Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows Lindy (Marillac Johnston) walking along a beach with the man she now knows to be her birth father. He explains how she came to be given up by her Vietnamese mother and later adopted. Lindy and her adoptive family together with her birth father, Le (Quang Chinh Dinh), are later shown in the family’s living room, where Le shows Lindy photographs of members of her Vietnamese family. Lindy’s adoptive mother is concerned that Le might want to take Lindy away as he had not signed the adoption papers. Lindy seems torn between her feelings towards her adoptive mother and father and her feelings towards her birth father.

Educational value points

• The film language used in constructing the scenes in this clip help to create a mood of tension and anxiety. The blond, adoptive parents are distanced from Lindy and her father both in appearance and in their positioning in the scenes. The setting of the opening scene on an Australian beach highlights the 'foreignness’ of Lindy’s father as well as representing Lindy’s world. Music is used to create tension, and Vietnamese music is mixed with voices that seem to call to Lindy as she views the photographs of her extended Vietnamese family.

• Four years after On Loan (1985), which features a young Vietnamese girl who has grown up within an Anglo-Celtic family, was made, Australia became a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Convention addresses, among other issues, intercountry adoption and states that priority should first be given to restoration of the child to the birth family, then placement with other family members or relatives, then care within the child’s community or country of origin. The Convention states that only after all these options have been exhausted should consideration be given to adoption of children by an unrelated family in another country.

• Lindy may have come to Australia as part of Operation Babylift, a strategy to rescue children who had apparently been abandoned during the final phase of the Vietnam War. In April 1975, when Saigon was under fierce attack from the advancing North Vietnamese forces, many thousands of South Vietnamese sought assistance from the USA to leave Vietnam. Humanitarian groups in Vietnam advocated an emergency airlift for children in their care. At least 2,000 children were flown to the USA and approximately 1,300 children were sent to Canada, Europe and Australia.

• In 1983, two years before the film was made, a study by Ian Harvey of Macquarie University on the fate of Vietnamese adoptees in Australia was published. It reported that more than 90 per cent of families who adopted Vietnamese children felt that the adoption was successful or very successful for both the families and the children. In a 2000 study by the Post Adoption Resource Centre in New South Wales, a higher level of concern was expressed by adoptees. Lindy eventually opts for staying with her adoptive family and later visiting her Vietnamese family.

• Lindy’s adoptive father says that he and his wife adopted Lindy simply because they wanted a child and could not have one. He then says that they chose a Vietnamese child when they became aware of the children made homeless by the War. In NSW alone, 4,000 applications were mailed out in response to telephone enquiries concerning the children who were airlifted out of Vietnam in 1975. Six hundred applications were filled out and returned.

• With the number of children available for adoption in Western countries decreasing, the subject of intercountry adoption continues to attract debate. Some adoption experts argue that a child should always be placed with a family where at least one member is of the same race or from the same culture as the child. Others say that the important factor is the capacity of the adoptive parents to provide the child with loving care. The process of adoption in Australia is a thorough one that involves personality tests, interviews, income reviews and references. Some couples go overseas to arrange adoption more quickly, a practice the current Australian government is trying to curb.

• The clip is from the telemovie On Loan, from the much-awarded series Winners, produced by the Australian Children’s Television Foundation (ACTF). Under the direction of Patricia Edgar, who joined the Australian Broadcasting Control Board in 1975 and later became the founding director of the ACTF, a system of regulation was introduced in 1979 to improve the production of programs made specifically for children. The ACTF was then established to develop a local children’s television production industry and to ensure that Australian children would have access to quality Australian product. The Winners series was the ACTF’s first major production and an outstanding success.