| LARRY SCHWARTZ |
| The Sunday Age 27-Jan-2002 Five young men who had arrived in Darwin on a fishing boat one hot April day in 1976 were claiming to be refugees. But Immigration officers had their doubts. This was before the term boatpeople was part of the Australian vocabulary, before desert detention centres and before asylum seekers dominated public debate. The officials found it hard to believe the account of the lone English-speaking crew member. Could these men, aged 16 to 25, possibly have travelled 3500 kilometres in a 20-metre fishing boat with a page torn from a school atlas to guide them? “Are you sure you’re from Vietnam?” they asked. This was to be a historic encounter – the boat people had arrived. Their arrival heralded the start of first of three waves of boat people that would continue through the years, culminating in such events as the Tampa incident late last year, the policy to prevent boats carrying asylum seekers from entering the Australian migration zone and unrest at Woomera detention centre. More than a decade ago, two crew members, including the man who had skippered the boat, died in a head-on car collision in Brisbane. The Sunday Age tracked down Lam Tac Tam and Nguyen Van Chen, both 17 at the time, in Darwin. Ngo Son Binh, 16 then, now works in a Sydney supermarket. |
| Their story: |
| Five men in a boat: the flight of the first wave |
| THE ORIGINAL BOATPEOPLE |
| Larry Schwartz |
| Lam Tac Tam can sleep soundly in his solid-brick home. His family is safely in Australia. At 42, he has a modest travel business, both teenage daughters are fluent in a language he can’t quite master, with the elder one studying accountancy on a scholarship. At a glance, his would seem to be the new Australian’s dream come true. Except that he’s not just another migrant – and there is a more unsettling dream that comes to reclaim him, again and again. “I still dream of running away from the country,” says Mr Lam, one of three surviving members of the first boat to bring Vietnamese refugees to Australia. “I still feel scared.” In his dreams he is thrust back to a time of terror in the months after the fall of Saigon, which led to a desperate, 3500-kilometre voyage across the ocean in a 20-metre fishing boat. For much of their journey, the five men, aged 16 to 25, who on a hot April day in 1976 were the first boat people to step ashore in Australia, had only a page torn from a school atlas to guide them. “You have to remember, in 1976 there was no interpreter or translator in Darwin,” says Mr Lam, speaking slowly to measure each word in a language he cannot read or write after nearly three decades here. “I had to use my hands, my body, to tell people what I wanted.” He was 17. Now a business consultant and travel agent, he has revisited his birthplace several times in the past decade. He is saddened by an old photograph of the five outside the Immigration Department offices in Darwin on their first day in Australia. He is buoyed by enduring camaraderie with friends Nguyen Van Chen, also 17 at the time, who farms fruit and vegetables outside Darwin, and Ngo Son Binh, 16 then, who first got a job in a bakery and now works in a Sydney supermarket. But he grieves to see reminders of the elder two men, both 25 at the time the photograph was taken. Mr Lam’s brother, Lam Binh, had learned English in Vietnam and studied navigation from naval books to skipper the vessel. It was he, too, who reportedly delivered a rehearsed speech for Australian authorities as they prepared to inspect the boat Kien Viang from which they had ventured in the hope of asylum: “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 Binh was employed at a Brisbane butter factory when he died in a head-on collision in Brisbane one Saturday morning in early 1980. He was on his way to market in an old Morris sedan with Giap Bao, then working in an electrical factory, also killed in the crash. “It’s very sad,” says Lam Tac Tam. “We had come a long way to survive, to come to Australia, and then to have an accident …” The first of three boats to arrive from Vietnam in 1976 heralded three waves of boat people in recent decades: 1976-81, from Cambodia, China and Vietnam, 1989-98 mostly from the Middle East, and from 1998, Afghanistan. Mr Lam, whose struggles with English made an ordeal of a routine visit to a GP, taught himself a new language while labouring on building sites during the reconstruction of Darwin, devastated by Cyclone Tracy in December, 1974. “I learned ‘cement’, ‘sand’, other building materials, ‘tomorrow’, ‘today’, ‘lunch’, ‘dinner’,” he says. “We learned slowly.” Third-eldest child of a wealthy manufacturer, he had thought he might some day run the family’s ice factory, and was little prepared for the heavy labour in Australia. “I’d never done the hard job before in my life. I couldn’t carry a 50-kilogram bag of cement. I had to learn day by day to do the job.” Language has proved a hurdle that has made him all the more appreciative of the academic achievements of daughters he says have benefited from tolerance in a rich mix of backgrounds in ethnically diverse Darwin. Thirteen-year-old Jashica, in year eight, and Sofia, 18, in her second year of studies in accountancy and law, have told their father