Transcript
eventually in May of 1972, Marie's passport turned up in the mail to me with her exit permit from Vietnam but I still didn't have an entry permit for her and fortunately I wasn't living in Victoria because the child welfare people here were dreadful. Anyhow, I got in touch with the authorities in the consulate, I think it was, in Sydney and they fast track things for me. They say, "Now, look, we'll have it ready for you.
You go to Vietnam, find the child and we'll have it ready for you before you come back." So off I went and I arrived there. Now, Tan Son Nhut, when I left Vietnam, was busier than Heathrow. When I got back there, you could drop a pin and hear it 50 metres away because all the Aussies had gone home apart from embassy staff and a lot of the Americans had gone home. So I got a taxi, I got wet as a shag because they had a monsoonal downpour before, just as I'm getting a taxi and I went to the only two places, or, firstly, Phu Mai hospital in Saigon. T
o describe it in simple terms, it was like big hangers full of people with every imaginable illness, injury, war wound you can... But there, there was a lady, Rosemary Taylor, an Australian lady who I think had been a nurse and somehow or other she was involved in looking after these orphans, trying to get them out to other countries and she got quite a number out. She could get six into Germany, America or France in the time she could get one into Australia.
That's how belligerent we were here. The White Australia policy. And anyhow, she wasn't there. So I've just gone in, I'm coming out thinking, "Shit, what do I do?" Now, I can't speak the Vietnamese. They only had a few words. It was sort of body language. I'm coming out their big gate and I'm about to merge into a busy crowd of people. Now, it'll be a bit like coming into a busy city street in Melbourne, the busiest, and merging into the crowd and I'm thinking, "God, what am I going to do? Do I catch a Vietnamese bus, to Vung Tau?" Very dangerous. "What the Hell am I going to do?"
And I'm just about to, someone grabbed me, "We've got your daughter at such and such a place." And I think, "Oh". It was like winning Tatts lotto 50 times over. Miraculous. That's all it can be. For the sake of maybe two seconds. And so, I got it. I was given the address. I went to this place. It was a three-story villa on the edge of the city of Saigon which was a Hell of a bustling place. I think there were about 5 million people there and I don't think there'd been a garbage run for five years. But anyhow, when I get there, I meet a lady who was an ex Mercy nun from Adelaide, named Margaret Moses.
She was looking after a small group of orphans whose adoptions had pretty well been finalised, waiting to go to whichever country and she looked after me. I went upstairs. Now, I hadn't seen Marie, as we call her, for 10 months or thereabouts. Here she was, she could sort of stand in the cot but she couldn't walk. She had some boils on her but she was okay, all right? And she was in good hands. It was about, then I realised, "Oh Hell, I've got to have an international health certificate to get her out of here" because that's how you had to travel.
A bit like you need something for COVID now and she hadn't had the smallpox vaccination or any of the others. So Margaret said, "Leave it to me". She made a phone call and apparently there was a volunteer Australian doctor working in Saigon and she said, "Go here to this address", in a taxi it was, "Go straight to the front of the queue" which got a lot of dirty looks, "He'll look after you".
I went in there, this doctor got the little girl, my daughter to be, and jab, jab, jab, whatever they did, wrote out the international health certificate and off I went hoping I could get out the next day which ultimately I did. But I get back to Margaret and then I thought, “Damn, you got to wait 14 days for the smallpox vaccination.” She said, “Give it to me”, and she made a little adjustment of the date and she let me stay there that night. I slept there that night, didn't get much sleep because I could hear howitzers going off on the perimeter of Saigon and I told her, I said, "For goodness sake, don't leave it too late.
You get your butt out of here." I said, "It's becoming very dangerous." And anyhow, next day, by about 11, I was on my way home. And I'll get back to Margaret. I didn't feel at ease until I got past the point of no return. And it was a 737, I got to Kuala Lumpur Airport. That was the first stop. I had to wait there and every time I sat down, Marie cried. Every time I stood up and I got a plastic bag with her gear in, kid under my arm, every time I stood up she was quiet. Every time I sat down, she cried. And she'd never seen glass windows in the airport. She's trying to put her finger through it.
Then eventually got to Singapore, and I thought, "Well, I've got to give this child a bath". Well, she'd never been in a bath. She'd just about crawled up the wall. This is in a hotel thing in Singapore and next day I'm on a flight out to Perth and the Singapore Airlines hosties treated me like a king, they really did. They gave me two seats and I arrived at Perth, I got the third degree there. I didn't quite understand what was going on but anyway, I caught a flight and off I went to Melbourne and it was there that I discovered that five other kids whose adoptions that had been approved out of Vietnam had been banned in Australia because of these horrible bureaucrats and somehow or other they'd smuggled these kids as far as Perth and had the media waiting.
That happened the day before I came in and had I known, maybe I wouldn't have had to go to Vietnam because Marie would've been the sixth one brought in. But anyhow, we got to Melbourne airport, taxi, straight to my in-law's place in Reservoir. And within a day we shot through. So we had no media, nothing. We just bolted and got to New South Wales, and I spent my, the rest, my time in the army there.
Now, back to Margaret, I learned later that, she stayed till the last minute and she got on that Galaxy 5A big aeroplane of the Americans which was loaded with about 90 orphans, it's a two-story airplane and it had failure, decompression failure of the back door. I think it blew out and it took some controls with it which meant they had this terrible crash landing that they eventually did and the bottom floor of this airplane, most of them got killed, including Margaret, which is just so sad. And, Rosemary Taylor stayed there. I think she went off that Free World Building in a helicopter, right at the last minute, and went back to look after orphans and so on in Thailand on the Cambodian border. She died a couple of years ago. So, if you're looking for a saint, there's two.
