his own country, and subsequently became a teacher of
English and History in Ballarat, did not begin writing until he was over 40, but he achieved
immediate success when his novel Seasonal Adjustments won the Commonwealth Writers
Prize for First Book in 1995. In his early novels and in his published essays he has been much
concerned with the themes of diaspora and identity, not least in relation to his own
experience. Recognizing the “claims [on him] of four different countries,”—India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and Australia—he sees himself as having multiple identities and is unable to
think of himself “in terms of a single tradition” (“In Janus’ Footsteps”). Aware that he was
“destined to occupy a kind of no-man’s-land, wedged between polarized cultures,” he
acknowledges what he terms the “cultural dualism” created by literary influences from East
and West (“In Janus’ Footsteps”). In seeking to characterize his own identity Khan has often
had recourse to terms such as “splintered” and “fragmented,” as when he referred to “the
cultural splintering, which results from an expatriate’s experience of dislocation” (“Diasporic
Homes” 11), and attributed his “splintered life” to his elitist, Christian, English-language
education in Bangladesh (“In Janus’ Footsteps”).

As a writer of Asian origin, Khan is naturally interested in Australian-Asian relations. He has

noted with approval that “there is a school of thought that advocates a greater recognition and
a strengthening of Australia’s ties with Asia” and that “fiction has not been slow to respond
to this idea” (“Trends in Australian Fiction” 7). In his view Brian Castro’s After China and
Alex Miller’s The Ancestor Game have, for example, demonstrated that it is possible to
bridge the gap between East and West. He adds:

Our imaginative engagement with Asia is finding broader and more subtle
perspectives that are not based on contrasts and simplistic conclusions about a
superior civilization, but one that seeks to present the interaction between
different cultures, between characters with different values and the necessity of
understanding Australia in its regional context. (“Trends” 8)

One might perhaps regard his fourth novel Homecoming (2003) as a step in that direction.

***
In 2001 Khan described what he termed “a slightly alien scenario.” He was, he said,

in a state of transition […] planning a novel set entirely in Australia, not about
migrants, but about a white Australian, a Vietnam veteran, troubled by guilt and
concerned by his lack of responsibility during the war, seeking atonement through
art and a commitment to a relationship with a partially paralysed woman. (“In
Janus’ Footsteps”)

This novel would become Homecoming. It would represent a significant change of direction
in the author’s work, for here Khan is no longer primarily concerned to give fictional
representation to the diasporic experience which had preoccupied him since his own
migration to Australia, but would embark on a work which addresses one of the most
controversial issues of the country’s recent history, its involvement in the Vietnam War and

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the traumatic consequences for those who fought in it. As one critic suggested, with this
novel Khan was moving into the mainstream:

The new novel reveals no trace of his interest in Indian and Pakistani culture, and
only a minimal concern with the displacement experienced by migrants. Instead
the displacement at issue in Homecoming is that of a native Australian who
cannot fit into the culture around him. (Matthews 52)

Khan was well aware that this was new thematic territory for him, but seemingly had no
qualms about his ability to engage successfully with an Australian theme. “If a Japanese
could have written a novel about an English butler” he commented (with reference to
Ishiguro), “then a Bangladeshi can fictionalize a white Australian’s experience” (“In Janus’
Footsteps”).

As an Asian-Australian writer Khan was here engaging with the legacy of a war of which he
obviously had no personal experience.11 He had, however, been exposed to the effects of war,
since he had lived through the war of liberation of 1971 which resulted in East Pakistan
becoming the independent republic of Bangladesh. That war, which he described as “savage
and brutalizing” (“Strength on Parallel Roads”), had impacted greatly on his own life. As he
commented to a Bangladeshi newspaper: “The beginning of my fractured existence [was] the
war of liberation and its long-term consequences [which] hastened the splintering process”
(“Cruising: A Writer’s Journey”). This assessment is borne out by his returning to the
experience of that war in two of his novels, Seasonal Adjustments and Spiral Road, the
former published in 1994, i.e. before Homecoming, and the latter in 2007, i.e. after it. In both
novels Khan writes passionately and sympathetically of the consequences of war and the
psychological effects on those who took part. He presents characters who struggle to come to
terms with traumatic guilt caused by their actions in the war. In Seasonal Adjustments, in a
sequence of events which seems to prefigure the later Homecoming, Iftiqar speaks for the
first time of his role in it. He recalls how he shot a young man during the conflict, how the
action had changed him, how the war had made him a “stranger to his old life” (269), had
turned him into “a moral pauper” (273), had drained him emotionally and had led to the
break-up of his relationship with Shabana. In Spiral Road Masud recalls how he had
accidentally brought about the deaths of civilians and how this experience had left him
feeling “stained and dirty” (121), and ultimately transformed him.

