Coronavirus: From refugee boat to captain in a crisis for SA Governor Hieu Van Le

SA Governor Hieu Van Le speaks about how he is using the lockdown to reinvent his role.

South Australian Governor Hieu Van Le and wife Lan enjoy gardening in the grounds of Government House. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

As Governor of South Australia, Hieu Van Le attends 900 community events a year and shakes hands with 200 to 300 people every day. “Now I can’t even shake my own sons’ hands,” he said from Government House on Adelaide’s North Terrace where he is in isolation with his wife, Lan, and a ­reduced number of staff.

“It is extraordinarily bizarre. I love people, so this is a big adjustment. I miss meeting people, I miss hearing their wonderful stories, but we all have to put our heads down so we can get through this.”

With every public event now cancelled, the Governor spoke ­exclusively with The Weekend Australian about how he was using the lockdown to reinvent his role, becoming the Premier’s eyes and ears in assessing community need.

The Governor, 66, is spending his days on the phone and online talking to community groups he would normally meet face to face to hear about the pressures they are facing, then relaying that information to Premier Steven Marshall in their weekly catch-ups.

He has been joined in the task by Lan, with whom he arrived in Australia as a refugee from communist Vietnam in 1977, the couple dividing up the phone calls to stay in touch with the 230 South Australian organisations of which they are patrons. He has also been writing and filming messages to the people of SA through the Government House website, saying he sees his role as “to amplify the key messages and to provide a calming presence in the community”. “The role and the duties have not changed but the way they are conducted has changed completely,” the Governor said.

“At a time when people feel vulnerable and scared, when people are sick, anxious about their jobs, there is a vice-regal role to help societal cohesion.”

The Governor revealed that ­because he and Lan were spending so much time cooped up at home, they had been working together on their Asian vegetable garden in the grounds of Government House, growing the various mints, basils and rare herbs essential to Vietnamese cuisine.

Hieu Van Le and wife Lan enjoy Vietnamese-style cooking. Picture: Roy VanDerVegt

“The last few weeks have been completely different where I can work remotely but then Lan and I get to have more time together. We are doing things we haven’t done for years, watching old movies, and we had a wonderful time over Easter where we cooked the food we love together in the kitchen, chicken with lemongrass from our own garden,” he said.

The Governor must still leave Government House to attend executive council meetings in person as they are constitutionally illegitimate if held remotely. The number of meetings has increased markedly with so much pandemic-inspired legislation requiring his assent.

“It’s all a bit strange, the Premier and the presiding officers meeting in a large room filled with hand sanitiser, sitting a great distance apart talking loudly about the running of the state,” he said.

The much-loved Governor is a great Australian story — he and Lan were among the original “boatpeople”, arriving with 40 other Vietnamese refugees after a treacherous voyage through monsoons and volcanic eruptions across Southeast Asia, which ended when they were found drifting off Darwin by two beer-drinking fishermen in a tinny.

Mr Le, who had excelled as a commerce student at Dalat University, politely called out to them in perfect English: “Excuse me, would you please direct us to the nearest police station?”

He succeeded in Adelaide as an accountant and his love for his adoptive homeland is such that his Australian-born sons are named Don and Kim after Sir Donald Bradman and Kim Hughes.

His love of lemongrass has a connection to his time in Adelaide at the old Pennington refugee hostel, where he and Lan lived in a Nissen hut. Tired of the hostel’s meat-and-three-veg menu, he ventured to a local fruit and vegetable store in Port Adelaide, with the fruiterer telling him: “Mate, we don’t eat grass in Australia.”

Mr Marshall on Friday paid tribute to the special role the Governor was playing: “He is an inspiration and role model for all South Australians and has made an incredible contribution to our state. I am particularly grateful for his calm and considered leadership through the COVID pandemic.”