Australia’s Indo-Pacific identity starts at home

At short notice, I attended a small dawn service in Dandenong this past Anzac Day – the most memorable part of the morning coming afterwards, with an invitation to join the commemorative service of Vietnamese Australian veterans at the local RSL.

The service itself was modest, but revealing. Older veterans stood beneath Australian and former South Vietnamese flags alongside younger generations whose connection to the Vietnam War now exists largely through family and inherited memory. One third-generation Vietnamese Australian spoke warmly about how Anzac Day had once felt little more than a public holiday from school, but that, with age, she had come to better understand the sacrifice and service to Australia, remembered through Anzac Day alongside her grandfather’s service and her father’s journey to Australia as a child following the war. It was an insight I had not expected to find at a suburban dawn service.

At one point, an elderly Vietnamese woman in traditional dress incorporating the colours of former South Vietnam approached us, warmly smiled at my son and pinned a metallic sprig of rosemary – emblematic of Anzac Day and notably absent from the earlier dawn service – to his jacket.

Watching on, it was difficult not to reflect on how Australia itself has changed in parallel.

The Vietnamese Australian community that emerged from the Vietnam War carried difficult memories into Australia – military service alongside Australian forces, loss of homeland, and refugee resettlement. Yet over generations, those experiences have settled naturally into Australian life rather than apart from it.

The resettlement of Vietnamese refugees following the fall of Saigon was not without domestic debate. The Fraser government’s decision to expand humanitarian intake during the late 1970s occurred amid wider public anxiety around migration and social change. Over time, however, the community that emerged from that period became increasingly woven into Australian society through gradual adaptation and participation across generations.

A former RSL president reflected on the enduring pain associated with the loss of both war and homeland, but also on how Australia had ultimately benefited from the resilience, contribution and participation of the community that emerged from that displacement.

Australia increasingly speaks of itself as an Indo-Pacific nation in strategic, economic and diplomatic terms. Less attention is given to the fact that the Indo-Pacific also exists domestically through communities shaped by the region’s wars, upheavals and migration.

This is not unique to Vietnamese Australians. Australia’s post-war identity has increasingly been shaped by communities carrying memories, traditions and histories formed well beyond its shores. Earlier generations arriving from Central and Eastern Europe experienced similar questions of belonging and social acceptance, even if those tensions are now often forgotten. The Vietnamese experience offers a more recent example of how those histories can become integrated into Australian civic life without disappearing altogether.

The service in Dandenong suggested something else as well. Becoming Australian does not necessarily require abandoning heritage or memory. Family history, participation in shared traditions, and a sense of belonging can sit comfortably alongside one another across generations.

These things rarely emerge through policy alone. More often, they develop gradually through lived experience – schools, workplaces, sporting clubs, local communities and national commemorations. Shared traditions create continuity between different histories while reinforcing common belonging.

Anzac Day itself reflects this evolution. What began primarily as remembrance tied to Gallipoli and the First World War has gradually expanded into something broader: a civic tradition capable of accommodating many different pathways into Australian identity. In Dandenong, that included descendants of those displaced by the Vietnam War standing comfortably within the same commemorative space as descendants of earlier Australian military generations.

There was no sense that one history displaced another. If anything, the opposite seemed true. The stories reinforced each other. Sacrifice, migration, service, loss, settlement and belonging had become intertwined rather than separate.

That was the quiet insight from a suburban dawn service in Dandenong. As Australia becomes increasingly Indo-Pacific in composition as well as geography, that continuity may matter more than we yet appreciate.