Voyage of Hope: Vietnamese Australian Women's Narratives

- Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen,
(Common Ground Publishing)

Publication date: 1 December 2005
Price: $34.95
Status: Available in Melbourne University Bookshop, as well as directly from the publisher at www.TheHumanities.com and Amazon.com.
Format: xvi + 207 pp, Paperback, 204 x 135 x 17 mm, + 14 pages containing 30 plates of B&W photographs
Subject: Women refugees – Biography
ISBN: 186335591-X

Shortlisted for the 2007 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award

Judges’ comments:
This is a work of important cultural and social history, containing amazing, often terrifying, life-stories compiled on thematic structures that never lapse into cultural clichés or sentimentality. Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen does exceedingly well to hold the narratives together.

Voyage of Hope explores the nature of exile and the state of the refugee with great empathy. Nguyen's story-gathering and storytelling skills, supported by an attentive, nuanced prose style, illuminate the Vietnamese experience. She captures the loneliness and tragedies of the émigré whilst also charting periods of colonisation and war.

Book Description:
Voyage of Hope explores the experiences and journeys of Vietnamese women who arrived in Australia as part of the massive exodus of refugees from Vietnam following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. It reveals women's memories of life in Vietnam during the French colonial period and after, throughout the war and its aftermath, and what motivated them to leave their homeland and embark on an often dangerous journey to freedom – a voyage of hope that eventually led them to a new life in Australia.

"The range and depth of these personal narratives strike resonance in the experiences of much larger numbers of Vietnamese in Australia. Yet, because this is the first time these stories have been presented in this thematic way by an expert in literary studies, herself a Vietnamese, the outcome is a beautifully written work, going beyond sociological interest to find itself a place in Vietnamese and Australian cultural history."

- Nancy Viviani, former Professor of International Politics and Dean of the Faculty of Asian and International Studies, Griffith University, author of The Long Journey and The Indochinese in Australia 1975-1995.

"In this exquisitely nuanced book, Nathalie Nguyen presents the narratives of twelve resilient women. Spanning life in Vietnam, flight, and resettlement, the stories are domestic yet devastating, contextualised by the author's sensitive historical analysis."

- Lesleyanne Hawthorne, Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, University of Melbourne, editor of Refugee: The Vietnamese Experience and author of Making it in Australia.