Following is the text of keynote speech given by author of best-selling autobiographical books and Australia's most experienced life-writing teacher on the occasion of the 2017 Refugee week at Drummoyne Oval Pavilion, Drummoyne on 23 June 2017.

Thank you for inviting me to speak Minh Hien, and thankyou everyone for coming along tonight.

First I want to acknowledge the original people of this land, the Gadigal, who lived on and looked after this land for so many tens of thousands of years.

Let me begin with a scene between Minh Hien’s father, ‘young papa’, she calls him, and his own father, which happens early in the book, long before Minh Hien is born. In this scene, ‘young papa’ is haunted by the scenes of violence, the mob ferocity, during the independence uprising, against both the French and the old culture of the emperors: Vivid images of fires, of people smashing, breaking and screaming intensified the sharp pang in his heart. ‘Young papa’ says sadly to his father, ’Nothing is left of our heritage. ‘ But his father says to him: ‘Fill your mind with literature and your heart with kindness. These are the treasures you can pass onto your children.’

I will leave that for the moment, because I want to leap forward to 1975, the year of the fall of Saigon, the year the North defeated the South and the American left. It was a year that was also personally significant for me because it was the year I gave birth to my first son.

There is a sentence in Minh Hien’s description of that year which leapt out at me. It reads ‘Down in the cemetery, here and there, I saw the living sharing the beds of the dead.’ She goes on to say, ‘Some of the refugees had erected tents and spread bamboo mats on the graves to sleep’.

It seemed to me that this image was the most powerful symbol of the disruption of war and of the circumstances of refugees - an image of the living reduced to sleeping on graves. Of all the sad and sometimes horrific events that Minh Hien describes, somehow this image struck me the most. It brought home to me the parallel nature of our lives on this planet – that at the same time as I was living happily with my new baby, enjoying the natural world and a peaceful community, others were sleeping with their babies on the graves of the dead.

I knew about the war in Vietnam, of course, I had participated in anti-Vietnam War marches in the early 70s, but it was only in reading My Heritage that the daily effects of danger and fear, the sight of people lifting sheets over dead bodies on the street to see if it was their loved one, the scenes of parents screaming ‘Run ahead children! Run together’ as they fled ahead of bombs, the stories of an Uncle eating snakes and rats to survive, of mothers waiting for son’s who would never come home, that the daily reality of the experience was brought home to me.

The book opens and closes with the story of Minh Hien’s escape from Vietnam. She evokes the painful loss of her whole past as a 17 year old in a beautiful scene as she contemplates the home she has known all her life ‘Every piece of furniture, every tile in this room, started to speak to me.’ And then she says ‘ I looked at my parents for a long time. Mama was leaning against Papa; both were deep in their own thoughts and sorrows. They both had indeed aged so much! Seeing them like that, I felt hopeless and tremendously sad, but I kept my calm. I needed to keep my mind on the precious things I was about to leave forever. I sat for a long time, thinking, remembering and looking at Mama and Papa and every single item in the room.

We feel the loss, just as we feel the fear as she escapes in the early morning, waiting for the boat, which may or may not take her to a life of safety and peace. These pages convey so vividly what it means to leave a home, almost certainly forever – the experience of all refugees. Here in Australia we often mistakenly think refugees must be so happy to be here in peace and safety – which is true – but we forget, that to do so, they must leave everything that matters – the complex weave of personal memory, culture and family that makes us who we are.

From writing and teaching memoir for more than 25 years I know how central home and family and culture are in our sense of sense, our sense of identity – how people survive the rupture of having to flee what means most to them, fills me with admiration and respect.

But Minh Hien’s book is much more than a story of war and hardship – in fact most of her book is a celebration of the richness and beauty of Vietnamese culture. There are fascinating stories about the history of the Vietnamese language, a wonderful scene of about a human chess game where all the pieces are beautifully dressed young women, many verses of translated Vietnamese poetry, and numerous joyful celebrations such as the First month celebration of a baby’s life, the Memorial feasts of ancestors, the August Full Moon celebrations and the long and noisy festivities of Tet. At all these celebrations, of course, there is delicious and elaborate feasting – and Minh Hien describes the food so evocatively – in fact, there is so much food in this book, you will find your mouth watering as you read. My personal favourite is Papa’s mother’s goi ca, described with such attention to detail you can taster the food as you read.

These stories are often evoked with a vivid attention to the sensory details of life – for example she describes her father’s memory of his village: They sat listening to the sounds of flowing water. A soft breeze filled their nostrils with the village’s unique scent during the fifth moon, a mixture of fragrance from lotus, michelia and magnolia flowers, the strong scent of tobacco leaves and the mild salty air from the nearby ocean... They heard the songs of dawn, at first like a whisper, then a little louder, and finally like a symphony with the emerging sun the conductor, directing the roosters and birds in song. The whole village was awake. They heard the sounds of cooking and the smells of food. In the distance some buffalo boys whistled and some played flutes.

Then there are the stories and poems of Vietnamese literature – my absolute favourite is a story from 1077, a thousand year old story. In this story a General ordered a poem about defeating the enemy which was ‘written in the Book of Heaven’, to be painted in honey on the leaves of the trees. Overnight, the words were carved into the leaves by ants eating the honey, so that the next morning, the soldiers saw the poem imprinted in the leaves by the ants. They were so inspired by the words of the poem, believing they were written there by Heaven, that they defeated their enemies.

