The surge in Vietnamese immigration to Australia was the first test for multiculturalism after the White Australia Policy ended.
Fewer than 700 Australians reported Vietnam was their birthplace in the 1971 census but that number grew to more than 80,000 15 years later.
At the most recent census in 2011 more than 180,000 Australians said Vietnam was their place of birth.
The actual number of Vietnamese-born Australians is estimated to be more than 200,000 since many people did not declare their place of birth in the national survey.
The influx of Vietnamese people to Australia came just after the Whitlam Government removed the last elements of the White Australia Policy in the 1970s.
The term refers to a series of laws that prevented people from outside Europe immigrating to Australia, starting with the Immigration Restriction Act 1901.
That law required immigrants to take a dictation test in any European language until the test was removed in 1958.
The Racial Discrimination Act 1975, which made racial discrimination illegal, came into effect during the last month of the Whitlam Government.
In the seven years ending in 1982 Australia accepted close to 60,000 Vietnamese refugees, most via plane.
While more than 2,000 Vietnamese people came to Australia in unauthorised boats in the seven years following the fall of Saigon in 1975, many more started their voyages but were killed at sea.
Various accounts, some personal, said Thai pirates often raped Vietnamese women and killed Vietnamese boat refugees, including children.
Many who stayed in Vietnam after 1975 faced harsh treatment in camps similar to the USSR's Gulag camps, the late professor of political science Rudolph J Rummel wrote in 1997.
Professor Rummel estimated the Vietnamese Government killed one million people and potentially many more in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos between 1975 and 1987.
Despite the hardships of Vietnamese people on their voyages to Australia, some Australians harnessed negative public sentiment towards the mass intake of refugees.
Several ministers of parliament and some newspapers labelled Vietnamese arrivals as queue jumpers, who were accused of carefully planning their stories to attract sympathy.
Today, 40 years after the end of the war, Vietnam is a major country of origin for Australia’s estimated residential population who were born overseas.
See Dateline's story on just one of those refugee families:
