Wounded Country

With the end of apartheid and the exciting, but elusive, advent of a new nation, South Africa is witness to the emergence of a new generation of oral historians whose aim is to develop a broader, more inclusive, and culturally sensitive understanding of the South African past. In a country still wounded by a legacy of racial discrimination, the retrieving of oral memories is a task more urgent than ever. Oral History in a Wounded Country shows how the cultural, political, socio-economic, and intellectual evolutions - that gave birth to South Africa as we know it today - affect the oral history process. It will help practitioners, whether they use oral history as one technique among others to gain a better knowledge of the past or envisage oral history as an academic discipline in its own right, to reflect critically on their practice and find better ways of handling the interview process. The challenge is to appreciate the complexity of South Africa's diverse histories, while being attentive to the dynamics of the interview and their effect on both interviewers' and interviewees' sense of identity.

Vietnam was often called a “teenager’s war.” The average age was 19.2, so in the main, the War was fought by 17, 18, 19 and 20 year olds barely out of high school and often without the income, intelligence, inclination, or focus to attend college. For everyone, the draft loomed large in our futures, so you could choose your branch of service or let the draft decide for you. This was the 60’s. Fresh from sock hops and college freshman mixers, young men found themselves in a fight for their lives, from the Delta to the DMZ, on animal trails, numbered hills and in remote jungle outposts. Teenagers witnessed the unspeakable carnage of war while trying to understand the collision of emotions and insult to the senses that is combat. Thousands died there and many thousands more were wounded and maimed. So the hell of combat was replaced by the painful recovery in a military hospital. For me and thousands of others it was Great Lakes Naval Hospital at Great Lakes, Illinois. For Self and Country follows my many months of recovery along with the stories of the brave young men who surrounded me and sustained me with friendship, uncommon humor, and courage. This is a story of family, young love, and the magnificent care administered by the Navy doctors, nurses and revered Corpsmen. Great Lakes was a place of great pain but also recovery, not just from the physical damage we sustained but also the unseen emotional injuries everyone endured but rarely talked about. We helped each other in our recovery by talking to each other about our wartime experiences and how we would need to cope outside the insulated and protected hospital. Most of us had no expectation of surviving Vietnam; now that we had we were unsure what place we would have in civilian life.

Like many Australians, I looked on with horror as images of a million dead fish swamped the media and consumed the news cycle. I resolved to dig deeper. The Murray–Darling Basin is under threat. This vast and spectacular geographical region, covering one million square kilometres from central Queensland to South Australia, has been exploited for nearly 200 years. Soil erosion, sand drifts, dust storms, salinity, algal blooms, threatened native flora and fauna, the drying out of internationally recognised wetlands and steadily worsening droughts have repeatedly brought large parts of the Basin to its knees. In Wounded Country, award-winning author Quentin Beresford investigates the complex history of Australia’s largest and most important river system. Waves of farmers exploited the region’s potential, with little consideration for the environmental consequences. Dispossession and marginalisation denied local First Nations people their lands and European settlers the Indigenous cultural knowledge to manage the Basin sustainably. Instead, we’ve had ‘nation-building’ irrigation schemes and agricultural enterprises promoted by politicians focused on short-term profits and a development-at-all-costs approach. Expert advice and warnings about long-term environmental effects have been continually sidelined. We’re now at a point of reckoning. How can we save the once mighty Murray–Darling? ‘One of the most important books to emerge in recent decades concerning both Australia's dangerous environmental mismanagement and the indivisible plunder of Indigenous society.’ — Charles Massy

This philosophical investigation into state violence and mourning in twenty-first-century Mexico weaves together personal essay and literary theory, giving voice to the political experience of collective pain.