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CHAPTER 1
Controlling the story
'The boat people had undergone intensive interviews which had confirmed stories of hardship and courage.'
Press release from the Minister for Immigration's office, 1977
On a beach in Borneo in April 1976, two men started talking. One had been at sea for almost forty days with his younger brother and three friends, having slipped out from the coastal town of Rach Giá in Southern Vietnam on a winter's morning. Their patched-up wooden fishing boat, the KG4435 or Kien Giang, had been reprovisioned and sent away from port after port along the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea, and now, guided by a page ripped from a school atlas, they were steering north to the Philippines or on to Guam, in the hope that the Americans might fly them to the United States as refugees. His name was Lam Binh, and the story of the five young men's endeavour would be recorded a few years later by scholar of South-East Asian history, My-Van Tran, and published in a slim volume called The Long Journey: Australia's first boat people. The other man on the beach was a seasoned Australian sailor, about whom historians know almost nothing. According to the young men's re-telling, the sailor warned they could drown in their attempt to head north. His country had friendly people and had accepted Vietnamese refugees already. It was closer, he said; they should 'take a chance there'.
When Binh hailed the attention of a fisherman near Stokes Hill Wharf in Darwin sixteen days later, on 27 April 1976, around 1200 Vietnamese refugees had already been flown to a new life in Australia, arriving under the Whitlam and Fraser governments. Many had been selected by Australian Department of Immigration officials from temporary camps in and around the places that Binh had sailed through. They landed in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney 'without money, clothes or personal belongings', having experienced 'emotional distress and extreme anxiety about their future'. Some were bakers, dressmakers or farmers, and they arrived with an array of languages, religions and levels of education. A few had worked for the Australians during the war, or had close relatives or other connections in the Australian community.
Binh steered into the harbour a stranger. He leant out into the sunshine and in English asked the fisherman if he could speak to the authorities. The next afternoon a spokesperson for the Department of Immigration told the local press that the five young men were being granted one-month temporary entry visas 'while their case was considered' by the Minister. The St Vincent de Paul Society gave the young men a place to stay until they found work on building sites around Darwin, and two Vietnamese-speaking locals helped them to adjust to a new language and culture.
The story of the five's arrival is now seen as a key moment in modern Australian history, their navigation by school atlas a famous detail. Yet, when the story is retold, it is sometimes mentioned that the Kien Giang gained little media attention at the time, and did not create 'a local sensation'. In just a few paragraphs the newspapers recounted Binh's story of how and why they had left, and explained that the refugees hoped to gain work as fishermen or mechanics.
The Kien Giang's journey may have been interpreted slightly differently within the Department of Immigration. For almost twelve months Australian authorities had been trying to gain intelligence from within refugee camps across Thailand and Malaysia, hoping to piece together an idea of how Vietnamese refugees were escaping and why. They had received a cable about another group of young men who planned to sail a fishing vessel to Australia if they weren't selected for resettlement by Immigration officials in the region, but that boat never arrived. The Immigration staff who gathered at Stokes Hill Wharf only knew for certain that the five young men who had reached Darwin that day in April 1976 were unprepared and fortunate to have survived the journey in their rickety vessel.
The previous May, when the Department of Labor and Immigration (as it was titled then) had consulted with colleagues in nine other departments to consider how the Whitlam government should respond if a vessel carrying refugees turned up on Australia's northern coastline, they had thought that allowing people to land would create a precedent that 'would not go unremarked by people in a number of countries to the north of Australia'. So if the Australian government couldn't predict or prevent asylum seekers arriving, then it had to shape the story. Years earlier, when Prime Minister Holt's department had debated the fate of stowaways from mainland China in the 1960s, a view was taken that if the government had to let a person stay, it was best to do so 'without publicly demonstrating it'.
The Minister for Immigration's Private Secretary flew to Darwin to see the Kien Giang. Wayne Gibbons was relatively young but had experience in the department and had worked for a number of successive Immigration ministers, and the year before he had been dispatched by Whitlam to Guam, Hong Kong and Singapore to select Vietnamese forresettlement. When we spoke in 2011, Gibbons recalled that when he looked at Lam Binh's map and the low-deck vulnerability of the boat, he knew that the young men were incredibly lucky. But he kept in mind past and future headlines, and the continuing exodus from Vietnam:
I got sent up there, and our major fear then – I had a very strong fear – was, if we don't handle this well, the mood of the public will become paranoid.
So we kept it as quiet as we could, it didn't become a big issue, we made people believe it was just a lucky experience for these few men on a boat, they couldn't have done it with a larger group because it was too far a journey[.]
