….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.
…/.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).
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,…
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.