1979
Dàn tre musical instrument
The boat people
Minh Tam Nguyen created this musical instrument, which he called the dàn tre (meaning ‘bamboo musical instrument’), while in a prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam. It features 23 wire strings attached to a bamboo tube, with a resonator at the base. The instrument owes something to the Vietnamese bamboo zither and western instruments such as the guitar.
Nguyen was a lieutenant with the Army of the Republic of Vietnam when he was captured by the Vietcong in March 1975. During his six years in the re-education camps, he made his first dàn tre from recycled materials. In 1981, after his release, he and his son fled Vietnam by boat and wound up in the Philippines. As for most refugees, the journey was fraught with heavy storms that twice almost sank their vessel.
While in a refugee camp on the island of Palawan, Nguyen made another instrument. He brought that instrument to Australia in 1982 and modified the resonator by using an olive-oil can. One of the major advantages of the dàn tre is its versatility – it can play both western and non-western scales. For Nguyen, it symbolises his journey by sea and blood, sweat and tears.
The term ‘boat people’ entered the Australian vernacular in the 1970s with the arrival of the first wave of boats carrying people seeking asylum from the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The first boat, a 17-metre fishing vessel known as KG4435, arrived in Darwin on 26 April 1976 carrying five Indochinese men. Over the next five years 2059 Vietnamese people arrived by boat. Within three years a further 53 refugee boats had arrived.
In 1982, the Australian, United States and Vietnamese governments agreed on an orderly migration program emphasising family reunion, and two-thirds of arrivals over the next few years were women. Within a few years the Vietnam-born population in Australia had again doubled. The controlled migration kept people out of dangerous and fragile boats and thus kept the issue off the front pages of newspapers.
Australia had been involved in the war in Vietnam since its inception as a phoney war, leading up to sending Australian ‘advisers’ in 1962. Australians stayed there until 1972, when only embassy and diplomatic staff remained.
When Saigon, the capital of the south, fell to the invading North Vietnamese Army on 30 April 1975, the country was thrown into turmoil. The Australian embassy was instructed that its staff could not evacuate any Vietnamese people. Essentially, Australia abandoned the people it had spent so much blood and treasure trying to help.
Over the coming years the whole of Indochina was enveloped in various wars. Cambodia was overtaken by the genocidal Pol Pot regime and then invaded by Vietnam. Political unrest throughout the region contributed to a vast refugee problem: the number of people seeking refuge during those years has been put at as high as 1.5 million, and as many as 200 000 may have died. In the end, the refugee intake of western nations stands at: USA 823 000, Britain 19 000, France 96 000, and Australia and Canada 137 000 each.
Those people who took to the sea faced sinking boats and pirates. They made for any port they could in the Philippines, Thailand or Malaysia. There they wound up in refugee camps and awaited resettlement. Some braved the ocean as far as Australia.
Approximately 90 000 Vietnamese in the initial exodus came by plane through the refugee system and were resettled in Australia. Only 2000 arrived by boat.
The Fraser government managed the refugee intake cautiously. In the first two years following the end of the Vietnam War, approximately 130 000 refugees left Vietnam: the Fraser government took 3732. When six boats arrived during the 1977 election campaign, the prime minister suggested that some might have to be deported. Other ministers suggested that the people were economic refugees.
It’s probable that Malcolm Fraser felt some responsibility towards the former allies who were now victims. Certainly there was an orderly resettlement of Vietnamese refugees over the next few years and certainly the government didn’t try to make political capital out of the refugee situation. Over the ensuing years the Fraser government increased the formal refugee program. Most of the immigrants came from refugee camps in Malaysia or the Philippines and most of them came by plane.
In the 1980s, Vietnamese immigration resurfaced as a hot topic in public debate. It was only ten years since the end of the White Australia policy. Suburbs such as Cabramatta in Sydney and Footscray and Springvale in Melbourne became enclaves of a new Asian diaspora. While the overwhelming majority of immigrants were respectable citizens, there were some criminal gangs. The tabloid media popularised the idea of Vietnamese gangs dealing in heroin who had their own style of organised crime.
At the same time, historian Geoffrey Blainey and the then deputy opposition leader John Howard speculated that the rapid increase in and scale of Asian immigration might not be in Australia’s economic interest. The race debate was only to heat up over the next ten years. Howard continued to put race and Asian immigration at the forefront of Australian politics.
According to the 2011 census, 185 000 people in Australia were born in Vietnam and 219 000 speak Vietnamese at home. Vietnamese Australians have made significant contributions to all levels of Australian society. It has not been easy to get to this point of multiculturalism, and a great many people have contributed to the final result. But just as Nguyen’s dàn tre can play a combination of western and non-western scales, the Vietnamese experience demonstrates that a multicultural Australia is achievable.