Tri Nguyen.
Tri Nguyen walks to Canberra to say thank you for the kindness he received as a refugee. Photo: Angela Wylie
Tri Nguyen is walking from Melbourne to Canberra towing a wooden boat in his own quiet plea for better treatment of asylum seekers.
The road trains roar past on the Northern Highway between Wallan and Kilmore, but it doesn't faze him.
In 1980, when he was eight, true fear was the threat of men with guns capturing the refugee boat in which he was fleeing Vietnam. The 68 refugees were taken to a Malaysian island and housed in a fenced compound.
They were fed a cup of rice a day and strip-searched at night. His uncle later told him women refugees were raped. The 42-year-old Brunswick Baptist pastor has ''blocked a lot out'' from the experience, but remembers hearing ''screaming and crying''.
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He also remembers, after arriving in Australia, the kindness shown to him, his father, Nang, and sister, Trang, 11, at Midway hostel in Maribyrnong in 1982, where there was no barbed wire.
Locals taught them English, gave them clothes and meals, and helped find Nang a job at Australia Post. A group from Moonee Ponds Baptist Church helped bring his mother and two younger brothers to Australia eight years later. At 2am, 60 strangers came to welcome them at Melbourne Airport.
''We were traumatised and had a really rough journey but were just immersed in love and hospitality.''
To thank Australians, and to raise money for Sanctuary, Baptcare's asylum-seeker accommodation program, Mr Nguyen is walking to Canberra in 35 days via Benalla, Wodonga, and Wagga Wagga.
He aims to arrive in Canberra on Good Friday, donate the little boat to Parliament, then attend an Easter Sunday ecumenical service on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin.
The small boat was made by Nang and was partly inspired by a ''profound'' Leunig cartoon of a man and a duck towing a trolley.
Mr Nguyen says he isn't a political crusader, but after hearing about conditions for asylum seekers on Manus and Christmas islands from advocates such as Jessie Taylor, ''I felt really angry and very sad that the guys [asylum seekers] who are coming now don't experience the same welcome that I did.''
He says we need ''to change the national conversation about asylum seekers'', which is too negative.
Working with Iranian asylum seekers at his Brunswick church and as a volunteer in St Albans, he is amazed by their will to be happy and make a contribution, and saddened by their stories of mistreatment and loneliness in detention and their inability to work or reunite with their families.
Three of the Iranians are accompanying him on the walk. Since setting out from the church on Sunday, they have been swapping stories with locals. The aim is to convey the human side of asylum seekers, ''rather than just the issue''.
''The idea is that we are at our best when we show compassion and work for justice for those who are oppressed,'' Mr Nguyen says.
''That's the Australia that's at its best. I hope in 30 years' time, we have refugees wanting to say thank you rather than us wanting to say sorry.''