By Emmanuel Tsigas, SBS
Oanh Nguyen is a classically trained singer and pianist. She and her husband Anh, an accomplished guitarist, are celebrating 30 years of teaching music in Australia, shortly after their arrival from Vietnam.
Refugees aboard a boat off the coast of Vietnam (Vinh Hoang)
Music students both past and present joined the Nguyens in the Sydney suburb of Bankstown to perform at a concert, many of them children enrolled at the couple’s Accelerated Centre for Education.
“The feeling is something special for this day,” Oanh Nguyen said. “I really think the greatest achievement for me is the growth and the success of the students.”
The Nguyens’ legacy is the result of a risky decision they made to board a boat on the shores of Saigon in 1983.
Following the rise of communism in Vietnam, the couple were among more than 170,000 asylum seekers who would eventually stay in the Galang refugee camp, an Indonesian island facility that operated for nearly 20 years.
With cramped conditions and limited food, Anh Nguyen said life in Galang may not have been perfect but the alternative was far worse.
“At the time I think “we have no future”,” Mr Nguyen said.
“[It] doesn’t matter what you do, you can only step up in life if first you become a Communist party member. We defied that.
“Our next generation, our children, I don’t think they should suffer such a situation. At the camp we were safe. That’s much much better than in the trauma of Vietnam.”
Family friend, Vinh Hoang, also stayed in Galang after fleeing Vietnam with little more than his camera.
Not only did he document his four day journey by boat, he was also able to take pictures during his 12 months on the island.
“They allowed us to carry on with our lives in the camp as we would normally live back home,” Mr Hoang said.
“Security was managed by the local navy and police. The running of the camp was allocated to the refugees themselves. So we divised a kind of program in order to keep the camp running smoothly.
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