***
Homecoming, which is dedicated to “Australians who went to fight in Vietnam and came
away to discover the war within themselves,” tells the story of one such soldier, Martin
Godwin, who served in the Vietnam War and returned to Australia displaying symptoms of
post-traumatic stress disorder. Now in his fifties, he is still haunted by memories of the war
which insert themselves into his everyday life; he suffers panic attacks, is prone to outbursts
of violence, and is plagued by self-doubt and feelings of emptiness. Having lost his Christian
faith and aware of his vulnerability, he hardly knows what to do with his life and tries to
manage his predicament by withdrawing into solitude. He is earning his living as a
handyman, can barely make ends meet, regularly consults a psychiatrist whose advice he
does not heed, and although he is intellectually gifted, he regularly fails the university courses

11
In the “Acknowledgments” he records his debt to “the two Vietnam veterans, who prefer not to be
named, for their narratives that sparked the ideas for this novel.”

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he signs up to. Satisfactory personal relationships, other than with his erstwhile mates from
Vietnam, elude him. Unable to communicate anything of his wartime experiences to his
family, he proves incapable of resuming a meaningful relationship with his increasingly
bewildered wife Moira, who divorces him (see 58), and with his son Frank, who cannot deal
with his silence (see 185) and attempts suicide. Martin starts a tentative relationship with a
younger woman called Nora, but because of the impotence which has afflicted him since the
war, he is unable to consummate it. Nora never asks him about his experience in Vietnam but
comforts him when he has nightmares about it. When she suffers a stroke, she is
institutionalized and declines into a mental world of her own. Martin returns to his solitary
life, paying her only occasional visits.

If Martin’s life takes an unexpected turn for the better, this is largely due to two formative
experiences: the first is the interest in Buddhism aroused in him by his visit to an ashram his
son Frank had spoken of; the second is his meeting Frank’s Vietnamese partner Maria who
describes herself as “born in a Buddhist tradition” (190). Martin’s spontaneous visit to the
ashram plays a crucial role in his development. Having previously been dismissive of what he
regarded as his son’s dabbling in Buddhism (45), Martin enters the place with some
trepidation and Khan is careful to sketch his evident discomfort, both mental and physical. At
first the ashram proves not to be “what he had imagined” (205); he is skeptical of the
institution’s ability to fulfill its professed objective of “promoting peace and harmony, both
individually and globally” (205), so much so that he regrets taking a detour to visit the place.
But when he joins a couple of sessions being run by a former academic from Chicago, he
soon finds himself “trapped in a world of unexplored ideas” (208). Unsettled by what he
hears he begins to participate. While he acknowledges that his own values have been shaped
by Christianity, a religion he no longer practices, he comes to see the relevance to his own
situation of the American’s teaching on the relationship of personal misfortune to universal
experience shared by all humanity. The American’s decision to forsake a prime university
position and successful clinical practice in favour of a life of contemplation impresses Martin
deeply, confronting him as it does with an example of how it is possible to reinvent oneself
and begin life anew.

During the years after his return to Australia Martin attempts to shut out his memories of the
war, but is regularly disturbed by flashbacks evoking the sounds of Vietnam and an
unspecified “tropical afternoon” there (12), by dreams of episodes which happened during his
war service, and by nightmares full of “images of agonized faces and burning landscapes”
(96). He takes showers in the middle of the night as a form of “ritualistic cleansing” (59). As
an art lover he sees his own panic reflected in Munch’s famous painting “The Scream” (20)
or in Albert Tucker’s painting “Army Shower,” which prompts him to wonder, “Did Tucker
know about the burden of memories that could not be exorcised?” (155).

Throughout the novel the reader wonders what it is that Martin is hiding, what trauma is
connected with that “part of an afternoon from the Vietnam days” (58) which he is afraid to
reveal to his psychiatrist. When he receives a visit from Ken Davis, one of his company from
Vietnam, who is now seeking political office and who seeks to pressurize him by appealing to
the loyalty of mateship not to reveal something he had done during the war, Martin in a fit of
revulsion decides to tell all to his friend Colin. And everything that had “festered” (103)
inside him since Vietnam flows out—the torching of a village, his witnessing the rape and
murder of a young woman, his own cowardice in fleeing the scene rather than trying to
prevent the worst from happening, his failure to report the incident, and his shame that
“everything important had deserted him at a time when he needed his humanity—love,

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generosity … compassion” (228). That single incident is the source of the guilt which has
never left him. The novel ends with him speaking out about Ken’s actions in Vietnam (see
260) and fetching Nora back from the home to the house he has bought outside Daylesford,
not far from his son and Maria, where he resolves to look after her.

