Praeger Publishers

Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora is the product of a project financed by the Australian Research Council and undertaken by Nathalie Huynh Chau Nguyen, herself a refugee. Between 2005 and 2008 she and two co-workers (Boitran Huynh-Beattie and Thao Ha) recorded confidential oral testimony from forty-two Vietnamese women living in Australia, who are referred to only by their first names. They come from a range of different backgrounds, in terms of age, class and district, but all of them fled war and political upheaval before prolonged and painful transitions to Australia. Their narratives cover generations of war and its aftermath, from the French and Japanese occupations to American intervention and the 1975 fall of Saigon, and life in re-education camps thereafter. Many of the women made multiple escape attempts before reaching Australia – fourteen, in one case.

‘It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place,’ declared Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament in April 1653. ‘Ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government … In the name of God, go!’

Leo Amery, a Conservative backbencher, brought Cromwell’s final six words into the House of Commons on 7 May 1940. He was unsure whether he would use them in the debate over Norway, where British and French forces were withdrawing from the first major land confrontation of the war. Colonial Secretary in the Conservative governments of the 1920s, Amery was a passionate advocate for the British Empire and strongly anti-communist. In the 1930s he became a tough critic of his own party’s appeasement of Nazi Germany. Speaking late in the debate, Amery felt the House was with him, and he ended his speech as Cromwell had done. Neville Chamberlain survived the division, but not the collapse in support from a fifth of his backbench, galvanised by Amery and others.