We publish quality short stories, poetry, extracts from forthcoming novels, and articles and essays on topics of social, environmental and cultural significance.ISSUE NO. 112
AUTUMN 2008
ESSAY
A Joy of Wild Donkeys
There is a reference in the Old Testament to an abandoned place becoming ‘a joy of wild donkeys’. No one considered that they could become such an excessive joy in Australia. There are now about five million in the dry areas. There is a good market for their meat in China and Europe but Mexico supplies all that is wanted much cheaper than Australia. So there are five million worthless mouths helping to destroy the dry country. Donkeys eat many more plants than cattle. They stay fat when cattle are losing condition. Also they need less water, so they can travel farther than cattle for their food, up to eighty kilometres is no trouble. They are intelligent and notice when a waterhole is drying up. So they station guards at the water to stop cattle coming to water. It is an expensive and disheartening experience trying to shoot them from helicopters or on the ground at water. Stations have shot ten thousand in a year. It takes one year only for them to replenish their numbers.
They bred up from the hundreds of working donkeys released when there was no further use for them. The owners, looking at the vast expanse of country around them, muttered, ‘I can’t shoot the poor buggers. I know them all by name. I’ll just let them go.’
The donkeys did very valuable work in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. They could negotiate much rougher country than horses or camels and they could travel farther from waterhole to waterhole. They carried most of the first produce into the Kimberley. The famous Australian Agricultural Company used them on a very rough track from the Liverpool Plains down to Gloucester and they brought in muleteers from Chile to handle them. Chileans had a worldwide reputation as handlers of donkeys. They still have it. Most Chilean villages still use donkeys. Cobb and Co used mules on several of their dry Queensland routes. The mule is a sterile hybrid resulting from the mating of a male donkey and a female horse.
The house mouse is the most successful mammal, by far the most successful immigrant to all countries. They can adapt to all climates, they breed quickly. They begin breeding when six to eight weeks old; they produce five to ten at a time; the females mate again two or three days after giving birth. In six months a single pair and their offspring can produce five hundred. So they are always ready to take opportunities. Wheat was once stacked at railway sidings in jute bags twenty-one tiers high. All over the country there were hundreds of thousands of bags in these stacks. Mice would breed up in the wheat paddocks then try to get at the stacks. Corrugated iron fences were some protection but the mice usually found ways under or over. It was usual to lay poisoned grain all round the stacks. Each morning the dead mice were carted away on drays. It was not unusual to shovel up seven tonnes. A fire in bushland provides an area without competition for food. So house mice breed up and for about four years they are the dominant animal. Then native mammals recover and take over again. story of the huge numbers of rabbits in Australia is well known. Not well known is the years of careful breeding it took to establish rabbits here. The plentiful dingos, goannas, quolls and eagles found the first rabbits easy prey. Most ships carried rabbits aboard, perhaps domestic rabbits, more often the wild European rabbits because it was thought to be a good thing to let a couple of pairs go on islands to breed up and provide food for shipwrecked sailors. There were numbers of unrecorded releases along the east and southern coast of Australia. None of them thrived.
A writer calling himself ‘An Old Bushman’ wrote to a newspaper called The Yeoman and Australian Acclimatiser telling of his attempt to breed rabbits at Mount Alexander, north of Castlemaine in Victoria in 1845. There were rabbits for sale in Melbourne. Ships’ galleys were ideal places to keep animals aboard and cooks often brought a few pairs of whatever they thought they could sell. So ‘Old Bushman’ bought two pairs of rabbits and took them up to the farm that he was managing. He kept them in a hutch until he fitted up cover for them. He collected stones from his cultivation paddocks and built them into cairns in a nearby grass paddock with openings for the rabbits to run into. He built a more elaborate structure near his homestead and the rabbits liked it better. He pulled logs together in the form of a square leaving the corners open for the rabbits to run into. He covered the logs with sheets of stringy-bark then shovelled a good layer of soil on top. Soon he had so many rabbits that they were beginning to burrow on neighbouring farms. But a new manager took over who had a sensible fear of what rabbits could do and he eradicated them from the district.
