T

he stories of the waves of Vietnamese refugees, known as “boat people”, who fled their homes after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and into the early 1990s has little presence in Australian museums. The voice of government officials involved in their journeys is represented even less frequently (Message, 2018). Where refugees are pictured in public culture as stereotypes, government officials are usually faceless. This essay offers a short story about an object – a model boat – that gives insight into the experiences, encounters and relationships between asylum seekers and government officials. It shows the role that material culture and museums can have in building human connections.

The Tran van Hoang

I first met this boat several years ago at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne. It’s the Tran van Hoang, a model fishing boat made by Vietnamese refugee Tran van Hoang in the Pulau Bidong Refugee Camp in Malaysia in 1981. At 450 mm in length, 124 mm in width, and 320 mm with standing mast, this boat would fit within standard hand luggage allowances if you were to carry it on a plane. Hoang made the model while he was waiting to be processed for resettlement to Australia, after he had been refused entry to Canada because he had tuberculosis. He later gifted it to Lachlan Kennedy, a member of the Australian Department of Immigration Indo-Chinese Refugee Taskforce. The boat tells the story of a person – Hoang’s experience of migration and the structures of migration bureaucracy – as well as the experience of interaction between Hoang and the structures of government administration and power as embodied by Kennedy, who later donated the boat to Museum Victoria.

We don’t know where the boat’s materials came from (Timber Detective Agency). Driftwood was plentiful around the camp, but while it was re-used by people in the camps for housing and other purposes, it doesn’t seem to be the main material used in the boat’s construction. It may have been constructed from materials brought by the UNHCR for the art centre on the camp. I wondered if the model could have been produced from salvaged plywood remains from the boat that carried Hoang or others to Malaysia, but people I interviewed suggest this is unlikely as their boats were destroyed after they had disembarked.

Luciana Martins’ argument that the circulation of objects creates new meanings and values is completely accurate in relation to the Tran van Hoang. It is, she says “the movement of objects that made [a] difference” (Martins, 2021: 28, my emphasis).

As it is with Hoang’s model boat.

Had the boat not been gifted from Hoang to Kennedy, who kept it in his home as a private object for many years, it would not have eventually been transferred to the museum, where it is today gaining value in a range of different ways to what its maker likely expected or what its previous journeys might have indicated.

Object Mobilities

Hoang’s model boat addresses the complex field of encounter between an object and its context, at the same time as it invokes the discursive frames and power imbalances through which the object – and the object’s maker – have come to be “welcomed” into institutional and national cultures in Australia.

The Tran van Hoang is an exemplary case study for thinking about object mobilities. It represents:

·       A transport. The passage of humans from Vietnam to Australia and the events of those journeys (keeping in mind that not all escape vessels were fishing boats but the models produced at Pulau Bidong seem to have been).

·       A transaction. A gift between refugees and government infrastructure by which a mobile population (refugees) are resettled, and the human face of that administrative process.

·       Everyday life and resourcefulness in resettlement camps (in which the model was produced or acquired and sold or exchanged).

·       A powerful mnemonic and commemorative device for people who, 40 years after their escape, continue to identify with the term “boat people”.

·       A reminder of the 400,000 to 600,000 people who lost their lives lost at sea in escape attempts.

·       Human resilience (through associated small objects like dictionaries or clothing that were carried by people and survive today in the care of surviving refugees or museums).

I have been researching this boat on and off on for several years, but the closer I get to it the more distant it becomes.

“I Stopped These”

I was drawn back to a second meeting with the boat at the start of 2022, after I attended a talk by Craig Foster at National Press Club of Australia. Foster, a prominent Human Rights activist, said:

We need to talk about boats. … let’s not forget the boat trophy that sits proudly in Australia’s prime ministerial office. That boat symbolizes suffering, death, racism, xenophobia, deception, lies and propaganda, myopia, and the degradation of Australia’s humanity. It encapsulates perfectly who we’ve become. That it sits lovingly on Scott Morrison’s desk speaks volumes about him and us [Australians].

The steel boat sitting on the former Prime Minister of Australia’s desk is smaller than the wooden model boat I’d been looking at. Like the Tran van Hoang, it was a present. It also represents refugee movement and engenders near disaster in the gift of a model boat. However, the “disaster” it signifies is archly different, as is the political worldview it represents.

Consideration of the steel boat consolidated my interest in political infrastructures and the role of government officials in the process of resettlement (Message, 2018). I wondered what the model boats – both Hoang’s wooden one and Morrison’s steel one – could tell us about humanitarian interventions through governments, organizations, and individual and international bodies.

History-making

In contrast to the wooden boat which represented and had itself experienced multiple movements, the steel boat on the Prime Minister’s desk was immobile. More doorstop than form of transport, it was not supposed to go anywhere. It doesn’t look like it has passed through many sets of hands. A comparison of these boats demonstrates the argument by Ruth Balint and Zora Simic that “as historical themes, migration and displacement lend themselves to both ‘big’ history and more intimate and local histories” (Balint and Simic, 2018: 380). The wooden boat tells us about individuals including refugees (including Tran Van Hoang) and the bureaucrat (including Lachlan Kennedy), and their journeys and lives in the camps. Even though refugees travelled on all manner of watercraft, the fishing boat is recognised as a symbol of their passage.

