Vietnamese Boat People Essay

After the Vietnamese ’boat people’ started arriving in Australia, the Australian attitude towards refugees and asylum seekers has been very effective at integrating them.

The arrival of the Boat People of Vietnam played a huge part in Australian history. This was the turning point from when the Australians believed in the phrase Populate or Perish and only wanted to bring in English immigrants, to welcoming and helping the Vietnamese. They would stop the people of other nationalities by making near impossible literacy tests in the language that that person was least likely to know. This made sure that Australia was almost a completely white nation. When the Australian government started to realize the struggles of the Vietnamese, the lengths

they were going to to save their families and what was left of any of their belongings.
The Australian government started to see the amount of trouble the Vietnamese were in so they started welcoming small fishing boats packed with Vietnamese boat people.

The conditions on the boat were terrible and most of the immigrants went the whole trip without food or water and many died. Fraser's Government implemented a programme of controlled immigration and also started taking refugees from the camps in Southeast Asia. By 1978 Australia was involved in the Orderly Departure Program from Vietnam. Over ninety thousand Indo-Chinese refugees came to Australia in the ten years after the Vietnam War. But Australians did not take to the new policy very well at first. They had been told too much of the ‘yellow peril’ and many were fearful of what large numbers of Asians arriving would mean for Australian society. Assimilation had been government policy towards racial differences for many years, but that started to change in Australia in the late 1960s, as can be seen in the difference in the way the Indigenous peoples came to be viewed. In 1967 a referendum was held that gave the federal government shared power with the States to make legislation on behalf of the Indigenous people. This meant that Aboriginal people could no longer be restricted in their movements or kept on 'reservations' in their State. The referendum also meant that Aboriginal people were counted in the Australian Census for the first time. This meant that when the refugees from Indochina began to arrive in

the mid-1970s, they entered a country that was making a concerted effort to move towards multiculturalism.
The Vietnamese knew that they had to get away from the war and that Australia was not going to be as hostile and dangerous as Vietnam. They started making trips on small fishing boats across the ocean to Australia. On 26 April 1976, the first boatload of refugees fleeing Vietnam sailed into Darwin Harbour. Australia had lots of land and many jobs, the Vietnamese knew not much else apart from the fact that they had to get away fast. Some of the fishing boats were so cramped people would die and be left rotting in amongst the living. Also there was almost no food or water on the boat so lots of the people below deck starved to death; or near it.