HISTORIANS sometimes refer to Australia's involvement in the North-South Korea conflict in the 1950s as the “forgotten war”. To entire generations these days, however, that period is not merely forgotten; it is completely unknown.
The little many Australians do know revolves mostly around the characters ‘Hawkeye’ and ‘Hotlips’ and their surgical-tent colleagues in the US TV comedy series M*A*S*H.
In reality, for three years Australian soldiers fought under the United Nations flag to help defend the southern half of that country from what it – and the broader democratic world – viewed as communism’s relentless expansion.
Oddly, in half a century dominated by books about two world wars and Vietnam, few have been published to record Australia’s military participation in Korea.
One brand-new exception is a family biography by Sydney journalist Louise Evans, whose uncle was transferred from occupational duties in Japan to the front line on the neighbouring Korean Peninsula.
Evans’ book begins where many traditional stories end: with the death of its hero. In Passage to Pusan, the killing of Private Vincent Joseph Healy in March 1951 leaves a chronic wound in the heart of his struggling working-class mother and siblings and drives Thelma Healy to steel herself for a harrowing personal pilgrimage in which she retraces her late son’s movements by sea a decade later to finally lay flowers on his grave. In reconstructed and stabilised post-war Pusan, ‘Thellie’ is reunited at last with her beloved eldest boy, observing at the same time the state of a region still battling to recover from bitter fighting.
This text and its accompanying images puts into context not only one but three wars in Asia, set against Australia’s economic and social circumstances of those times, describing in bare-bones detail the confronting everyday life of the Healy family in suburban Brisbane and the upbringing that prompted three brothers from a single household to enlist for army service.