For many Vietnamese refugees escape was long in the planning, and more would make the choice to leave their lives behind and clamber aboard a boat months or years after Binh did. More than 2000 people reached Australia over the next six years. From everything we know about their small vessels, it is clear that they were equally lucky, many lacking sailing experience, charts or detailed bearings for their journey. Others still may have tried and failed.
In 1976, less than 10 per cent of migrants who settled in Australia each year were from Asia. Most were from the United Kingdom or its former colonies, with many others from Southern Europe. They entered to fill specific occupational demands, or as dependents of existing residents. While a nondiscriminatory entry policy had been in place for several years by now, demographic change was slow to result after the White Australia Policy was dismantled; in the midst of an economic downturn the annual immigration intake was recovering from a thirty-year low under the Whitlam government, and entry criteria were 'more restricted than those of the 1960s' due to increased unemployment levels and the Department of Immigration's 'concern for the employment prospects' of individual migrants. Because the department had not yet assessed how it would recognise trade or professional qualifications awarded in Asia, it reported that 'in the present circumstances' migrants from the region would be mostly confined to family reunion'.
The Minister for Immigration, Michael MacKellar, was a relatively junior Liberal MP from the Sydney electorate of Warringah. In his late thirties, he was good-humoured and self-assured, and had held the role of Shadow Immigration Minister for a short period in Opposition. After the Coalition won the federal election in December 1975, Fraser appointed him to a portfolio that was, in MacKellar's words, considered to be 'low on the totem pole'. The Department of Immigration had been diminished under the previous government, and although as noted in the Introduction the dismantlement of White Australia had been pursued by key figures within the department, the organisation was viewed by others as retaining a 'White Australia' mind-set. Whitlam saw the department as 'racist, sexist, narrow and hidebound', and 'totally wedded to the White Australia Policy in all its ramifications'. Fraser said it had a 'latent racism'. MacKellar was tasked with building a holistic approach to migration and social cohesion within the newly reconfigured department, and with increasing support for the Liberal Party among migrant communities. In accordance with the Liberal and National Country Parties' policy platform of August 1975, the department was renamed 'Immigration and Ethnic Affairs'. Scholars have observed that where the Whitlam government promoted a concept of 'multiculturalism' to encourage an openness to cultural difference within Australian society, the policy gained greater momentum in the Fraser years, partly as a consequence of recommendations made through the 'Galbally report' on migrant programs and services. As noted later in this chapter, the increased arrival of Vietnamese refugees by boat from 1977 would make the task of securing party support from migrant communities more complex.
As stated in the Introduction to this book, when the Kien Giang arrived, Australia did not have a formal refugee policy or refugee status determination procedure in place. Thus far the Australian government under Whitlam and Fraser had been responding to the Vietnamese and other urgent refugee situations on an ad hoc basis. For instance, the Lebanese community had urged the government to process thousands of family members fleeing the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon, and several thousand were brought to Australia as 'quasi-refugees' on humanitarian grounds in 1975–76. Meanwhile, the Whitlam government had been caught on the hop by more than 2500 East Timorese who sailed directly to Darwin in the months before Indonesia invaded their country, and Australia had belatedly and somewhat reluctantly negotiated with the Portuguese for them to stay permanently. The young men from the Kien Giang would tell Tran that when they arrived, 'Immigration neither knew what to do with us nor helped us'. Three months after they arrived, in July 1976, a spokesperson for the Department of Immigration told reporters that the five Vietnamese men now had permanent visas. Until that point the young men had lived with the worry that they might be asked to 'move on', and their boat had been sitting anchored in Darwin harbour slowly filling with water. Before the wet season began Binh was able to bring Kien Giang ashore to repair and then to sell through the local classifieds.
Later that year it became clear that Vietnamese would continue to navigate south through the Indonesian archipel-ago and across the Timor Sea. There was no plan or formal policy for receiving boats just yet, and as the Minister for Immigration began to give the media detailed information about the asylum seekers' journeys and futures, his press releases presented their arrival as isolated incidents. On the morning of Saturday 28 August 1976, an Australian oil-rig supply vessel, Lady Cynthia, rescued a two-month-old baby, eight other children and thirteen adults from a sinking fishing boat off the coast of Indonesia. In keeping with the discretion afforded him as Minister for Immigration, which at that point was unframed by a formal refugee status determination procedure in accordance with Refugee Convention obligations, MacKellar announced that he would offer the refugees 'sanctuary' if they wanted to settle in Australia and met 'acceptable health and character standards'.
