Surviving The Saigon Shambles

Sun Herald

Sunday May 1, 2005

MELINDA HOUSTON

IT HAS been 30 years since the fall of Saigon and the extraordinary stories of the people involved are being revealed or revisited. They are stories that have a particular resonance as Australia becomes embroiled in other wars and home to a new wave of refugees.

Adding a fascinating perspective to the debate is All Points Of The Compass, a new documentary from Judy Rymer and Bevan Childs, which tells the story of a rather unusual group of "refos": that of the family of Tran Van Lam, South Vietnamese ambassador to Australia and a key negotiator in the Paris Peace Agreement.

There are nine Tran children, all raised in an environment of wealth and privilege. But as the situation in Vietnam disintegrated, all were sent off out of harm's way: to Australia, the UK, the US; to all points of the compass. The documentary is a poignant reminder of the reality of exile and the loss of homeland, told through the eyes of the children.

Tran Van Lam's original plan was for his children to be educated in skills needed by the fledgling Republic of South Vietnam, so they could return and serve their country. But by the time Tran senior was airlifted from the roof of the American embassy on April 29, 1975, it was clear that was never going to happen.

"I left Vietnam for the first time in 1969, just after the Tet offensive," Therase Tran - seventh daughter of the clan - says. "I was 13 and the climate was really heating up. Before that, when bombs fell all it meant was that school might close for a couple of weeks - we thought it was great. But by 1969 there was panic around the city."

Her first port of call was a convent school in South Virginia, where she learnt to speak English with a distinctive southern drawl. But by 1974 she was in Australia, finishing high school in Sydney, then going to the ANU.

"We were a novelty," Therase says. "By then the Vietnam war was very unpopular, but I think because we were young we didn't suffer for that in any way. Australia was very new to a lot of migrant groups. There was one other Asian girl in my school and she was Australian-born Chinese. But really it was a very welcoming, a very peaceful transition."

Therase's parents finally joined them in Australia in 1976 via a refugee camp in Guam. Therase, her sister Marie and their parents shared a two-bedroom flat

in Canberra.

And, just as your taxi driver now is likely to be an Iraqi doctor or a Pakistani mathematician, in 1976 the former governor of South Vietnam, ambassador and minister for foreign affairs opened a coffee shop.

Curiously, despite the various hardships the family suffered, Therase says the first real racism she suffered was during the Hanson years. "People were shouting at me in shopping centres. I'd be pulling out of the car park and youths would shout at me to go home. By that time I'd been here 20 years. It was around that time I started gathering material for a documentary."

Tran Van Lam, who died in 2001, had been a great man for the Super-8 movie camera and vast tracts of family history were preserved on film. "We wanted to honour his memory," Therase says. "So it was that, and my reaction to Hansonism, that got me thinking about making some kind of film."

Armed with her father's films, she approached the ABC, met Rymer and Childs and All Points was born.

It is a chance, Therase said, for her to address what she and her family see as a change in social temperature with regard to refugees.

"I think the attitude to refugees and migrants has changed," Therase says. "It's changed worldwide. It's very disturbing to all of us, because we all believe that multiculturalism can work. We're living proof of it."

All Points Of The Compass, Sunday, 7.30pm, ABC.