My first job in Australia was a cleaner in a restaurant, but I just worked there for six months only and after that I gave birth to my son and six months after that I found a job at Kitly Fashions as a machinist. I started there on July 15, 1981 and I stayed there for seven years. In those seven years I did everything. I learnt to sew, but it was just for piece work only which is a very hard way to work. Unfortunately in December 1988 the company closed down, so I had lost my job. Sewing was a job I didn’t like but I had to get some money to live.

When I arrived here in 1981 I began looking for a job a little too early because I only had a little bit of English and it was very poor, so to find a job it was very hard. My vocabulary wasn’t enough for me to describe things when I needed to explain what I wanted.

In 1988, in February and after the Christmas break I started to study English, but I didn’t understand much because the level was too high for me, and six months later I found a job at King-Gee. King-Gee is a big company and they have a total of two thousand workers. I worked at their Collingwood warehouse in Melbourne.

As far as I can remember, it was a Monday when I applied for the job and the boss asked me a few questions. I nearly didn’t understand him at all, so I answered yes to everything and he laughed at my answers. He said "I’ll give you one week to try first" and I thought in my mind, thank god, because King-Gee is a big company, so I would have more benefits with them than I would with a small company.

I was the only Asian in the company, therefore I felt a little bit lonely. I had many chances to learn English because my workmates were almost all Australians except for a few Italians and Englishmen.

King-Gee was a place I felt was my second home because I was so happy to work there. My workmates were very kind, they taught me how to read English correctly. I learnt something new every day and they taught me in a friendly way – things to do with Australian culture. My workmates didn’t look down on me because my English wasn’t good enough. They often encouraged me and were patient in teaching me to read correctly. Particularly Jan, she is my lovely friend, she loved me like a sister.

In brief, working in Australia is better than in Vietnam, where I came from. This is die to the fact that we have more benefits, and my first wages were enough for my living standard. Although for the first couple of years, it was bit tough because of my poor English.