8 - Refugees—the End of Splendid Isolation?

Summary

A.C. Palfreeman, writing on immigration to Australia, 1971–75, in an earlier volume in this series, said: “There still existed, in accord with the classical definitions of sovereignty, the belief that the nation state should retain absolute control over the composition of its population … This showed very little erosion, either through international contractual obligations or through tacit international consensus. It remained one of the most jealously guarded powers, by the older states, by the Third World and by socialist states alike. Australia’s policies should be seen against this background.” In April 1976, a small boat containing Vietnamese refugees slipped almost unnoticed into Darwin harbour. It was just one of the flotilla that had left and has continued to leave Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in April 1975, and it was the harbinger of a number of boats arriving on Australia’s northern shores in following years, bringing some 2000 ’eroders of sovereignty’ to settle here. These ’boat people’ together with those refugees arriving by the more conventional means of an intercontinental jet, numbered (by the end of 1980) some 45 000 new Indochinese settlers.