***
Martin’s experience in Vietnam is thus the source of the psychological problems he has to
deal with in later life. Before he left on war service, he had had no understanding of war; it
had been merely “a distant occurrence involving people with whom he had no connection”
(31). By the end of his tour of duty he has gone through a series of horrific experiences
beginning with his own first accidental killing of a Vietnamese girl soldier (see 146, 198) and
the violent deaths of his mates Barry and Stan, who got blown to pieces before his eyes (see
10, 97, 147), continuing with his reluctant participation in the torching of a Vietnamese
village (see 10-11), and concluding with the gang-rape and murder of a village girl (see
224ff) by four of his mates. It is the image of the girl who was raped which returns frequently
to haunt him and to remind him that he could have prevented the horror if he had had the
courage to do so (see 9, 62, 85, 260).

Apart from the psychological effects of the war on an individual exemplified by the case of
Martin, Khan also reminds us of some of the more far-reaching consequences of military
conflict, namely those due to chemical warfare. Martin’s research into the effects of the war
on troops elicits a response from an academic who has investigated the effects of spraying
100,000 tons of dioxin over most of South Vietnam, but who is nevertheless unable to reach
any satisfactory conclusion as to whether such exposure can cause depression or physical
abnormalities in later life (see 105-106). This misguided opinion is later shown to be false
when Ron’s second child is “born without fingers” and the horrified Ron attributes this to the
fact that “we brought something back with us! … Something inside us” (45). This tragic
development fuels Martin’s concern that his own exposure to chemical warfare in Vietnam
may have contributed to Frank’s depression and may yet affect the health of Maria’s baby
(see 79, 192).

***
The representation of Vietnam, the Vietnamese and their culture is essential to the conception
of the novel. The Vietnamese appear both as victims in the wartime scenes in their own
country and as migrants in the peacetime scenes set in Australia. Martin’s encounters with
them during the war unsettle him, and not just because they are ostensibly his “enemy.”
When his company enters a village in search of men, they find only an old woman who in
spite of their weaponry defies them with her lack of fear and her unwavering stare, and who
grins at them “as if she were privy to some secret knowledge far more precious than anything
that they wished to know” (10). The mysterious words she addresses to them seem to express
that knowledge:

The angry eyes of the dragon are rings of white fire. It will follow you from
behind—under the sea, across land and sky, burrow into your being, live inside
you, nibbling for the rest of your life. You too will know what it is to be hunted.
(9, italics in the original)

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The old woman’s prediction unnerves the soldiers who go on to commit the rape in the next
village they come to, but it also foreshadows Martin’s later trauma, which is confirmed in one
of his subsequent dreams when he hears a Vietnamese voice saying, “War with us over …
You kill no more Vietnamese. Now you fight yourself … Inside” (38; cf. 189). The
Vietnamese villagers themselves are described as patient and unafraid: “Accustomed to
foreign men invading their homes” (225), they are cunning enough “to offer [them] harmless
intelligence, [to] appear innocent and [to] give the impression of being cooperative” (225).
They are also rightly confident that the foreigners would ultimately tire and go home.

The moral strength and resilience displayed by the Vietnamese people is evident too in the
Australian scenes of the novel. In a surprising twist of the plot Khan introduces Frank’s
partner Maria. From the name Martin expects her to be Italian, and he is somewhat taken
aback when he encounters a young lady reading the business section of The Age, who turns
out to be Vietnamese, whose parents were among the first boat people to come to Australia,
and who was herself “born on a boat” (67). She nevertheless feels secure in her Vietnamese-
Australian identity and, echoing a constant theme in Khan’s work, she accepts that she will
“always live as a fractured being” (194). The confidence with which she and her father have
faced their new lives in Australia while continuing to recognize Vietnam as their home, as a
“sacred place” (164), makes a great impression on Martin who, unlike them, has come to
regard himself as “a stranger in a strange land” (69). It is above all the strength they derive
from their Buddhist beliefs which has helped them to come to terms with their experience of
exile and diaspora. They exemplify a life lived on Buddhist principles and they are able to
impart their principle of acceptance to Martin through the force of example. “As a child,”
Maria tells him, “I learned that when there are difficulties that can’t be easily resolved, you
accommodate them in your life instead of struggling and fighting as though they are enemies.
That way problems become a part of every day’s landscape” (193). As Mercanti points out,
“it is through Maria’s honesty and her resilience in surmounting the consequences of war that
Martin’s quest for self-acceptance is … encouraged” (6). Martin’s growing friendship with
her, his conversations with her clear-sighted father Nguyen, and his respect Maria’s values
both in her own family and in her relationship with his son Frank, prove instrumental in his
healing. Indeed, it is one of the greatest attributes—and ironies—of this novel that it is the
Vietnamese who prove instrumental in helping to heal a Vietnam veteran.

