OUTSIDERS? Refugees in Australian Society: Short Stories: "The Boat" by Nam Le

.  

Nam Le was born in Vietnam, and arrived in Australia with his parents as  very young child. He was raised in Melbourne, where he attended first Melbourne Grammar School and then the University of Melbourne.

At the University of Melbourne, Le completed a B.A. Hons (for which he wrote a dissertation on W.H. Auden under the supervision of poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe) and an LLB (Hons), after which he was admitted to the Supreme Court of Victoria as a lawyer.

The Boat: Lesson & Sample Essay

The History of Vietnam Refugees into Australia

In the late 1970's, many people fled Vietnam by boat. The first five ‘boat people’—five boys—arrived in Australia in 1976. The SBS documentary Immigration Nation shows footage from that time and first-person accounts from some of those first arrivals. It explains how those arrivals would change the face of immigration in Australia.

Refugees traveling to Australia, like those in "The Boat," experience moments of extremism, confronted by death or loss or terror (or all three) and forced to grapple at the most fundamental level with who they are and what they want or believe. Whether it’s the prospect of dying at sea or being shot by a drug kingpin or losing family members in a war, Nam Le’s people are individuals trapped in the cross hairs of fate, forced to choose whether they will react like deer caught in the headlights, or whether they will find a way to confront or disarm the situation.

Immigration Nation (available on YouTube.)

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

SOURCE: YouTube (2012) Duration 14:47 mins.