Anh Do - ENTERTAINER, AUTHOR, COMEDIAN, ACTOR, &
ARTIST [2 June 1977 - ] Updated 23 July 2024
Introduction
Anh Do (born 2 June 1977) is a Vietnamese-born Australian author, actor,
comedian, and artist. He has appeared on many Australian TV shows such as
Thank God You're Here and Good News Week, and was runner-up on Dancing With
The Stars in 2007. He is the brother of film director Khoa Do and has acted
in several of Khoa's films, including Footy Legends, which he co-wrote and
produced. In 2012, his TV show Anh Does Vietnam began airing. He was a
finalist in the 2014 Archibald Prize.
Anh Do and his family fled to Australia as refugees in
1980. In his 2010 autobiography, The Happiest Refugee, Do tells of
how his family survived five days in a leaky fishing boat nine and a half
metres long and two metres wide. During the trip his family and the rest of
the passengers were attacked by two different bands of pirates. The first
group stole one out of the two engines and the second group of pirates stole
the second engine, which had been broken but repaired by Anh's father using
a piece of rubber from a thong. It was reported that as the second band of
pirates left, one of them threw a gallon of water onboard which kept all but
one of the refugees alive, until they were finally rescued by a German
Merchant ship. The boat was packed with 40 Vietnamese refugees fleeing
across the Indian Ocean. "We were crammed in like sardines," he
said.
The Happiest Refugee has won many awards,
including the 2011 Australian Book of the Year, Biography of the Year and
Newcomer of the Year, as well as the Indie Book of the Year Award 2011,
Non-fiction Indie Book of the Year 2011, and it was shortlisted for the 2011
NSW Premier's Literary Awards, Community Relations Commission Award.
Did
You Know?
•Winner, ABIA (Australian Book Industry Awards) Book of the Year
•Winner, ABIA Biography of the Year 2011
•Winner, ABIA Newcomer of the Year 2011
•Overall Winner, Indie Book of the Year Award 2011
•Winner, Non-fiction Indie Book of the Year 2011
•Winner, The 2011 Nielsen BookData Booksellers' (ABA) Choice Award
Education:
Anh Do grew up in the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta. "In
1982, he started school at St. Bridget's Primary, a local Catholic school
with an abundant mix of nationalities." (Source:
The Happiest Refugee)
He won a part scholarship to attend
St Aloysius at Milsons
Point for his secondary education. His uncle was a Jesuit
and wanted the best education for Anh and his brother. He advised Anh's
parents to send him to St Aloysius - a prestigious Sydney school.
He studied a combined Business Law degree at the
University of Technology, Sydney.
Experiences
& Opportunities:
When he was 14 he started a small business breeding
tropical fish. While studying his first year of law at the University of
Technology, Sydney, he owned a stall which sold American-Indian artefacts,
which he later expanded to four franchised stores.
Six months before finishing his combined Business Law
degree, law firms offered him jobs which required 60 hours of work a week.
He opted to take up stand-up comedy instead. Since 2013 Do has cut back on
comedy to focus on painting full-time again and was a finalist in the
Archibald Prize in 2014.
He took every gig he was offered,
including spruiking fruit and vegetables in shopping malls and hosting
boxing tournaments, until he'd saved a $40,000 deposit [on a house for his
mother].
''I gave the house to her for Christmas 2000,'' recalls Do, who was then 23.
''We all cried.''
Do realised he may have a future in comedy during his final year of
university, when the law students practised their courtroom technique in
''moot courts''. ''Rather than just going through the case, I'd just make
the class laugh and I'd win because they would vote for me,'' he says.
At an ''open mic'' comedy night, a friend told Do he was funnier than the
participants, so next time Do did a five-minute stint that went well and led
to his first booking.
Did You Know?
Anh was a finalist in the
Archibald Prize 2014 for his portrait of his Dad, Tam Do.
Anh Do’s father Tam Do is a pork roll maker. ‘A few months ago my
father came to stay with me. I didn’t know he’d been in hospital
because he’d forbidden the family to tell me. He deals with problems
by conquering them first. You only hear about it afterwards. My
father taught me to fear nothing and I’ve always thought he was
invincible,’ says Do.
‘He’s had an incredible life: stared down communist soldiers, faced
starvation at sea and pirates who threatened his family. But this
time, despite his bravado, he looked vulnerable. He’d dropped to 50
kilos and when I hugged him I could feel his ribs. I spent the next
few days wondering how long this skinny, fearless man could keep
defying the odds.
