TWO weeks before Paul Haw left his home town of Boort for the jungles of Vietnam in 1968 he made one of the most important purchases of his life.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
“My father said ‘they’re going to take a Minolta camera to the moon, so it must be the best, so let’s go to Bendigo and buy one’, so we did,” he said.
For the next 12 months Gunner Haw used the Minolta to document his experience of war.
“I had it in my webbing, and so whenever I saw the opportunity to take a photo, I took it,” he said.
"When war incidents are happening you haven't got your camera out at all so I didn't just take photos of soldiers, I actually took photos of children going to school and little things like that in everyday life."
Mr Haw said many soldiers took cameras away to war with them, but his prints were among the few to survive.
"When I was over there I used to send them to Kodak to get developed and they'd send them back to us in Vietnam and straight away I'd pack them up and send them back to my parents in Australia because if you left them out they used to go mouldy with the heat, so I was very fortunate that I had the common sense to do that," he said.
Now the photographs are on display at St John of God hospital until May 15 in the exhibition Vietnam Framed.
Entry is by gold coin donation.