PEOPLE

There was no wharf, so Lam Binh turned his boat across the harbour,
following the shoreline for a couple of hours. Still no one
noticed hem. He rounded a point and saw Stokes Hill wharf, the
busy centre of rhe port of Danvin. He brought KG 4435 alongside
about midday. Lam Binh then caught the attention of a fisherman
working on 8 boat nearby. 'Where immigration people?' Lam Binh
asked. 'We from south Viernm'. The fisherman told them to stay
where they wm and drove ofi. As the wharf was crowded, Lam
Binh anchored KG 4435 about fifty metres away. Immigration
officials arrived in a pilot boat and stepped on bard. Lam Binh,
taking a deep breath, made r speech he had rehearsed many times:
'Welcome on my bat. My name is Lam Binh and hex are my
friends from wuth Vietnam and we would like ptrmission to stay
in Australia!
These were the first of the boat people to travel through South-
East Asia as far as Australia.
On 30 April 1975, Saigon, the capital of the tmb~ttlcd Republic of
Vietnam, fell to the Vietnam people's army,
In the last weeks before the surrender the most envied pcople in
the capital were to be found at the airport compound of Iht US
define attachk's office, which was known as Dodge City. Here the
Americans were proetssing those Vietnamese deemed compromised
enough to warrant immediate evacuation to the United States.
Ofiially, only the parents of Vietnamese girls who had married
Americans and children born after 1958 were allowed on the flights.
But the US immigration officers, sweating men in short-slcwed
shirts who had been flown in specially for the job, had long since
surrendered to the inevitability of the Vietnarntse,extended family.
Grandparents, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces and cousins of varying
degrees squatted solemnly around the solitary American citizen who
was their ticket out of Vietnam. At first glance, it might have been
a crowd at a sporting event: the harassed officials calling out names
over megaphones; American-Asian children in baseball caps and
jeans playing around the suim~es; elderly women, in the peasants'
straw has their daughtm so despised, staring at nothing. The sprawl
continued to a bowling alley where people were sleeping on the
Landfall
plished law under a sign that said, among other things, chat prtlfaniry
was airietly forbidden.
At night, above the distant artillery fire, you could hear the drone
of the American evacuation planes ming in and out of Tan Son
Nhut airport. Long afm curfew, when the stmts were d&
except for the bunging adolescents of the militia, the plmes' engines
would wake you as they went into a steep dive for their final
approach - a manoeuvre employed since repons wert received that
the advancing North Victnamtsc were bringing surface-to-air missiles
to Saigon.
Delicately built Viemamest air force pilots, in basebdl cmp4 green
fiying suits and with low-slung revolvers, stalkad about the crowd
at the airport, studying faces as if they wert making an assessment
of the sort of peoplc ahead of their families in the queue. It was common
gossip that deals had been made with some Vittnamc&c officers
in the hope that ensuring their own families a place on a plane would
permade them to kaep their mcn under conuol. There had been
instances of abandoned soldiery fuing on evacuation flights, hurling
grenades at them, wen stowing away in the wheel wells and king
crushed to death when the landing gear was rcoacted.
And yet, only three weeks before Saigon fell, the head of the US
information service in Vietnam appeared on government-6ponsored
television to explain that the queues outside the American consulate
downtown were merely 'American citizen5 and their dependants
updating their records'. At the same time elements in the Central
Intelligence Agency {CIA) wm putting out unverified auocity
stories from the areas newly oempied by the North Vietnamese in
the hope that a stubborn US congress might be persuaded to release
the urns President Ford nnd Secretary of Stare Kisrringv wanted to
wnd President Thiw. The Vietnamese did not find it difficult to
hlitve these stories. During the 1968 Tet offensive the mmmuniutu
had slaughtered 2000 pcople and buried them in mass grave in the
cnclavc they held for a few days in Hue. Then the American and
Vietnam- marines had defended that city so stoudy that some of
the French press had called it the Vcrdun of Vietnam. Now, when
it came to military metaphors, it was the final French defeat in Vietnam
at Dien Bien Phu that came most readily to mind,
It is difficult to pinpoint the moment when the general consensus