The most successful and the most advertised introduction of rabbits was that of twenty-four wild rabbits brought from England by Thomas Austin of Barwon Park, Winchelsea, near Geelong in 1859. At the same time he brought in seventy-two partridges and five hares. He had been a tenant farmer in England. After he made a fortune in Australia he tried to play the part of a sporty squire. Everything was very ready for these introductions. There were aviaries for the partridges, paling-fenced paddocks for the hares and rabbits and a cottage and a shotgun for Myles, the gamekeeper, who was to take care of any hawks, eagles, goannas, dingoes and quolls which had survived enthusiastic baiting with strychnine. Austin released thirteen rabbits in long grass near the Barwon River. By 1862 his rabbits numbered thousands. Austin gave away pairs to his friends. His rabbits were breeding in many districts. By 1868 there were so many that the price of land in the Western District of Victoria had dropped by half. In 1869 one landholder reckoned that he had spent £9,500, equal to $5 million now, trying to rid his land of rabbits. He still had as many as ever.
Breeding of rabbits went on in other districts. There was a general belief that it was a good thing to have a few to shoot and that the numbers in the Western District were simply a freak of the district. Landholders spent twenty- five years in the Riverina trying to establish rabbits until they were successful. Soon there were so many in so many districts that they spread over southern Australia like a grey blanket. In the 1860s bodies known as Acclimatisation Societies set up to move animals around the world. What they wanted was a homogeneous world. Members thought it would be a marvel to hear magpies carolling in an English field or to sit under a gum tree in an Australian paddock at dusk and hear the first songs of a nightingale. A main instigator of this movement was Professor Frederick McCoy, foundation Professor of Natural Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He had worldwide recognition as a scientist. Yet he saw no difficulties with introducing animals anywhere. Not even the story of the Western District rabbits made him wary, though he was careful to point out that his society had not introduced them. In a long anniversary address to members in November 1862 he told of the successful introduction of thrushes, blackbirds, larks, starlings and canaries. They were living in the grounds of the Royal Botanic Gardens and needed no supplementary feeding. But he told tales of young men with catapults and shotguns who were attacking them. He thought that but for that interference:
There could be no doubt that those delightful reminders of our English home would even now have spread from that centre over a great part of the colony and the plains, the bush and the forest would have had their present savage silence, or worse, enliven’d by those varied and touching strains of Heaven-taught melody which, our earliest records show, have always done good to man – which, in all times have been recognised among all varieties of nations of taste, as sweetening the poor man’s labours, inspiring the poor with happiest thoughts and softening and turning from evil even the veriest brute that ever made himself drunk, or plotted ill against his neighbour. It is beyond my understanding how anybody could find the Australian
bush silent. It is alive with voices night and day. Even the trees talk.
At the end of Professor McCoy’s talk, Mr T T A’Beckett, a Member of the Legislative Assembly, proposed a vote of thanks to him. A’Beckett thought that hawks were killing as many birds as the young men. He advocated the extirpation of Australia’s hawks. The members of these societies were all eminent men. I do not think any other body of such men have ever made such fools of themselves. The Victorian society released our three worst bird pests: house sparrows; common starlings; and common mynahs. Either at the end of 1862 or the beginning of 1863 that society brought in a batch of one hundred and twenty sparrows and forty-two mynahs. The New South Wales society made a much more cautious introduction of sparrows. They brought in one pair only in 1863. In November they reported joyfully that the female had laid and was now sitting. Dr Gordon of Murrurundi took some of the offspring to his home in 1865 and they soon nested. Market gardeners throughout Victoria were having extreme trouble with insects. That seemed to happen everywhere new ground was put to work. In 1864 the Victorian society reported: ‘Hundreds of industrious farmers have even this year been ruined by the caterpillars and similar visitations must necessarily be expected. The introduction of insect-destroying birds has therefore been carefully attended to.... The thrush, the blackbird, the skylark, the starling, the chaffinch, the sparrow, the Chinese sparrow, the Java sparrow and a most active and interesting bird, the Indian mino, may now be considered thoroughly established.’
They made no attempt to study insect-eating Australian birds with millions of years experience. They distributed sparrows to eighteen agricultural centres in Victoria. Soon complaints began. The farmers could not count the insects that sparrows were eating but they could see the fruit destroyed by them. The sparrows were as bad as the insects.
McCoy deplored the attitude of the farmers. He told them that if they cut sparrows open they would find that they destroyed 4000 insects a week. Netting was cheap, he said, spread netting over the crops and leave the sparrows alone to eat insects. Nevertheless Sparrow Clubs set up all over Victoria in a vain attempt to eradicate them. By constant attention, especially by checking that sparrows are not on ships, Western Australia has kept the state free of house sparrows.
