By CAMERON LUCADOU-WELLS
LATEST: When Vu Ho lost last week’s legal appeal to keep his pet sheep Baa at his Springvale home, he faced a $200,000-plus bill.
But he has faced much worse. As he said after last Thursday’s Court of Appeal hearing: “I risked my life to get here [to Australia] so it’s nothing to lose money.”
It is extraordinary enough that Mr Ho, untrained in law and uncertain in English, produced a thorough 116-page legal submission and represented himself in court.
The submission won praise from the court’s president Justice Chris Maxwell who said: “I haven’t seen such well-directed research by an unrepresented litigant … for some time.’’
Little would people know that Mr Ho worked as an anti-communist revolutionary in Vietnam, plotting against the Viet Cong government in the 1970s, escaping from prison and avoiding pirates in his desperate fleeing by boat.
In his clandestine operation, he forged fake money and government identity cards for his colleagues to move freely around Vietnam out of the prying of the regime’s police. Outrageously, the foundry was under government control opposite Saigon police headquarters.
He built his own gun – that looked like a pen – and learnt how to make explosives.
But the revolution didn’t catch hold. He was caught by authorities for his forgeries and sentenced to four years’ jail. Mr Ho thinks he was treated lightly because his father was a communist hero, leading student revolutions in the 1960s but dying during the Tet Offensive.
Mr Ho thinks his father was shot by his superiors for rebelling against an offensive that sacrificed troops, outnumbered by thousands of American troops. His father’s legacy is sealed in a Saigon street sign.
Mr Ho made his escape from a prison jungle camp after midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1980. With guards and prisoners asleep and certain to sleep in the next morning, Mr Ho was ”in charge of security”.
“Every day I was in prison I was looking for a way out,” Mr Ho says. ”I didn’t want to be a slave.”
He fled the camp, running non-stop through the jungle for two hours despite the pain of a previously broken foot. He caught a truck to Saigon and lay low with his now ex-wife.
They and eight friends and relatives escaped Vietnam aboard a self-made catamaran comprising two small river boats. Mr Ho taught himself mechanics in trying to fix an engine for his craft.
Mr Ho carried his vessel along the jungle coast to avoid police. The party were assisted by a Thai trawler’s captain, who allowed them to hitch a ride. Unbeknown to them at the time, the captain saved them from certain death from pirates who trawled the seas between Vietnam and Malaysia.
They received refugee status from at an Australian Government mission in Thailand, allowing Mr Ho to set up his home in Springvale in 1981. He has since worked as an unassuming mechanic who charged $60 an hour labour to his friends.
That was until another authority Greater Dandenong council crossed his path, ordering the removal of his pet sheep Baa and fining him $225.
Again Mr Ho made a stand, and intends to keep fighting to the highest court in the land – the High Court.
He’s clearly not a person to be underestimated.