‘I had everything set up to paint a famous comedian friend. But I
knew I had to paint dad. I decided to use unprimed linen because I
wanted the oil paint to bleed a shadow of my father. The main thing
I wanted to capture was dad’s physical vulnerability juxtaposed with
his defiant, untamable spirit. I painted it in a day, cried a lot
and was emotionally spent at the end.’
Born in Vietnam in 1977, Do came to Australia as a refugee with his
family in 1980. He enrolled to study law at university and fine arts
at TAFE simultaneously but dropped out of both courses to become a
comedian. Since last year, he has cut back on comedy to focus on
painting full-time again.
My father's favourite Vietnamese saying:
There's only two times in life - now and too late.
Australian
Curriculum General Capability:Literacy Australian
Curriculum General Capability:Critical and creative thinking Australian
Curriculum General Capability:Personal and social capability Australian
Curriculum Cross Curriculum Priorities: Asian Priority
Philosophy
Cooperative
Learning Activity
Teacher
Instructions:
1. Get the students to form a circle
with their chairs or directly on the floor. Everyone is to be in the circle.
Read "The Little Refugee" by Anh and Suzanne Do by asking the students to
take turns to read out loud each paragraph.
2. Set up a
Question Quadrant on the floor or on a whiteboard:
3. Get the students, in pairs, to come
up with 4 questions - one for each quadrant. The questions for thinking are
the hardest to come up with – but that is what we are aiming for. Example:
What is Hope?
4. List all the questions on the
board and put the students' names next to their question.
5. Ask the students to think about grouping the
questions - the ones that are the same or similar - together.
6. Start the discussion
with the most asked question.
7. Make sure the students follow
the rules of Philosophy in Schools:
Only one person speaks at a
time
Pay attention to the person
who is speaking
Give other people a chance
to speak
Build upon other people's
ideas
No put-downs
(Source: Phil Cam)
8. Discussion should involve students in
critical, creative and caring thinking:
Critical
Creative
Caring
give reasons
explore
disagreement
consider implications
apply criteria
weigh evidence
generate questions
raise suggestions
imagine alternatives
formulate criteria
make connections
build on ideas
listen to other's points of
view
consider other's reasons
explore disagreements considerately
build on other's ideas
explore other's opinions
help to synthesise suggestions
9. Provide Closure: Example:
Get the students to reflect in their journals a time when they felt lonely.
10. Leave the questions on the board or
copy them so that the other unanswered questions can be used in the next
lessons.
Interviewing
Anh Do(Adapted from
Oxford University Press - PDF
- only in
WebArchive)
Primary
Middle Secondary
Australian
Curriculum General Capability:Literacy Australian
Curriculum General Capability:Critical and creative thinking Australian
Curriculum General Capability:Personal and social capability Australian
Curriculum Cross Curriculum Priorities: Asian Priority
Cooperative
Learning Activity
Teacher
- for more activities see the Unit Written by Jane Sherlock - Years
9/10 English -
WebArchive Only
1.
Read The Happiest Refugee [or, The Little Refugee by Anh
Do and Suzanne Do - a Picture Book].
2. Go to
the ABC's
7.30
Report with Leigh Sales - Leigh interviewed Anh on 26th July
2011 after he had won a major literary award for The Happiest
Refugee.
4. Form a group of 3-4
students. Write three more questions each [individually] and then
share and decide which 3 questions you would put to Anh.
5. Each of you is to also
write Anh's likely responses to the 3 questions. Compare them and
decide as a group your best three answers [ they could be a
combination of your individual answers]. Base Anh's responses on
what you have learnt about him from reading The Happiest
Refugee.
Australia's
Migration Policy - what does it mean for refugees like Anh Do? A
multimodal presentation.(Source:Oxford
University Press - PDF-
only in
WebArchive)
Middle Secondary
Australian
Curriculum General Capability:Literacy Australian
Curriculum General Capability:Critical and creative thinking Australian
Curriculum General Capability:Personal and social capability Australian
Curriculum General Capability: Intercultural Understanding Australian Curriculum General Capability:
ICT Capability Australian
Curriculum Cross Curriculum Priorities: Asian Priority
Cooperative
Learning Activity
Above: Thirty-five Vietnamese refugees
await rescue after spending eight days at sea.
Photo by Lieutenant Carl R Begy.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons
1.
Working in groups of 3 - 4 students, read the
following articles and websites:
"Vietnamese refugee crisis
The
aftermath of the Vietnam War motivated many people in Vietnam to leave their
country seeking safety and a better life.
