Transnational and Transgenerational Families and Histories: The Vietnamese in Australia

Australia was one of the top four Western resettlement countries for Vietnamese refugees who left their country as part of the Cold War diaspora following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. The Vietnamese community in Australia grew from 1,000 people in 1975 to 334,785 in 2021 or 1.3 percent of the Australian population. It is the largest refugee community and the fourth largest Asian community in Australia. Drawing from a key national oral history collection on second-generation Vietnamese in Australia, this paper will examine the accounts of two cousins, one male and one female, born twenty years apart. Their grandfather was a prominent public figure in South Vietnam, and this paper will analyse their reconstruction of their family history, articulation of the process of remembrance, transnational connections with family members in North America and Europe, and their negotiations of their family legacy and their identities as Vietnamese Australians.