THUYỀN NHÂN VN ĐẦU TIÊN VƯỢT BIỂN THẲNG TỪ VN ĐẾN DARWIN-
ÚC CHÂU./-Mt68
"Lam Tac Tam with his granddaughters, Mia and Mikaela Tutton, at Nightcliff beach 50 years after he first came ashore in a small fishing boat sailed from Vietnam.
The GuardianAfter 16 days at sea, Lam Tac Tam and his older brother, Lam Binh, saw land in the distance. Darwin twinkled in the dusk, a promise of safety.They were desperate to land after the turbulent waters off the coast of Timor, but sense prevailed. They decided it would be safer to dock in the light of the morning sun. Fifty years ago this Sunday, they floated at a pivotal point in Australia’s history. Their own lives and nation’s character were about to change for ever. Unbeknownst to the Lam brothers and their three crewmates, they were about to become the first refugees from Vietnam to reach Australia by boat, the seeds of a community the country would come to embrace.
So they docked. Lam, remembering the moment, breaks down
how he felt: 70% relief and 30% uncertainty.
“We don’t know what the future is.”
Surviving on dried meat and rice, they waited on their
vessel for the Australian authorities to arrive. Lam Binh, the only one on
board who could speak English, greeted them with words he had carefully
rehearsed: “Welcome on my boat. My name is Lam Binh and these are my friends
from South Vietnam and we would like permission to stay in Australia.”
Lam Tac Tam says the officers didn’t believe them. Surely
they were from Indonesia? Vietnam was thousands of kilometres away.The Republic
of Vietnam had fallen a year earlier, in 1975, and the new communist government
had come for business owners, many of whom were Chinese-Vietnamese, like Lam’s
family.
“They caught them, took their house … their business …
everything,” Lam says.
Lam’s father, who owned an ice factory in Saigon’s
Chinatown, was worried his family would be next. Lam says word had spread that
wealthy families were being rounded up.
“We chucked away everything. Life is more important,”
says Lam. His father made the decision that the family must flee in the
family’s fishing boat – the Kien Giang. He believes their boat was the first to
set sail from the coastal town of Rach Gia.
Lam, who was 20 at the time, skippered the boat alongside
his older brother, Lam Binh.
For the brothers, it was the first time they had sailed
on open waters.Rough seas in the gulf of Thailand meant many got seasick and
not everyone could make the distance. The brothers had to leave their youngest
siblings and parents in Thailand as they continued their voyage through
Malaysia and Singapore, with hopes of reaching the US island territory of Guam,
where they could seek refuge.
Despite the willingness of Malaysians to help, providing
Lam and his crew with food, water and petrol, the government would not permit
them to stay because “during that time there were no refugee camps in
south-east Asia”.
In fact, none of the nations of maritime south-east Asia
were party to the United Nation’s refugee convention and while docked in
Singapore, they were detained when they tried to seek help from the Australian
embassy.
And so they continued on to Borneo. There, in the port of
Kuching, the captain of an Australian timber ship warned them a voyage across
open ocean to Guam would be a death sentence for the small fishing boat. He
pointed them south.
“Don’t worry, Australian government will accept you,” Lam
says the Australian ship captain told them. He advised it would be safer to
sail to Australia, and his advice came with a gift: a maritime map of
south-east Asia, an upgrade from the one torn from a school atlas.
From Borneo, the Kien Giang sailed for 16 days straight.
They were warned the Indonesian government would imprison them should they
land. So they rounded Timor and Bali and sailed onwards to Australia’s northern
coast without rest.
Arriving in Darwin, the first person they spoke to wasn’t
an immigration officer, but a local skipper who give them the 10 cents needed
to call the Australian authorities (and a pack of cigarettes for a first
smoko).
Lam says Darwin residents were “very friendly, very
helpful”. It was only two years after the territory capital had been devastated
by Cyclone Tracy. Charities found them food and board, but
within a week, Lam and his crew went out to find work, not wanting to be a
burden on the locals.
“They always help us. We don’t want to make trouble for
them,” he says. The men took on construction jobs as speaking English was not
required. It was a stark contrast to the life Lam left behind in Vietnam as the
son of a business man, someone wealthy enough to afford fake papers for him to
avoid military service.
“In Vietnam, I didn’t need to work,” he says.
In Darwin, Lam often worked two jobs, construction or
manufacturing by day and a takeaway restaurant by night.
“When I come to Australia we work, work, work, work.”
“During that time, I really hate the communists,” Lam
says. He would air his feelings with members of Chinese diaspora in Darwin,
who’d come from Timor and Hong Kong, often without much choice of their own.
However as the years turned, Lam’s view changed. “[If
there had been] no communists, I can’t come to Australia,” he says, thinking of
his wife whom he met in Darwin, and his two daughters and grandchildren.
Letting go of bitterness towards his birth country, Lam
instead wanted to promote better ties between Australia and Vietnam. He became
a tourist agent to encourage more people to holiday there. “ I try to help the
country, help the people there get a better life.”
In the decades since becoming an Australian citizen, Lam
turned down many opportunities to relocate to places with larger Vietnamese
communities, overseas or in other Australian cities.
He has always felt drawn back to that wharf on Nightcliff
Beach, the one they first landed on. He lives only a few kilometres away and he
will stand there “looking to the north, to look to the Vietnam side, to think.”
Of those who shared the boat journey, “only me, only one
person lived in Darwin for 50 years and never left”, Lam says. The others
aboard the Kien Giang moved to larger Asian communities elsewhere, he says, and
his brother died in a car crash in the 1980s.
“I get a good life in Australia,” says Lam.
Another 2,000 boats would carry Vietnamese refugees to
Australia, and in the 10 years after 1976 almost 100,000 came to Australia from
Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Dr Claire Higgins, a historian and academic at the Kaldor
Centre for International Refugee Law, says Lam’s arrival was no surprise to the
Australians.
“[Malcolm] Fraser felt there was a moral obligation to
aid the refugees given Australia’s military involvement in Vietnam,” she says.
Related: Malcolm Fraser had no Damascene conversion – he always
championed human rights
Higgins says this welcome gave Australia a “strong
international reputation on refugee issues”.
But by the 1980s, economic downturn and changes in
political leadership had hardened attitudes towards asylum seekers. Today,
Australia’s refugee policy is defined by mandatory detention and an offshore
processing system that is “hugely costly to lives and sheer expense”, she says.
Reflecting on the wars that embroil our world today, Lam
says, “[those] whose country starts up the war, you have to accept the
refugees”.
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