'Integration', Vietnamese Australian Writing, and an Unfinished Boat Story

Abstract

This article contributes to the critical commentary on boat narratives through a reading of an early and little-known example of a Vietnamese Australian boat story: ‘The Whitish-Grey Dove on the Disorientated Boat’, a serialised novella which was published in Integration: The Magazine for Multicultural and Vietnamese Issues from 1994 to 1998. Focusing on this novella and the magazine in which it appeared serves two objectives: the first is to make the argument that Vietnamese Australian writing has a longer and more active history than may be commonly recognized or acknowledged and that ‘the boat’ is a significant figure in this body of writing from its beginnings; the second is to situate the novella in the context of the diverse range writing found in Integration and to argue that the literary content of this community magazine constitutes a significant body of Vietnamese Australian writing that, for both literary scholars and other interested readers, is well worth exploring.