NAM TIẾNG: RECOGNISING THE CYCLIC NATURE OF COLONISATION AND DISPLACEMENT THROUGHOUT VIETNAM’S HISTORY OF OCCUPYING KHMER AND CHAM LAND ONLY TO ITSELF BE METABOLISED AND DIVIDED BY OTHERS.

Filmed on Dharawal Land that is steeped with its’ own history of frontier massacres and colonisation in suburban Sydney, we rest by Salvinia infested waters with Nguyễn Thị Kim Nhung. She recalls her distant homeland, reflecting on the cruelty of children, of waiting for migration papers, rampant development, and family breakdowns due to an ancient curse. This curse, however, is not some external evil, but the familial theft of land, and ongoing appropriation of Indigenous stories by the Kinh ethnic majority Vietnamese.

Resisting conventional narratives of Eurocentric colonisation, this documentary incorporates new research by Dr Theara Thun and Nguyen’s own family testimonies to trouble the amnesia of Vietnamese imperialism. Appropriating the term Nam Tiến – The Southern Progress – a Vietnamese equivalent to Manifest Destiny, this film reflects on the southward trajectory of the artist’s family.

Nguyen’s grandparents were Northern Bác 54. After the fall of Điện Biên Phủ, they crossed the 17th parallel in 1954, as internally displaced refugees from the North, and like many others, the family benefited from the South Vietnamese Government land grants to occupy large tracts of Indigenous Land to establish tea and coffee plantations in the Southern Highlands. Following the American-Vietnam War and reunification, the artists father, along with many others, escaped Vietnam by boat. He ended up in a refugee camp in Galang, Indonesia, and was eventually resettled on Dharawal Land in Sydney. The artist and his brother have in turn, moved even further south, both based in the Kulin Nations, Melbourne.

This southward movement is never far from the experience of colonisation as a cycle of being occupied and occupying other people’s Land. The animations by Phil Soliman are taken from 19th century French anthropological rubbings of the Nine Dynastic Bronze Urns of Thế Miếu – made by the imperial order of Emperor Minh Mạng (1822-1823) these urns celebrate the Kinh Vietnamese conquest of its’ southern territories.

Accompanying these rubbings are old Khmer Bangsāvatār texts by the Venerable Pich and the Venerable Chan. Voiced by Lea Sreng, a selection of these Cambodian Buddhist chants forensically chronicle the explicit forms of torture, violent massacres, and colonisation of Khmer Lands by Vietnamese invaders just prior to French colonisation. To this day, the untold histories of land theft, environmental exploitation, and mis-appropriation of Indigenous storylines significantly shapes the exponential economic development of Vietnam.