Boat People: Personal Stories From The Vietnamese Exodus 1975-1996 edited By Carina Hoang, Freemantle Press, $45.
In 1979, Carina Hoang, then 16, fled her Vietnamese homeland with her younger brother and sister in a 25-metre wooden boat crammed with 373 others.
They were part of the greatest mass exodus in human history as 1.5 million South Vietnamese escaped the communists in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.
Carina now lives in Perth and her heartbreaking, but ultimately liberating book tells the stories of many of the survivors of that exodus.
They are powerful tales simply told, which triumph the human spirit and act as an important document of a terrible time in an all too recent history.
Many of the photographs are hard to take in and are interspersed with envelopes containing reproductions of official documents charting the refugees’ battles to build new lives.
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