Lessons 2 & 3 - Response to the arrival of Indochinese refugees

Five young Vietnamese men sail into Darwin Harbour on Anzac Day 1976 and a tiny fishing boat is about to sail into the history books. The first Asian boat people are on their way to Australia.

Tac Tam Lam “the first few day we keep worrying and we are scared and worry so much. Don’t know where we go, or what life… and after a few more day we don’t think too far away. We have enough fuel, water and food. So we keep going.”

His future under threat, 19 year old Tac Tam Lam flees the communist regime in Vietnam with four friends. He escapes onto the high seas using nothing but a school Atlas to guide them. They fearlessly consider sailing thousands of kilometres to Australia or America.

Tac Tam Lam “American people not friendly. We know, during the Vietnam War. So only the Australian Army very friendly we know.”

Fond memories of Australian soldiers convinced the boys to head here. After two months at sea they finally make it to Darwin Harbour. Pulling up next to a prawn trawler, they ask local fishermen what to.

Tac Tam Lam

“They say ‘call the police, public phone there’. So, my brother… ‘we have no money’. So, they give my brother ten cents ‘Go and call there’. So, my brother go to make the phone call to call the police. And my friend the fisherman, he’s dying, for three weeks no cigarette on the boat. And the Australian fisherman are smoking. So, with body language we asked them for a cigarette. And the fishermen throw whole package ‘yeah for you’. So we say, Australian people very good. Ask for only one, but give whole package! That means really good country we like.”

The locals may be welcoming that immigration officials are panic-stricken. The authorities think even five boys and one boat could cause public alarm. In his latest mission Wayne Gibbons is ordered to Darwin to hush things up.

Wayne Gibbons (Department of Immigration 1969-1993) “But we kept the arrival of the boat, that first boat into Darwin, as low-key as we could. We didn’t want to spook Australians. Boat arrivals directly into Australian territory risked creating an atmosphere that things were out of control. When the Australian public feels things are out of control they generally turn against immigration.”

The government has managed to keep this first arrival under wraps, but just years later Prime Minister Fraser faces a crisis on an entirely different scale. There are now hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Vietnam and several hundred boat people have already made it to Darwin.

News broadcast “Vietnamese refugee boat number 48 arrived in Darwin yesterday with 113 people on board. Immigration Department officials have completed the preliminary checks on the refugees and are now awaiting a decision on whether they’ll be taken to a quarantine station for detailed health and immigration procedures. Meanwhile the refugees remain on the listing boat, which will eventually join the dozens of others lying in and around the Darwin harbour.”

Canberra dispatches Wayne Gibbons to Malaysia to set up refugee camps and stop the boats from coming directly to Australia.

Gibbons “you would see them arrive with no standing room on the deck, that looked awful when you open the hatch and look below and you saw sometimes hundreds of people just stacked like sardines. Literally like sardines. There was no room to move. How people survived those journeys is amazing.”

The exodus from Vietnam shows no sign of slowing down. The Nguyen family fought against the communists now, like many others, they must flee.

Phong Nguyen “we were listed at the public enemy number one. We are the most dangerous elements of the new society. We are scoundrels, we are scum of the earth and we might be sent to labour camps. That is when mum decided that at any cost we must escape.”

Like all the enemies Fong’s family are forbidden from leaving the country but the government is pushing out the ethnic Chinese and so the Nguyen’s assumed false identities and escaped on a packed ship.

Phong Nguyen “Mum was carrying with us nothing but a little statue of Our Lady. That’s it. And nothing, no clothing but what we wear and we’re leaving our country. But the only thing is I’m happy if we die, if we perish, at least we are the whole family…we die together.”

News announcer: “For the developing countries of Southeast Asia the impacts of hundreds of thousands of refugees is an intolerable economic burden.”

July 1979 and there are now 400,000 refugees in Southeast Asia looking for a new home. Malcolm Fraser has a momentous decision to make. If he opens the doors he not only risks the backlash of a deeply fearful nation, he will overturn an ideology that has barred Asians from Australia for more than 70 years.

John Menadue (secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister 1974-1976) “if Malcolm Fraser had decided that he wouldn’t take Indochinese refugees until he had consulted opinion polls or focus groups, he would never, and Australia would never have taken Indochinese refugees. But Malcolm Fraser didn’t take polls, he decided that leadership was essential. It was something Australia had to do, it was morally justified, and will be to benefit of this country if we did so.”

In July 1979 Fraser agrees to take 14,000 Indochinese refugees. Ultimately 70,000 will settle here during his time as Prime Minister. Phone Nguyen’s family arrived into Adelaide at Christmas in 1979.

Phong Nguyen “everything was so strange, everything was so different. But on the other hand, we’re so glad, we are so relieved from the refugee camp to finally… this is our new home!”

Professor Mary Crock (University of Sydney) “in my mind there’s no doubt that the decisions made by the Fraser government literally changed the fate of Australia. We had never had such an injection of Asian migrants to the country, not since the gold rush days. I think their acceptance and their settlement is one of the great success stories of Australian migration history.”

Professor Andrew Markus (Monash University) “It was the Fraser government’s decision to allow tens of thousands of refugees from Vietnam to come to Australia that really marks the end point of the White Australia Policy.”