Cirrus@Austlit

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 of 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. [Author's abstract]