You are Never Alone

The Australian Government Culture and Recreation Portal newsletter reminded me today that in 10 days time we observe Vietnam Veterans’ Day.

Vietnam Veterans’ Day, celebrated in Australia on 18 August each year, commemorates the Battle of Long Tan and those Australians who served during the Vietnam War and is an opportunity to remember those who did not come home.
The Vietnam War was the longest war Australia was ever involved in. Australian involvement in the Vietnam War was marked by controversy and significant levels of public opposition to conscription and concern about casualties. The Vietnam War was also the first war witnessed ‘live’ on television.

There is an excellent article available with an outline of the history of the Vietnam War, and links to all sorts of resources related to the topic.

You may not know that the Cultural and Recreation Portal is a partner in edna’s Distributed search. This search form enables users to search edna and ten other trusted repositories that contain well over 3.25 million resources between them.
Among these “trusted repositories” are ABC Online, ACER Research Online, AESharenet, ARROW, Australian Flexible Learning Framework, Culture and Recreation Portal, MERLOT, myfuture, Picture Australia, and the VOCED database.
The distributed search allows the user to choose the repositories to search, and gives up to 200 results for the search. As with all edna searches, the search will return consistent results every time it is run, unless new resources have been added to the repository. Here is the search for Vietnam Veterans.

Because of the consistent and predictable nature of the search results, edna searches are ideal for embedding in web pages. In addition the search results are available as an RSS feed. The long URLs of an edna search can be converted into a short URL using edna’s URL shortening service. Use of this service requires an edna login, and then URLs can then be generated for use in printed materials. The short URL for the Vietnam Veterans search is http://url.edna.edu.au/RkXS

And of course Vietnam Veteran’s Day is yet another of those events listed on the Australian Schools Calendar.
On the calendar for coming days in August are also the Olympics, the International Day of the World’s Indigenous People, the Fast of Tisha B’Av, International Youth Day, International Left Handers Day, the 40 Hour Famine, the announcement of the Children’s Book of the Year Awards, Children’s Book Week, National Science Week, National Glaucoma Week, Daffodil Day, Be an Angel Day, Freedom Day in the Northern Territory, Hearing Awareness Week, and Keep Australia Beautiful Week. August ends with Refugee and Migrant Sunday.