One of the first birds discussed as a desirable import was the curassow from Central and South America. They are big, showy birds and good eating. The males are black with white bellies and showy red knobs above and below their beaks. There are many species, all much alike, and it was not mentioned which curassow was brought in. Victoria had eight birds breeding in the Botanic Gardens. The birds spend most of their time in rainforest trees and come to ground for mating and nest-building. Nevertheless, it had been found in Europe that birds did well out of the trees if blackberries were planted for them. ‘So get ready for curassows’, pronounced Dr Bennett, president of the New South Wales society. ‘Plant blackberries.’ So thousands of cuttings were put in everywhere that blackberries were not growing. Curassows did not thrive. Blackberries are still thriving.
ERIC ROLLS was born into a western New South Wales farming family in 1923. In his lifetime he published twenty-one books along with many hundreds of journal articles and newspaper features. He was the Patron of the Watermark Literary Muster and died unexpectedly only weeks after the conclusion of the 2007 Muster at which he delivered this paper.
'Your Memories are your Belongings': the Narratives of Vietnamese Refugee Women
In her recent memoir Journey from the Land of No, the Iranian-American writer Roya Hakakian notes:
When you have been a refugee, abandoned all your loves and belongings, your memories become your belongings. Images of the past, snippets of old conversations, furnish the world within your mind. When you have nothing left to guard, you guard your memories. You guard them with silence.1It is this issue of silence, the silence of refugees, and in particular the silence of women, that I seek to address in my work. In one of the largest and most visible mass migrations of the late twentieth century, more than two million Vietnamese left their country after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. They settled principally in the United States, Australia, Canada and France, and Vietnamese communities exist in countries as diverse as Israel and Norway. Women form an integral part of this migration. Their story is one that remains largely unwritten. In books and edited collections on the Vietnamese diaspora, it is the accounts of men that predominate.2 As a means of redressing this imbalance, my work focuses on Vietnamese women’s narratives. In 2004 and 2005, I conducted an innovative community project on ‘Vietnamese Women’s Stories’ with the Australian Vietnamese Women’s Welfare Association in
Victoria. The project’s aims were to document Vietnamese women’s experiences as refugees and migrants, record their stories of past traumas as well as the successes and setbacks of settlement, and present their stories in both English and Vietnamese. This would add Vietnamese women’s experiences to the documentary heritage of Vietnamese migration and settlement in Australia, allow women to participate in a
community-building activity, and provide them with the opportunity to tell their stories in a safe and supportive environment. Twelve women agreed to give in-depth interviews in 2004 and 2005. My book Voyage of Hope is based on their narratives. By relating their memories and speaking of their experience of displacement, migration and resettlement, women provide a valuable window into understanding the Vietnamese diaspora. Their words serve to redress the perceived ‘silence’ of Vietnamese women in the Australian community.3
It is a difficult thing to speak about the past and to speak about loss and trauma. For this reason, I am immensely grateful to the women for their courage and generosity in sharing their past, their memories, and their stories. Loss lies at the heart of the refugee experience and my work deals with the way these women have dealt with their losses, and moved beyond them to offer stories of courage, determination, survival and hope. I chose the title Voyage of Hope because my book seeks to capture the essence of these refugees’ journeys. When refugees leave their country, they do so in the hope that they will survive their journey and flourish in a new land. The women who spoke with me are all survivors. I hope that their experiences will not only provide insights into the lives and motivations of refugees, but that they will give heart and hope to those who have been hurt or damaged by the refugee or migrant experience.
The extent of the post-1975 Vietnamese diaspora is a new phenomenon in Vietnamese history. Until then, Vietnamese communities overseas, such as the one in France, had represented a very small minority. Although war and political unrest had resulted in widespread internal displacements within Vietnam, most notably following partition in 1954, it took the collapse of South Vietnam in April 1975 and the country’s reunification under a communist regime to trigger an exodus of historic proportions.