***
A major focus of interest with Homecoming lies in the way Khan, a writer of Southeast Asian
origin, engages with such essentially Australian themes as the country’s participation in the
Vietnam War and the often terrible experiences of the soldiers who returned home to a
country that wanted only to forget the war they had fought.12 There is much to be found in
Australian literature that is familiar in Khan’s choice of topic. Many of the themes he
addresses are commonplaces to be found in some of the other Australian war novels which
focus on homecoming, for example the melancholy and anxiety at the prospect of returning
(in Nagle’s The Odd Angry Shot); the inability of returned soldiers to talk about their
experiences (in Jones’s The Rainy Season); the focus on their postwar psychological
problems and trauma (in Lord’s The Sharp End); the impact of the war on family life (in
Johnston’s My Brother Jack); the marital strife that ensues (in Jones’s The Rainy Season); the
inability to form new relationships (in Stow’s Merry-Go-Round in the Sea); the failure to

12
Ham has an informative but depressing chapter on the uncomprehending and often abusive
reception which the soldiers met with on their return and their reactions to it. Cf. Ham 560-573.

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reintegrate into Australian society (in Stow’s Merry-Go-Round in the Sea); the long term
consequences of crimes such as rape committed during the war (in Lord’s The Sharp End);
the struggle with one’s conscience and the burden of moral responsibility for one’s actions
during the war (in West’s The Ambassador).

Homecoming is a novel of memory which skillfully interweaves past and present, while
leaving unexplained until the very end the cause of Martin’s trauma and the unexplained
references to the “girl” which occasionally surface in the text. It is remarkable how faithfully
the sequence of flashbacks, dreams and nightmares and their sudden interventions in Martin’s
consciousness reenacts the trauma of a returned soldier. It is noticeable, too, how Khan, like
other authors who were not combatants themselves and whose concern lies in the aftermath
of war in Australian society, reduces the actual scenes of war in the novel to the essential
minimum necessary to motivate the later trauma. A further feature of the novel is Khan’s
reworking of some of the themes of his other fiction and essays, particularly his interest in
flawed characters: “For me,” he has said, “flaws in people are far more interesting and offer
greater scope for exploration in fiction than virtues” (“Cruising: A Writer’s Journey”).
Homecoming offers examples of several such characters. “Vietnam,” Frank says, “is like an
archaeological dig. The deeper you go, the more you unearth” (179) and the novel would
seem to confirm that. Indeed, a major feature of the book is Khan’s particularly sympathetic
approach to Vietnam and the Vietnamese. He is sensitive to the cultural and religious
differences between Vietnamese and Australians, as we have seen. To the extent that it
concerns itself with the situation of Vietnamese erstwhile boat people in Australia and their
relationship to their homeland, it is in part also a novel of the diaspora. The Vietnamese
presence in Australia is portrayed very positively and it is, of course, they who play a
significant role in Martin’s healing process and self-discovery. Khan convincingly portrays
Martin’s somewhat stumbling steps towards reconciling with them as well as the Buddhist
belief which sustains them.

In as far as it is about a war, Homecoming is also, we should remember, an anti-war novel in

the Australian tradition, a work which offers a very clear condemnation of war, of the
brutalization and descent into barbarism that it entails, and of what Ron calls his “failure to
remain human” (129). At several points in the novel Khan introduces Martin’s fellow soldier
and poetry lover, Colin, who has written a memoir about his experiences in Vietnam for
which he has been unable to find a publisher. Martin dismisses the project out of hand:
“There are already too many books about Vietnam” (21), he says. Anyone who has worked
on the topic may be inclined to agree with him, but perhaps with Homecoming Khan has
proved him wrong.

Works Cited
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Castro, Brian. After China. St Leonards NSW, Allen & Unwin, 1992.
Clark, Manning. A History of Australia. Abridged by Michael Cathcart. London, Chatto &
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Coates, Donna, “Coming Home: The Return of the (Australian Vietnam War) Soldier.”
Southerly, vol. 65, no. 2, 2005, pp. 105-117.

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Cole, Catherine and Marsha Berry. “History and Postmemory in Contemporary Vietnamese
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Ham, Paul. Vietnam: The Australian War. Sydney, HarperCollins, 2007.
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Geoffrey Davis, MA (Oxon.), Dr.phil (Aachen), Dr.habil. (Essen), has taught at universities
in Austria, France, Germany and Italy and held research fellowships at Cambridge
University, Curtin University (Australia) and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas
at Austin. He wrote his doctorate in German studies on Arnold Zweig in der DDR and his
post-doctoral dissertation (Habilitation) on Voices of Justice and Reason: Apartheid and
beyond in South African Literature. He has been actively associated with the Bhasha
Research Centre in Baroda, India for the past twelve years. His most recent co-edited books
are Performing Identities: The Celebration of Indigeneity (2015) and The Language Loss of
the Indigenous (2016). He is co-editor of Cross/Cultures: Readings in the Post/Colonial
Literatures and Cultures in English and of the African studies journal Matatu. He is a past
chair of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) and
of its European branch.
Email: [email protected]

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