My Heritage is also a history book. Most of us probably know Vietnam’s history in vague outline, at least from the French colonial period, the struggle for independence, the rise of Ho Chi Minh, the advent of the Americans where Vietnam became an ideological battlefield between communism and capitalism, then Paris peace talks, followed by the withdrawal of the Americans, then, soon after, the fall of Saigon, then the re-education camps as the communists tried to establish their rule. But Minh Hien makes all this real in the lives of her family – we feel the heartbreak of young papa as he returns to his village to see the ancient temple, site of so many village celebrations for centuries burnt down, and we feel the loss of culture and history. We hear the story of the Uncle forced to drink poison by eager teenage ideologues, both young boys from families Uncle had helped with food and education when they were young.

We also learn of the internal refugees in Vietnam, the people fleeing from the their villages and towns, trying to find safety and food. Tired, weak, dirty and hungry they struggled along the streets, looking for shelter, looking for someone to give them some food. Many of them had stories of horrors they experienced as they escaped, soldiers pushing women and children into the sea to make room for themselves on overcrowded boats. Minh Hien’s parents took in dozens of relatives, feeding them and giving them a place to sleep. But ordinary life also continued amongst the chaos, as Minh Hien says ‘I went to school as usual.’

Through all of this we have the characters of Hien’s mother and father, both extraordinary people. Her mother worked hard all her life as a seamstress making clothes, as well as looking after an endless stream of family members and bringing up children who were not her own. It was a life of courage and selfless service to others. Her father, a cultivated and well-educated man, taught her the central guiding principles of his life, handed on from his own father. The memories of his boyhood in a North Vietnamese village evoke a way of life that has faded, but the principles have been handed down through the family.

These central principles were drawn from literature; as one of the verses he recited says ‘ ‘Treasure the old literature. The wise words will give meaning to your life’. In another poem he quotes the lines ‘Immerse your mind in poetry and literature / Clothe your body in generosity and chivalry.’ It’s one of the things I have noticed, teaching life stories over more than 25 years, that the people of Vietnamese background who come to my life writing classes, value literature. Indeed in Hanoi, there is a Temple of Literature, where I paid homage during my own trip to Vietnam. A country that has a temple of literature, in my mind, is a country with a deep well to draw on.

One of the key aspects of not just the literature, but daily practice, is the importance of symbolism. There is for example the lovely passage about Minh Hien preparing tea for her mother in a tea-set given to her mother by her own father when she was a child. Her father explained the symbolism of the seven cups and of the tray in the shape of a lotus and teapot in the shape of a painted dragon: ‘The lotus flower, he said, stands for purity and beauty and the dragon for strength and success. The tea set with the lotus flower as tray and the dragon as teapot is a symbol of success, happiness and purity. The lotus flower would stand for my mother and the dragon for my father. The lotus leaves surrounding the flower would hold the cups that would stand for my brothers and sisters. One cup would ride on the body of the dragon and that would stand for me.’

This feeling for the deep symbolism of not just stories, but of things, seems to me to be one of the most powerful aspects of Vietnamese culture. It means everything speaks; all of nature, but also ordinary household objects, even food – there is a story about Thi fruit, a fruit so sweet no-one wanted to eat it: – an old woman persuaded the fruit to fall into her bag, saying she would breathe in her fragrance but never eat her. There was a beautiful girl hidden inside the fruit who only came out when the old lady left the house. She cleaned the old lady’s house and cooked for her and then hid back in the fruit. One day the old lady hid to see what was happening, then she grabbed the skin of the fruit so the girl could not get back in. Of course the story ends with a prince arriving at the door and with ‘ they lived happily ever after’.

I was struck by a world where everything contained a story, everything was a symbol in a world that was not separate, a world that spoke to its people. No-one could feel alienated in such a world, for everyone and everything was contained in the weave of stories.

And so we return to the beginning of my talk As Minh Hien’s father explains to ‘young papa’ and years later, Papa explains to his daughter Minh Hien, ‘Remember two words, Tri and Thien. Tri, in simple terms, means using your head and Thien means using your heart. Tri and Thien are two ancient words of wisdom. Lao Tzu wrote: ‘Kindness in words creates confidence; in thinking it creates profundity; it giving it creates love, Thien means kindness or good acts which spring from your hart. Tri is intelligence which springs from your head; you need to immerse your mind in literature, seek new values and ancient wisdom by reading books and listening to the elders.’

I believe that here in Australia we have been too eager to think about both what we offer refugees, peace and opportunity, and about what problems refugees might create – fears of jobs being taken, of terrorism, of refugees not fitting in. I think it’s time to shift our gaze to the great richness that refugees bring. When people say this, they often mention diversity - which is important for everyone’s survival, but what Minh Hien brought home to me is that refuges also bring the richness of an affirmation of the values we already hold dear – let me quote Minh Hien’s father again – and here he was talking about the names he had chosen for his daughter ‘When I chose a name for you, I was thinking of a daughter who engraves on her heart a vision of striving for knowledge, seeking justice and righteousness, calmly and wisely applying her talents through clear explanations and quick thinking. Intelligence and Kindness. Head and Heart’.

It is what I hope for all of us from every background – a life of intelligence and kindness, head and heart. Thank you for sharing your story with us Minh Hien and thank you for the head and heart that you and the Vietnamese people have brought to the Australian community