This exodus followed increasing political repression in the south, including the internment of detainees in ‘re-education’ camps, forced relocations to New Economic Zones, restriction of educational and employment opportunities, confiscation of private property, and the nationalisation of commerce and agriculture. The regime’s campaigns against business and trade targeted Vietnam’s 1.5 million-strong ethnic Chinese minority and many fled the country. Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia in 1978 and China’s invasion of Vietnam in 1979 only exacerbated the situation, and in addition to all those who made their way to refugee camps in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong, a quarter of a million ethnic Chinese fled northwards to the People’s Republic of China and were eventually resettled there.4
Most Vietnamese escaped from their country by boat.5 The exodus proved immensely costly in terms of human lives. The losses of boat refugees alone are estimated at between 100,000 and a million over the fifteen-year postwar period.6
For the Australian component of this migration, the number of Vietnamese grew from only 1000 in 1975 to approximately 200,000 now or 1% of the Australian population. The majority live in New South Wales and Victoria and approximately a quarter are ethnic Chinese. The 2001 Census reveals that women form a slight majority or 51.6% of the total. Gathering oral narratives from Vietnamese women raises particular challenges. Firstly, many Vietnamese are reluctant to write or tell their life stories , in part because it is seen as an individualistic rather than a community-oriented activity and also because many lived for years under fear of censorship and imprisonment in postwar communist Vietnam.7 Secondly, Vietnamese women struggle even more than men in this respect since they have traditionally had less education and are expected to remain quietly in the background. And thirdly, many women were reluctant to bring their private stories into the public domain. Many experienced trauma either during or after the war and during or after their escape from Vietnam. Women were reluctant to speak of rape or abuse at the hands of pirates. And within their Australian ‘settled’ context, women also found it difficult to speak of violence or abuse within marriage.
I found that the Vietnamese women I approached, once they made up their minds to speak, did so with an astonishing honesty. I am constantly surprised about this and about the fact that women are prepared to entrust painful and difficult events in their lives to the interviewer. The women who agreed to be interviewed are doing something new and unusual. The refugee and migration experience has allowed them to reinterpret their traditional role . By agreeing to speak, women indicate that they are not only capable of articulating their stories but that they feel that they have a story to tell, and are prepared to bring it into the public domain. One woman told me that she was glad that I was writing a book. She said that she had wanted to tell her story to her daughter but found herself unable to do so. She hoped that her daughter would read my book and find out about her mother’s story that way. In this light my work serves as a bridge between the different generations.
ESSAY 27
In order to convey a sense of how powerful these hidden stories are, I will quote an extract from Phuong’s narrative, which is one of the most traumatic. Phuong left Vietnam with her two sons in 1988.8 Her recounting of events is fragmented, incomplete and initially confusing, but the sequence of events gradually becomes clearer: I took my two sons to escape with me. We went down to the Y bridge and had to pass an area where the roads were made of red clay, so we fell over many times. My niece-in-law and her daughter came with us. We stayed in that area for one night before we boarded the boat. At the beginning, everybody had to stay in the hold. After sailing for three days and three nights, we ran into pirates . They forced all of us to go up to the boat’s deck. They searched us one by one, searched every inch of our bodies to find gold. If there was no gold, they pushed the person back into the hold again. They did that three or four times. As the pirates wanted us to come out of the hold, I had to put my son onto the deck first. While I was still in the hold, they threw my child away. Yes ... threw ... into the sea. I did not see this. When I put my older son onto the deck, he saw this and he cried: ‘Mum, they threw my younger brother away.’ I went up on deck. I didn’t see him either. I only saw many men in the water clinging to the boat’s stern. The pirates forced the men to jump into the sea. People tried to cling to the stern but the pirates forced their hands open and pushed them away. Then they took the women onto the pirate ships, four women to each ship. I asked to keep my son with me. But they refused and hit me with a large piece of wood. I had to leave my older son on the boat. He was seven years old and my younger son was six years old. At that time, a pregnant woman with her child and an older man still remained on our boat. I said to the man: ‘Uncle, please look after my son. You’ll find the addresses of his father and his aunt in his pocket.’ Then I was dragged onto the pirate ship . They pulled our boat along behind their ship. I do not know what happened to the other people on the boat, whether they lived or died. When the pirate ship approached Thailand, I asked the pirates to let me jump into the sea, as on the ship they had raped me so many times that I could not bear it any longer. They gave each of us a plastic can. The four of us [four women] with four cans jumped into the sea and floated on the water. We floated from nine o’clock in the morning to twelve o’clock at night, and then we saw another Thai fishing boat. We were lucky, because the captain and his brother were religious people. They put us into the front section of the ship. Every night the seamen wanted to rape us, but the captain and his brother did not allow them to do so. We stayed on that boat for around a month, as it had just started sailing out for a fishing trip. They taught us the Thai language. We cooked for them. After one month, they took us to Thailand and freed us. Her repeated assertions that she did not see her younger son die, and
