David Marr - Artworks from Vietnam

Emeritus Professor David Marr is a specialist in Vietnamese history, politics and culture. He served in the US Marine Corps between 1959 and 1964. He taught at Berkeley and Cornell, and headed the Indochina Resource Center in Washington, before coming to the ANU in 1975. He served as editor of Vietnam Today for the Australia-Vietnam Society 1978-1982. He was involved in projects relating to Vietnamese material library cataloguing and coding Vietnamese script in computers.

Emeritus Professor Marr has donated a variety of Vietnam research papers and publications to the ANU Archives, including a series of posters, calendars and artworks collected over the course of his career. This includes a mix of prints and originals from the 1930s to the mid-1990s. They largely focus on the Indochina Wars - particularly the Vietnam War - and the politics of Vietnam during that time but the series also includes art and folk art not specifically related to these topics as well as material focusing on Laos, Cambodia and other regions. The perspectives of the material is mixed, work coming from North and South Vietnam, Europe (mostly France and Russia), Australia and The United States. The series contains examples of propaganda, fine art, children’s art, promotional material for private, not-for-profit and academic organisations and events, educational material, work related to charity and foreign-aid and material discussing war crimes.