Surprisingly, few people fled Vietnam during the Vietnam War. The enormous
wave of refugees from Indochina started after the war, beginning in 1975
when totalitarian communist governments had control of Vietnam, Laos and
Cambodia and forced millions to flee. The Happiest Refugee begins
in 1976 in Saigon (current day Ho Chi Minh City). The Vietnam War has ended
and the country is in turmoil as the brutal communist government tries to
impose its new regime.
Two million
Vietnamese people became refugees. Many, like Do's family, fled their
country in small, overcrowded, substandard boats. Some boats made it to the
safety of neighbouring countries like Malaysia. Other boats made it as far
as northern Australia. However, in trying to cross the South China Sea, many
people died, the victims of unseaworthy boats and pirates. Some refugees
spent years in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, such as Thailand,
before finally being allowed to resettle in other countries like Australia.
In the ten
years from 1976, approximately 94,000 refugees from Laos, Cambodia and
Vietnam settled in Australia. Only a very small number of these, about 2,000
people, came to Australia by boat.
Australia's
migration policy
Australia has a
long history of welcoming people who have lost their homes and livelihoods,
especially through the devastation of war and harsh political regimes.
People have had to flee their homes because they fear for their lives, often
because they belong to a political, religious or cultural group that is
being persecuted in their country of origin.
Australia's
permanent migration program is divided into two main categories:
'migration',
which is for skilled migrants, migrants joining family members already
in Australia, and a small group of special eligibility migrants
'humanitarian',
which is for refugees and others in humanitarian need"
(Source:Oxford
University Press- only in
WebArchive)
ABC - The Luckiest Refugees 27th January 2014
-
WebArchive Only Wonderful stories here that are well worth
a look!
South Australia's Lieutenant Governor and
University of Adelaide graduate Hieu Van Le came to Australia in
1977 as a Vietnamese refugee. His remarkable journey to Australia is
the stuff of legend and his achievements within Australia almost as
extraordinary.
"In the
late 70s and early 80s Australia processed and received in excess of 112,000
Vietnamese refugees including those originally dubbed "boatpeople". They
were processed in Australia and Malaysia. Though the state of the vessels in
which they arrived and the dangers of their passage were matters of great
concern, nobody at that time thought to build policy platforms on the notion
that our guiding prinicple should be the targeting of "people smugglers" (ie
those renting out the boats) in order to stop the boats - as if that were to
solve the problem.
Not only did we in Australia accept this rapid inflow of asylum seekers, but
today no one could deny that our country has been cultrally enriched by this
influx. At the time the significant inflow of refugees was managed without
the need for a policy of mandatory or indefinite detention. Families were
not deliberately separated, or fathers deliberately deprived of sleep, or
sick people deliberately deprived of their medicines, before shipping them
back to the same danger they were fleeing. It was managed without the fear
and politicking we see today. Because Australians recognised the need to
deal compassionately with the aftermath of war.
Today those making a similar journey to our shores for similar reasons, be
it persecution of Christians in Thailand, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or
Iran; be it civil war in the Central African Republic or refuge from
dangerous politics in countries like Zimbabwe, find that the government of
Australia has changed since the 1980s in the style of "protection' now being
offered. Given the modest numbers it is difficult to understand why. But the
testimony of our Vietnamese, brothers and sisters will remind us, if we will
remember, that another way is possible."
(Source: WebArchive Only Paul Wallis)
2. Working
in your small group, research and create a multimodal presentation on
one of the
following topics.
Multimodal
presentation can include:
a. Comics
b. Picture books
c. PPT
d. Posters
e. Brochure
f. Newspaper item
Topics
Anh Do and
his family and their contribution to Australian Society, OR,
Hieu Van
Le's Story compared and contrasted to Anh Do's story, OR,
The Plight
of refugees in Australia Many people find the issue of refugees confusing or alarming
because of myths and misinformation. Sort through the misformation to
find the real facts. The following questions will help guide your
research.
i. How has the media represented the issue of refugees in Australia?
Research recent media coverage of asylum seekers and refugees, including
newspaper editorials, cartoons and letters to the editor.
ii. Find information and statistics about the numbers of refugees who
come to Australia and where they come from. What is happening in their
home countries to cause them to flee? What happens to some of these
families months or years after they have settled in Australia? (Source:Oxford
University Press
- only in
WebArchive)
Australian
Curriculum General Capability:Literacy Australian
Curriculum General Capability:Critical and creative thinking Australian
Curriculum General Capability:Personal and social capability Australian
Curriculum General Capability: Intercultural Understanding
Australian Curriculum General Capability:
ICT Capability
Australian
Curriculum Cross Curriculum Priorities: Asian Priority