that the pirates ‘threw him away’, ‘into the sea’, but that she was not
there and still failed to see him when she went up on deck, reveal her
perturbation and distress. Her son disappeared without a trace and she
was powerless to do anything about it. The extent of her trauma is even
more marked when she revisits the story of her escape and speaks in
greater detail of the refugees’ ordeal : There were over one hundred people on the boat. All of them died, over one hundred people. At the beginning, everyone had to stay in the hold. But later I was hungry, so I climbed up to the deck for food. I saw only the sea around. I felt frightened and said to myself, ‘If I’d known this, I would never have dared to go.’ When the pirates came, they came in four or five ships . They threw the men into the sea, and dragged the women to their ships to rape . They raped me so many times that I asked them to let me jump into the sea. They said that if I jumped into the sea I would die. But I said I’d rather die in the sea than continue to be raped. We floated in the sea from nine o’clock in the morning until twelve o’clock at night. I was so frightened when it got dark. This was because there was water all around and fish and other things. The sea looks horrifying at night. I just wanted to die. When I was too exhausted, I prayed for my child [the son who had been thrown overboard by the pirates ] to pull my legs into the sea, so that I could die peacefully. I prayed to my son. I prayed for him to send a ship to rescue us. Of the four of us, two could swim, two could not. Two were Christian and the other two Buddhist . We all prayed. The four of us held on to our plastic cans and drifted in the sea. Offshore, the waves were very high. I had to press my nostrils shut and hold onto the can very tightly whenever I saw waves coming, otherwise I would have drowned. I can’t forget that experience. The memory of it still obsesses me. When I got to the refugee camp, any time I heard waves, I could not
ESSAY 29
sleep. It obsessed me and I suffered from very bad headaches.
For her as for other refugees , the sea came to signify a place of darkness and horror. Her narrative reveals the intense imagery of traumatic memory.9 As Cathy Caruth notes in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ‘to be traumatised is precisely to be possessed by an image or event’,10 and Phuong ’s trauma was underscored by continued proximity to the sea in the refugee camp. She never found her two missing sons. Today, Phuong is a homemaker. She was reunited with her former husband and had two sons in Australia. Both boys, according to her, bear an uncanny resemblance to the two sons she lost at sea in 1989. Vietnamese women’s narratives of escape stretch over a decade and are linked by two factors: the refugees ’ determination to leave their homeland ; and their hope or belief that fate would deal kindly with them.11 Although they all knew the risks and dangers involved, they were sustained by the hope that they and their families would survive the journey. Their resolve persisted in the face of earlier failed attempts, or even the known loss at sea of loved ones. The fact that women persevered with this course of action indicates the extent to which they rejected the repressive regime in Vietnam, as well as the strength of their desire to seek a better life elsewhere. The notion of luck or good fortune features in all these recollections , even the ones most expressive of loss and trauma . The Vietnamese expression co phuoc (to possess luck or good fortune) has a wider meaning referring to blessings brought about by an accumulation of good deeds, a definition based on the traditional Buddhist concept of karma . The terms emphasise the women’s thankfulness for the gift of their life and that of their family, and imply that these blessings are not only individual but collective . Phuoc is one of the three good wish symbols seen in Vietnamese households and is usually represented by a rotund male figure holding a child. The other term the women used is may mang, which simply means ‘lucky.’ The words ‘we were lucky’ acknowledge the fact that these women are all survivors , lucky to have survived the sea journey, lucky to have been rescued by other ships, lucky to have found a safe haven just before a bad storm hit, the last of their supplies ran out or their boat sank, lucky to be spared rape or further rape, lucky to have found kindness among strangers. All the women eventually reached safety after being rescued at sea. None of their boats made it directly to countries of first asylum. If they had not been rescued, whether by container ships, supply ships or fishing boats, they would most likely have perished at sea. The experience of escape itself carried a heavy emotional toll. For example, one woman who agreed to be interviewed was Anh. She was a pharmacist and escaped with her two small children, aged two and five, in 1978. More than a hundred people were crowded on their boat and once they had left Vietnamese territorial waters it began to sink. They were rescued by a Thai boat and the children had to be thrown across three or four metres to the safety of the other boat. Thirty years later Anh is still haunted by the image of her two-year-old daughter being thrown from one boat to another across a gap of water. Anh was lucky, both her children survived. For the most traumatic case detailed here, that of Phuong , luck may have spared her life, but failed to save her children, and with their deaths, much of the motivation for her escape collapses in turn. For the other women, though, these two interconnecting factors – the will to leave their country, and their belief in a benevolent fate – provide a positive foundation and framework on which to structure their narratives and help them to justify the risks that they took and the dangers that they faced when they made their escape from Vietnam.
