Meet Probus Member Tuyet Drummond
24 Nov 2018
Tuyet Drummond survived the Vietnam war and she now returns regularly to visit family and friends.
Tuyet Drummond was born in Cai Be, a small rural town on the Mekong Delta in South Vietnam, situated about 107 kilometres west of Saigon (now known as Ho Chi Minh City). Her parents were farmers, and she is the second youngest of 10 children.
Tuyet was born during the Vietnam War and her father joined the Viet Minh to fight with the French, while her mother took care of the family. “We had to move around constantly to be safe,” she says. “The people in the village, including Mum, couldn’t grow any crops to eat. I didn’t have the opportunity to attend school, so I am self-taught. I lost two brothers in the war, including my youngest brother when he was only nine years old. I was also shot in the leg and almost died.”
When Tuyet was 15 the war was getting too dangerous to stay in the village, so her mother took her to Saigon to stay with her brother. She found employment as a nanny and helped support her parents. Then, when Tuyet was 19, she met a young Australian named David Drummond. David was a surveyor who went to Vietnam to help rebuild the war-torn country. He was Tuyet’s English teacher and she was teaching him Vietnamese. They were married a year later in 1970.
“Our first son was born in 1971,” she says. “By then the war was getting so intense it was very dangerous for foreigners to stay in Vietnam. The three of us came to Australia to join David’s family. Our first home was in Spring Hill, Brisbane. In 1972 our daughter was born. We made some Vietnamese friends in Brisbane (some of whom have stayed friends until today). In 1975 another son was born to complete our happy family.”
David got a job in Hong Kong in 1976 with the Mass Transit Railways to help build a tunnel across Hong Kong and Kowloon harbour. The family was there for three years.
In 1979, they came back to Australia and settled in Northbridge, but once the war was over Tuyet and David travelled to Vietnam regularly until David’s passing in 2012.
“When I was young I was not able to see all of my country,” she says. “When I was born during the war, the north and south were fighting, so we couldn’t go to the north. But recently, in 2004, my husband and I went to the north, and it is very different there. I love my country more because I can now see something more than when I was born.”
In 2015, Tuyet discovered Northbridge Probus Club and joined member Anne Arthur on the catering team.
“I really like the Club because the people there are nice and I like the couple of trips we have taken together. You get to know people and you are sharing the activities with friends,” she says. “And that really makes my life happy.”
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