they hope to get a boat to replicate the journey he and his companions had undertaken with little more than rice, dried and canned fish, and a container of fresh water. Some day, says Mr Lam, he will retrace the journey through Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand to Rach Gia, the port city to which he once vowed to return. “We got on the boat in the late afternoon, about five o’clock. As we left, I was looking back at the harbour, my country, my home town. I said, one day I’ll be coming back. I swear I’ll be coming back.” All seemed changed when he first revisited Keing Giang, in 1993. “When I came to the town it was completely different to what I had thought before,” he says. “I thought my country was beautiful. But after 17 years, everything was completely different. Too many cars, noisy traffic. I come back for a holiday, not to live. It’s different now.” On that visit he stood outside each of the four homes the family once owned in the then Saigon, now used by the government to house retired public servants. Then he left. Home is with his wife, Sylvia, who works as a cook for a Catholic priest, and the two girls. “When we were young we’d think we’d go back to our country, to our own culture,” he says. “But you have to remember I stayed in Vietnam for 17 years, and I’ve lived in Australia coming up this April, for 26 years. So I’ve been here longer. So now Australia is my home country.” He laughs gently, adding: “Vietnam is my second country now.” Sylvia had come from East Timor in 1978. She has no relatives there now. Mr Lam’s family had migrated to Vietnam from the south-east Chinese port of Canton in the early 1950s. After fleeing Vietnam, his parents, two brothers and two sisters spent a year in Bangkok, another two in a refugee camp in the Thai province of Udon, and six in Canada, before he was able to sponsor their migration to Australia. A younger sister and brother are in Darwin, and others run a restaurant on the Gold Coast. “I always tell Sofia and Jashica, Australia is your country,” says Mr Lam, who was the lone Vietnamese migrant at a ceremony at which he was granted citizenship in 1979. “You were born in Australia. So Australia is your home.” The first five boat people were quickly granted temporary visas and and spent their first months in a one-room unit provided by the St Vincent de Paul Society. Some moved on to Brisbane. Mr Lam remained in Darwin to watch over the boat, sold months later for $10,000, split five ways. Australia had not been the intended destination at first. They had hoped they might somehow make it to a US army base on the north Pacific island of Guam. While others slept in the cabin, one would steer from the cabin, another keep watch from the stern. They endured violent storms on the Timor Sea to reach Darwin at the very end of the cyclone season on April 26, 1976. The dash had been planned in secrecy. Mr Lam, who knew nothing of navigation, was drawn into lengthy preparations. “I’d never been fishing before,” he says. “So I had to learn how to get used to it. Not to get seasick. How to make friends with other people in the fishing boats.” Etched in memory as it is, Mr Lam can recall decades later that the boat named Kien Giang, after the southern Vietnamese province of origin, was registered in Vietnam as KG 4435. “Because it sticks in my mind,” he explains. “This was the big change of my life.” Again and again, the dream reaches into the depths of sleep and takes him back to a time before flight. Months have passed since he ran outdoors to watch the tanks roll in at the fall of Saigon. That day he had seen the terror of soldiers and officials discarding South Vietnamese uniforms to run almost naked through city streets. Friends have been taken away for “re-education”. In the dream they are ready to ferry the boat through the busy port. In his dream it occurs to him that patrol boats fire on fugitive vessels. “It’s too risky,” he says, as if once again steeling himself to go. They set sail at dusk in late January, 1976, taking no luggage. They had not even dared buy an atlas for fear of spies. The brothers had arranged to meet the rest of the family at a secret rendezvous on the Mekong Delta. Because they were seasick and unfit to risk a hazardous voyage, the brothers left their parents, two brothers and two sisters in Bangkok. The five men sailed from port to port, moved along by authorities, who were prepared to provide fuel and food, but not refuge. On an east Malaysian island, the skipper of an Australian ship counselled them to continue towards Darwin. The atlas neglected to feature most of the islands they would pass. Sixteen days out from Timor, the Kien Giang sailed past Bathurst Island. That night, on April 26, they dropped anchor off the suburb of Night Cliff. They woke to find the tide had retreated, and they had to wait several hours until they could go on. Finally, they were able to berth alongside Stokes Hill wharf, where fishermen on a trawler gave them a 10-cent coin and directed them to a phone booth. “So my brother made a phone call to the police station. He said, we are Vietnamese refugees. The policeman said `ah, that’s not my job, that’s Immigration. You wait there. Don’t move.” |
Larry Schwartz Writer