In 1979, following the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, Be Ha and her husband, two children and younger sister decided to flee their homeland with the desire to find a better life.
The family lived in Sadec, about 150km south of Saigon, which felt the effects following the Vietnam War when the victorious Communists enforced a harsh crackdown on anyone seen to be in opposition to the regime.
During the post-war years, Ms Ha’s husband Dien was held captive in a hard labour prison for three years, and the family was forced to live in a small house with 17 other relatives.
With little sign of improvement, the family decided to pay their way onto a small fishing boat to escape Vietnam with 154 others.
Ms Ha recalls that the conditions progressively deteriorated on the boat after they were boarded by Thai pirates wielding machetes, who began robbing passengers of their possessions.
Faced with the possibility of death, some of the asylum seekers rebelled, which resulted in the deaths of their captors and three passengers.
The boat was at sea for a month, with the final week without food or water. Two elderly passengers died from starvation.
They were eventually rescued by the British cargo ship Entalina and they were brought to Darwin in December 1979.
Following quarantine procedures, the family decided to settle in Melbourne to start their new lives. It was there where Ms Ha decided to dedicate her life to her new homeland.
"When our whole family was settled in peace and our children were well-educated, I decided to use the rest of my life to repay and contribute to Australian society - a place that has received and given to them,” she says.
“I had a second chance to redo my life.”
Ms Ha recalls that Australians treated her and her family “very nice” and assisted where they could by providing food and water.
Ms Ha and her friends decided to form the Springvale Indo-Chinese Mutual Assistance Association in 1982, which looks to assist in the integration of other Vietnamese nationals into Australian society by running programs and English language classes.
Ms Ha was also a founder of the Hoa Nghiem Pagoda in Springvale in 1987, which was the first Vietnamese Buddhist Temple in the Southeast region of Melbourne.
Source: SBS
Her tireless efforts to the Vietnamese community over several decades saw Ms Ha has been awarded the OAM Medal of the Order of Australia in January this year.
