After 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.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailThe 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.
They didn’t even have a proper map.
“I was lucky to have my brother,” says Lam. Lam Binh had brought with him a US navy handbook that taught them how to sail as they went, and an A4 classroom map of south-east Asia for directions.
“The first few days we got all the wrong directions … missing [by] about a few hundred kilometres.”
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.
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”.