According to the press release, most of the adults rescued by the Lady Cynthia had a 'working knowledge' of English, and included 'a chemical engineer, an accountant, a bank clerk, typists and students'. When the next two fishing boats managed to reach the safety of Darwin harbour, in late 1976, the story was similar. One boat carried fifty refugees who had fled from the port of Vung Tau, a short distance from Ho Chi Minh City (previously known as Saigon). The 'breadwinners' onboard included an accountant, an optical repairer, a plumber and a mechanic. The second boat arrived just before Christmas, and according to the Minister it too carried breadwinners such as an electrician, a plumber and a carpenter. At 16 metres long this vessel had fifty-six people crammed onboard, and they had been shunted south for almost two months from ports in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Jakarta and Kupang – the Minister described their journey as 'harrowing'. When they reached Darwin, the refugees handed Customs officials a letter they had carefully prepared in English. Their words were included in the press release:
Please help us for freedom. We live in South Vietnam. Don't want to live with Vietnamese communists [...]. We gone to Australia. Please, Australia government help us live in Australia. There are fifty-six persons on board, eighteen mans, ten womans, fourteen boys, fourteen girls. There are ten familys. We shall keep Australia law, will be goodman.
MacKellar described this as 'all that needed to be said'.
For a reader accustomed to a lack of human detail in contemporary Australian asylum policy, in which government press statements announce the interdiction of 'illegal maritime arrivals', it is striking to see these press releases of the 1970s and to be given so many personal details – not just the age and occupation of the refugees, but clues as to how they survived at sea ('only 30 kilograms of rice'), how they navigated the dangerous route ('without maps'), and their immediate needs once they came ashore. It is because of these press releases that these stories of survival are preserved and readily found in online and library collections. One group of seventy-three refugees had drifted west in the Timor Sea and ended up in the remote Cambridge Gulf on Australia's northwest coastline; among those onboard were a woman who was eight months pregnant, a three-month-old baby, and several small children. Some of the men climbed ashore and trekked inland to a cattle station to alert a rescue party. The Minister publicly explained the schedule of their transfer to a quarantine station in Sydney:
Our main consideration in making these arrangements is the comfort of these people who have suffered severe hardship on their journey. By shuttling them to Darwin, the refugees will have a full day's rest before flying on to Sydney.
The Department's language was sympathetic but it still conveyed the idea that the federal government was in full control of the refugees' arrival – their reception had been orderly, the press releases said, and proper quarantine procedures had been followed. Cases of tuberculosis were identified, boats were fumigated and any animals the passengers had brought with them were destroyed. 'Everything was being done', the Minister stressed, 'to ensure that the refugees' medical conditions were treated quickly and effectively and that any risk to the community was eliminated'.
The message shifted as time went on and the government became concerned that more Vietnamese refugees might arrive by boat. The Minister's press releases began to speak of the risks facing those who set out on a hazardous journey. The Minister also began to issue warnings that boat people were not guaranteed residence in Australia, a point clearly made for the benefit of both a restless Australian public and for local authorities in Malaysia or Singapore who may have been nudging the refugees onward to Darwin. By the beginning of 1977, only three boats had made it to Australia, but no doubt there were reports of more people on the water in the Gulf of Thailand. On 31 January MacKellar asserted that Australia would likely take a strict approach if the practice of sailing south became 'a large-scale project', although what that new approach might be was unclear. After two small boats reached Broome in May, and just before another three landed on the West Australian coastline, the Minister reiterated 'that any refugee landing in Australia will initially be permitted only to stay temporarily'. Finally, by the end of November 1977, his department had designed a formal procedure for determining refugee status, in which individual boat arrivals would have their claims for protection assessed against criteria under the Refugee Convention, and the Minister for Immigration and the Foreign Minister, Andrew Peacock, publicly clarified that 'genuine refugees would not be turned back'. This line would be maintained until the Vietnamese refugee boats ceased to arrive four years later, in 1981.
In The Long Journey, Nancy Viviani described the Fraser government as performing a difficult 'balancing act', navigating competing and disparate pressures in crafting aresponse to the boats and the broader refugee situation. It is an apt description, because in addition to demand from regional neighbours and the United States for Australia to increase its resettlement program, the government had been caught between the demand from community groups that as a large, sparsely populated country Australia should accept many more refugees, and the resistance of those who accused the government of trying to 'flood' Australia.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Asylum by Boat"
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Copyright © 2017 Claire Higgins.
Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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