To conclude, I will quote the words of Thy, a young woman who arrived in Australia as a one-year-old in 1980. Her family had escaped from Vietnam by boat and spent four months in a refugee camp in Malaysia. She paid the following tribute to her parents:
The greatest strength that a second-generation person can have is that they’re a child of the first generation. Child of men and women who survived a story, survived their life, full stop. If you survived what happened, you know, how life was in Vietnam after 1975, if you survived that, and the journey from Vietnam to Australia , you had to be a strong person. You cannot be weak because such a story cultivates strength, courage , and resilience in a person, and because your parents were like that, you too have to have a bit of that, because you’re a
child of those people. 12 Her words encapsulate the inspiration she has drawn from her parents and people like her parents. By ‘surviving their story ’, these strong women have now made possible its continuation, as a rich source of personal insight and historical understanding
NOTES
1 Hakakian, Roya, Journey from the Land of No, Bantam, 2004, p14.
2 My book Voyage of Hope is the first and only scholarly study of Vietnamese women overseas. It is based on the oral histories of twelve women. A number of extracts from Voyage of Hope are included here. See Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, Voyage of Hope: Vietnamese Australian Women’s Narratives, Common Ground Publishing, 2005.
3 As Mandy Thomas notes, Vietnamese women in Australia are often perceived as submissive and subservient. See Mandy Thomas, Dreams in the Shadows: Vietnamese-Australian Lives in Transition, Allen and Unwin, 1999, p 170.
4 See W Courtland Robinson, Terms of Refuge: The Indochinese Exodus and the International Response, Zed Books, 1998, p 272.
5 Of the 839,228 recorded Vietnamese arrivals in UNHCR first asylum camps between 1975 and 1997, only 42,918 were land refugees. See Robinson, op cit, Appendix 1. In addition, 134,000 Vietnamese were evacuated to the United States in 1975, and 263,000, mostly ethnic Chinese, fled to China in 1978-1979. Robinson, op cit, p 272. James Freeman and Nguyen Dinh Huu write that the 260,000 refugees who fled to China included 230,000 ethnic Chinese and 30,000 ethnic Vietnamese. See James M Freeman and Nguyen Dinh Huu, Voices from the Camps: Vietnamese Children Seeking Asylum, University of Washington Press, 2003, p 8.
6 ‘The most conservative estimates suggest a 10 per cent attrition rate, or 100,000 deaths, but other estimates put the figure much higher, at 50 to 90 per cent’ Nguyen, op cit, p 16; See also Robinson, op cit, p 59; Linda Hitchcox, Vietnamese Refugees in Southeast Asian Camps, Macmillan (in association with St Antony’s College, Oxford), 1990, p 85.
7 Schafer, John , Vietnamese Perspectives on the War in Vietnam: Annotated Bibliography of Works in English, Yale University Council on Southeast Asian Studies, 1996, p 1. URL: http://www.yale.edu/seas/bibliography/home.html.
8 Extract from Nguyen, op cit, pp 26-29.
9 ‘Traumatic memories... are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images’. Judith Lewis Herman , Trauma and Recovery, Basic Books, 1992, p 38.
10 Caruth , Cathy, ‘Introduction’, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Cathy Caruth , ed, The John Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp 4-5.
11 Extract from Nguyen, op cit, pp 31-33.
12 Extract from Nguyen, op cit, pp 144-145.
NATHALIE NGUYEN holds an ARC Australian Research Fellowship at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. After completing a BA(Hons) at Melbourne, she won a Commonwealth Scholarship to the University of Oxford, where she obtained her doctorate. Her books are: Voyage of Hope: Vietnamese Australian Women’s Narratives (2005) which was shortlisted for the 2007 NSW Premier’s Literary Award and Vietnamese Voices: Gender and Cultural Identity in the Vietnamese-Francophone Novel (2003).
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