{"id":631278,"date":"2026-04-26T03:54:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-26T03:54:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/631278\/"},"modified":"2026-04-26T03:54:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T03:54:08","slug":"fifty-years-on-lam-tac-tam-reflects-on-life-in-australia-as-the-first-vietnamese-refugee-to-arrive-by-boat-australian-immigration-and-asylum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/631278\/","title":{"rendered":"Fifty years on, Lam Tac Tam reflects on life in Australia as the first Vietnamese refugee to arrive by boat | Australian immigration and asylum"},"content":{"rendered":"

After 16 days at sea, Lam Tac Tam and his older brother, Lam Binh, saw land in the distance. Darwin<\/a> twinkled in the dusk, a promise of safety.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Fifty years ago this Sunday, they floated at a pivotal point in Australia\u2019s history<\/a>. Their own lives and nation\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

So they docked. Lam, remembering the moment, breaks down how he felt: 70% relief and 30% uncertainty.<\/p>\n

Lam Tac Tam with a photo of those he sailed from Vietnam to Darwin with in 1976. Photograph: A Parkinson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t know what the future is.\u201d<\/p>\n

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: \u201cWelcome 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lam Tac Tam says the officers didn\u2019t believe them. Surely they were from Indonesia? Vietnam was thousands of kilometres away.<\/p>\n

Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email<\/a><\/p>\n

The 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\u2019s family.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey caught them, took their house \u2026 their business \u2026 everything,\u201d Lam says.<\/p>\n

Lam Tac Tam at his home in Darwin with his family. Photograph: A Parkinson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Lam\u2019s father, who owned an ice factory in Saigon\u2019s Chinatown, was worried his family would be next. Lam says word had spread that wealthy families were being rounded up.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe chucked away everything. Life is more important,\u201d says Lam. His father made the decision that the family must flee in the family\u2019s fishing boat \u2013 the Kien Giang. He believes their boat was the first to set sail from the coastal town of Rach Gia.<\/p>\n

Lam, who was 20 at the time, skippered the boat alongside his older brother, Lam Binh.<\/p>\n

For the brothers, it was the first time they had sailed on open waters.<\/p>\n

They didn\u2019t even have a proper map.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was lucky to have my brother,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The Kien Giang in Darwin. Photograph: Northern Territory Government Photographic Collection<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first few days we got all the wrong directions \u2026 missing [by] about a few hundred kilometres.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cduring that time there were no refugee camps in south-east Asia\u201d.<\/p>\n

In fact, none of the nations of maritime south-east Asia were party to the United Nation\u2019s refugee convention and while docked in Singapore, they were detained when they tried to seek help from the Australian embassy.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t worry, Australian government will accept you,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The route of the boat taken by Lam Tac Tam and his brother Lam Binh, from Vietnam to Australia.<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u2019s northern coast without rest.<\/p>\n

Arriving in Darwin, the first person they spoke to wasn\u2019t 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).<\/p>\n

Lam says Darwin residents were \u201cvery friendly, very helpful\u201d. It was only two years after the territory capital had been devastated by Cyclone Tracy<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey always help us. We don\u2019t want to make trouble for them,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Vietnam, I didn\u2019t need to work,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

In Darwin, Lam often worked two jobs, construction or manufacturing by day and a takeaway restaurant by night.<\/p>\n

Lam Tac Tam at his home in Darwin. Photograph: A Parkinson\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I come to Australia we work, work, work, work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDuring that time, I really hate the communists,\u201d Lam says. He would air his feelings with members of Chinese diaspora in Darwin, who\u2019d come from Timor and Hong Kong, often without much choice of their own.<\/p>\n

However as the years turned, Lam\u2019s view changed. \u201c[If there had been] no communists, I can\u2019t come to Australia,\u201d he says, thinking of his wife whom he met in Darwin, and his two daughters and grandchildren.<\/p>\n

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. \u201c I try to help the country, help the people there get a better life.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201clooking to the north, to look to the Vietnam side, to think.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of those who shared the boat journey, \u201conly me, only one person lived in Darwin for 50 years and never left\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI get a good life in Australia,\u201d says Lam.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Dr Claire Higgins, a historian and academic at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, says Lam\u2019s arrival was no surprise to the Australians.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Malcolm] Fraser felt there was a moral obligation to aid the refugees given Australia\u2019s military involvement in Vietnam,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Higgins says this welcome gave Australia a \u201cstrong international reputation on refugee issues\u201d.<\/p>\n

But by the 1980s, economic downturn and changes in political leadership had hardened attitudes towards asylum seekers. Today, Australia\u2019s refugee policy is defined by mandatory detention and an offshore processing system that is \u201chugely costly to lives and sheer expense\u201d, she says.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on the wars that embroil our world today, Lam says, \u201c[those] whose country starts up the war, you have to accept the refugees\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After 16 days at sea, Lam Tac Tam and his older brother, Lam Binh, saw land in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631279,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-631278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}