We Were All Boat People Once

December 03, 2009

By Susan Merrell

Cabramatta: A Case Study

It’s been decades since the first boat people arrived in Australia. Coming from Vietnam in 1976 after the fall of Saigon they continued to enter this way into the early 1980s, with Australia taking in extra Vietnamese boat people from Indonesian refugee camps.

Cabramatta had long been a Mecca for newly arrived Australians. With migrant hostels in the vicinity and a relatively low cost of living, World War II refugees had settled there. But the suburb was to change in character irrevocably when Vietnamese migrants, mainly refugees, chose this suburb as their new home. At some stage during the 1980s the population of Cabramatta became overwhelmingly Indo-Chinese in origin.

So, with 30 years hindsight, has suspicion and hostility towards boat people been justified?

Take the Train on Platform 5

If the train from Sydney to Cabramatta is running on schedule, it’s a 51-minute journey.

For a heroin addict desperately needing a fix this journey must have seemed interminable. Yet many still took the trip during the 1980s and 1990s, knowing that in Cabramatta they were guaranteed to score and that the heroin would be cheaper and purer. It was not for nothing that the train to Cabramatta was known as the ‘Smack Express’.

Cabramatta saw a rise in violent gang culture, among which the primary business was the importation, sale and distribution of heroin. Vicious home invasions, extortion and even murder were all just another part of the culture. The gang members, meanwhile, were all young and overwhelmingly of Vietnamese origin.

Cabramatta had become the embodiment of many of conservative Australia’s immigration phobias.

Acting Superintendent Alf Sergi of the Cabramatta Police believes that opportunity fed the culture, created by economic considerations that meant both parents needed to work and were not available to exert parental control. Vietnamese youths also had links back to the Golden Triangle where most of the heroin was sourced. The success of the gangs was aided by law-abiding Vietnamese citizens’ traditional suspicion of police, something which ultimately worked to their own detriment.

‘Cabramatta, for the average person, has never been a dangerous place,’ Sergi says.
Yet while this may have been true for most people, for some Asians it was still an extremely dangerous place. The gangs exploited the inherent fear of the police and committed the bulk of their crimes within their own community, where the victims were unlikely to inform or complain.

Fairfield Councillor Dennis Huynh agrees with Sergi that youth gang culture arose in Cabramatta because of parental negligence underpinned by lack of money, a view he says has been formed by his own experiences.

Huynh says that despite growing up in Cabramatta during the gang years, he never participated in the culture because he was never given the opportunity. Huynh’s mother didn’t work and supervised her son closely. The family was fortunate, for with only one child, they had few of the economic pressures that beset larger families.

‘[Other] parents didn’t have enough time’, Huynhsays. ‘They both worked and when they came home from work they were tired.’