It also offers information about life, leisure, labour, trade, relationships, class and power structures in refugee camps. We can extrapolate a larger story or “big” history from it and the oral histories recorded with Lachlan Kennedy and Hanh and Lien Do and others. While their experiences cannot be generalised, Hanh and Lien Do, for example, spoke about the boat as representing a “humane” story of government interaction and processes despite the trauma they personally experienced in escaping Vietnam. The pristine steel boat, fabricated in Australia around 40 years after the Tran Van Hoang, obviously represents a different era. It makes sense only in relation to its context. Located in the Prime Minister’s office surrounded by articles of government, it celebrates Morrison’s hard-line policies of offshore processing and turning back asylum seeker vessels. It invites viewers to identify with the “I” in its “I stopped these”. While my interviewees tended to look “into” the boat when recalling their own experiences, pointing out differences from their own boat, or to remember something that happened on board, the steel boat deflects human interaction.

Absences

Both the Morrison boat and the Tran van Hoang have the capacity to illuminate individual experiences of displacement despite the absence of people on either boat. In reality, the boats from Vietnam were overflowing with people. They were attacked by pirates. The boats travelled through cracking storms and high seas. They were often fabricated in secret out of found objects and constructed crudely. They creaked. The engine on Hanh and Lien Do’s boat put-putted and died soon after they left. People cried and prayed. Video footage shows boats so overcrowded that you can barely see the boat surface under the layers of people.

Lien Do vividly recalls the aborted and eventually successful trips that she embarked on. She remembers moments of quiet. Like when they realised they had been intercepted by Malaysian water police. They knew then that they would be safe. But mostly, the stories were full of noise. This was the case at the camps too, when they waited every day for the voice over the loudspeaker to announce the numbers of people that would be processed that day. One of the Lien’s proudest moments was when she directly spoke on behalf of herself and Hanh – in English – to Lachlan Kenendy, instead of through the translator.

The model boats cannot be expected to represent everything, but they are a powerful way for individuals to reflect on experiences. For Lien, for example, looking at the wooden boat noticing the absence of people reminded her of sound and silence that was part of her experience. Senior curator for migration and cultural diversity at Museums Victoria, Moya McFadzean agrees: “We are able to provide a platform for refugee voices that are often silent and absent in our historical narratives and contemporary conversations”.

I spoke to more people and heard more histories about boats. I heard a story about a multigenerational family who made their own wooden boats in response to the steel one. They did this to reclaim their experience of being boat people and to express pride. It was a form of material resistance against the Morrison boat’s invocation for Australians to stop people like them. The lack of human life on the steel boat appears more sinister in context of its text: “I stopped these”, which could equally refer to people as it might to boats. Huynh points out that it says “stopped” not “saved”.

Looked at side by side, these two model boats have a unique ability to draw our attention back to the processes, roadblocks, and conditionality associated with the experience of being welcomed – and not welcomed – in any new country. Not only do they exemplify the point that government policy is never peopleless; they provide a material focus for the petition by writer and human rights activist, Arnold Zable, for us to “never lose sight of the individual refugee, and the tales of the countless men, women and children who have chosen to make perilous journeys, risking all on a gamble for freedom” (Zable, 2015: vi).

Even though there are also no model people on the wooden boat, it bears on its side, as an important sign of human life, the name of its craftsman, Tran Van Hoang. In circling back to the biggest failure of my research journey to date – my inability to track down Tran Van Hoang the person – I realised the point of the research was (perhaps ironically) to “re-people” the boats.

Vietnamese Museum of Australia

There are many more moving parts to this ongoing research journey than I have space here to discuss in this essay. It is, however, relevant to end with one last model boat. A much larger one this time.

The Vietnamese Museum of Australia is scheduled to open in Footscray, Australia, in 2025 as the first museum dedicated to the Vietnamese refugee experience in Australia. Its architectural concept represents a massively scaled up wooden boat, like the Tran Van Hoang. The building’s design is inspired by the familiar fishing boat motif, as well as waves, bamboo, and the red earth of Australia.

In the end, I hope this discussion has shown that no single object can contain the complexity of what happened in the past, especially when it is decontextualised. Each object is a part of a bigger story that helps us learn, but all objects are necessary to that story. Museums that build and preserve collections that represent these “big” and small stories are crucial tools in facilitating deeper understandings about the journeys people made and their lives after resettlement.

Acknowledgments

This research is only possible thanks to the kind and generous participation of Hanh and Lien Do and Lachlan Kennedy and I sincerely express my deep gratitude to them. Thanks also to Eleanor Foster for research support, and to the Vietnamese Museum of Australia and Moya McFadzean at Museums Victoria for supporting the work, and to Sean Wales at SBS for covering some of the research process.

References

Balint R and Simic Z (2018) Histories of Migrants and Refugees in Australia. Australian Historical Studies 49(3): 378–409. Available here (accessed 10 May 2023)

Martins L (2021) Plant artefacts then and now: reconnecting biocultural collections in Amazonia. In Driver, F, Nesbitt M, Cornish C (eds.) Mobile Museums: Collections in circulation. London: UCL Press, pp. 21–43. Available here (accessed 10 May 2023).

Message K (2018) Museums and Racism. London and New York: Routledge. Available here (accessed 10 May 2023).

Timber Detective Agency podcast, episode. 4: “Following the boats”. In production, contact the author for release details.

Zable A (2015) Foreword. In: Neumann K (ed) Across the Seas: Australia’s response to refugees: A history. Collingwood, Victoria: Black Inc, pp. v-x. Available here (accessed 10 May 2023).

Kylie Message is Professor of Public Humanities and Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University and Research Fellow of the National Museum of Australia 2023-25. She has served on the external Advisory Board for the Vietnamese Museum of Australia from 2022.