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*. The archival research at the National Library of Australia and the National Archives of Australia in Canberra was made possible by the award of a Harold White Fellowship from the National Library in 2007-2008. I first presented this material at my Harold White Fellow Public Lecture on "Vietnamese Refugees: Perspectives and Perceptions" at the National Library on 23 September 2008. Amended versions of the material were presented at the Australian Institute of International Affairs in Canberra on 27 October 2010, the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford on 15 February 2011, and the Oxford Transitional Justice Seminar Series on 3 May 2011. My grateful thanks to Nicola Palmer, Julia Viebach, Briony Jones, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
Introduction
This article explores the intersection of official Australian records on the fall of Saigon in 1975 and government handling of Vietnamese refugees with circumstances around my family's arrival in Australia as political refugees in 1975. My research demonstrates the potentially blurred categories of researcher and subject and illuminates the dynamic interplay between an official history of events and a deeply personal experience. The analysis of formal archives is paired with a reflective positionality that allows for a closer understanding of the personal dimension and consequences of past injustice. My parents were refugees from a communist state and sought asylum in a democratic state. As transitional justice addresses the legacies of human rights violations including the displacement and resettlement of refugees in post-conflict contexts, Australian responses to the Vietnamese refugee crisis in 1975 provide a relevant case study. "Since displacement and human rights violations are integrally linked," writes Roger Duthie, "transitional justice measures have reason to respond to displacement."1Australian government responses to requests for asylum by Vietnamese refugees in 1975 provide the opportunity to examine the concept of asylum as a form of reparation for past injustice.2
The records in the National Archives of Australia and the National Library of Australia reflect the political atmosphere in Australia during the events of 1975 encompassing the collapse of South Vietnam, the end of the Vietnam War, and Australia's reception of Vietnamese refugees. While my parents arrived in Melbourne with their four young children in the winter...