A 2014 paper by Chris Dixon in the Australian Journal of Politics And History is devoted to arguing that the claims that Australian soldiers engaged Vietnam were frequently spat at and abused when they returned home are exaggerated - they were not frequent occurrences. The recent Mark Dapin book on the experiences of Australian conscripts, Nashos, takes a similar line on the claims of being spat at and abused - that they were largely exaggerated. Instead there were welcome home parades for returned servicemen which were widely reported on at the time by the media, which generally did not mention incidents of crowd abuse (and the newspapers likely would have reported on if it had occurred, what with conflict selling papers).

It's also fair to say that the topic is controversial, politically - Dixon points to Mervyn F. Bendle in the right-wing Australian journal Quadrant having a good rant about left-wing academic historians in their ivory towers who are simply ignoring what it was really like. As the Quadrant example suggests, the topic is something of a political football, tied to right-wing/left-wing beliefs about patriotism and its appropriateness and ethics.

Overall, Dixon argues that the idea of Australian Vietnam Veterans were spat on and abused is strongly related to attempts by soldiers to find meaning in their war experiences by finding an emotionally resonant narrative. In particular, the idea that they were spat on and abused is related to a narrative that 'the war was lost at home' - that the war could have been won (i.e., that there was a point to all their blood, sweat and tears in the first place), except for that there was too much dissent fostered by anti-war protesters, and that as a result Australian politicians were forced into bad decisions. This narrative allows the veterans to feel that they were honourable and that their contributions weren't entirely in vain from the start. The person spitting, Dixon also notes, is almost always female, and Dixon argues that the power of the imagery of being spat upon by an ungrateful public is tied up in the narrative to military-influenced notions of masculinity. Altogether, this is understandably a powerful, emotional narrative amongst a set of people whose identity is often tied up in their national service experiences, not least because many veterans of course have PTSD related to their experiences, and because the occurrence of PTSD has been tied to the way the traumatic event is viewed in society. And this narrative, argues Dixon, has distorted memories.

Dapin argues that both the pro-war right and the anti-war left like to overstate the prominence and effectiveness of the protests for their own reason - the anti-war left liked to promote its own size and effectiveness (despite the evidence mostly suggesting it was inconsequential in influencing political decisions related to the war), while the pro-war right likes to use the left's lack of patriotism as an excuse for losing the war.

What absolutely did occur, and which was prominently reported in the popular press at the time, was an event during a Sydney homecoming parade in 1966 where Colonel Preece was smeared with a mixture of red paint, turpentine and kerosene, by a young Campbelltown woman, Nadine Jensen. This has become part of public memory about Vietnam in Australia in a bunch of ways, Dixon argues, with soldiers reporting half-remembered memories of the event, but getting times and dates confused, and with a version of these events happening to the main character in a 1987 fictionalised telemovie about the Australian war experience, Sword Of Honour. Additionally, according to Dapin, there were demonstrators at a 1969 parade in Adelaide, who were apparently physically attacked by other elements of the crowd for their lack of patriotism. Fourteen other parades in the late sixties and early 1970s were reported on by the press with no mention of conflict.

Dixon points to the period of 1987 or so as being the tipping point of the belief that Australian servicemen were commonly spat upon; there was an October 1987 homecoming parade in Sydney for Vietnam veterans, modelled after similar American parades, in which 20,000 veterans marched, premised upon the belief that the Vietnam Veterans hadn't gotten a proper homecoming (despite the fifteen homecoming parades between 1966 and 1971, which I've already mentioned - it should be said, however, that the parades were difficult for many servicemen to attend).

Before this period, broadly, the idea that Vietnam veterans were spat upon when they returned home doesn't seem to have been part of Australian pop culture. For example, there's no reference to being spat upon in, say, popular songs like 'Khe Sanh' by Cold Chisel (~1978), or 'I Was Only 19' by Redgum (~1982), which were from the perspectives of Vietnam Veterans. Instead, these songs generally deal with issues like PTSD, the surreality of everyday life after having experienced war. There's certainly a sense in both songs that there's a profound lack of understanding towards their experiences from the general public, but there's no references to being spat on or abused per se.

Dixon also finds a small amount of anecdotes of spitting/abuse incidents, which he takes as credible rather than urban myths - he's not denying that some events like that occurred. For example, a serviceman called David Morgan is quoted in Paul Ham's 2007 book Vietnam telling a story about being spat upon by a woman at Sydney Airport while en route returning home. However, while the belief that these events occurred is quite common, detailed versions of such stories being reported as happening to the person telling the story seem to be rare, and they don't seem to have been discussed very much at all before the late 1980s - which is thus why Dixon argues that they occurred but where not frequent. Instead, Dixon argues that the period around 1987 seems to have been when the narrative of being spat at and abused when returning home coalesced in Australia, helped along by its portrayal of the war in Australian and American movies and popular culture.