The first time I decided to buy a piece of ‘Australian history’ was at a weekly auction in Leichardt. Before this, I had been laser focused on scouring local antique dealers and online auction sites for old Vietnamese ceramics and bronzes. To this day, I am surprised by the quantity of Vietnamese antiquities and Indochinese decorative arts that randomly appear in Australia. It seems unlikely that these cultural objects would end up here. Culturally, Vietnam was never part of the British Empire, and over the past few centuries were instead colonised by France, Japan and the United States. But here I was, looking for Vietnamese cultural maerial in the gentrified industrial suburbs of Sydney’s Inner West, when I happened on an unassuming brick. Skimming over the listings, Lot 407. was a sandstock convict brick from Tasmania, circa 1800, with a broad arrow impression. 24cm in length.

Doing a quick search on eBay, convict bricks were going for 80 to 200 dollars. But there was something about this one brick that seemed particularly compelling. It wasn’t just the burnt red or crumbling texture of this relic that caught my attention. The fact that this was an actual brick that I could pick up, hold, touch, feel; with a weight that was baked into the national mythic of convict labour and frontier struggle. This was a tangible piece of property in the crudest sense of the word.

As time approached towards the lot, I quietly moved to the back of the room. I planned on waiting for other bidders to make a move. As with most of the other small decorative items consigned to the bric-a-brac portion of this weekly auction, there was initially very little interest in the brick. I held back until the auctioneer started undercutting their own opening bid. At 30 dollars I lifted my auction slip. Someone bid 40 dollars. In response, I immediately raised 50, then 70, then 90 dollars. I noticed people looking back at me, and I felt a burning in their eyes. Why was this Asian guy interested in this lot? Usually, Asian buyers and dealers would stick to their own lane, only ever bidding on Asian ceramics, Asian carvings, Asian relics, Asian furniture, Asian arts and crafts. What right did this person have in buying a beat up and crumbling convict brick? Before I could take a step back, there was a frenzied and animated effort to outbid the Asian at the back of the room. As things slowed down, I held my nerve. I slowed my bids down until the gavel finally struck SOLD! The nineteenth century convict brick was mine for 550 dollars excluding buyer’s premium. I did the sums in my head and realised I had just spent 690 dollars on an old brick.

I learnt two things that day. Firstly, that as a Vietnamese Australian with a refugee background, I could actually own a material piece of 'Australian' cultural property. Not only that, I had in my possession a piece of overpaid convict history. The other lesson was that my presence in that room suddenly became disturbing and disruptive. For bidders who suddenly took a rabid interest in preventing this Asian person from buying their cultural property, they perhaps experienced a micro jolt and epiphany that they too could lose their cultural inheritance. Losing to someone who perhaps until that moment, had no business buying up ‘Australian’ culture.

This was a different type of imposter syndrome. Instead of buyer’s remorse, I felt the rush and tingling satisfaction of winning and beating these collectors and dealers on their own turf. I no longer felt satisfied with buying back Vietnamese antiquities. Instead, with dry mouth and clammy hands, I was thirsty for cultural appropriation.

As an Australian citizen with the paperwork, no one could legally prevent me from buying up so-called ‘Anglo-Australian culture and history’. And having grown up here, I had been indoctrinated to become profoundly more knowledgeable about the materiality and mythology of this nation, than the culture of my parents. After all, my education was shaped by The Fatal Shore, Port Arthur, Port Phillip, Port Botany. My school assignments relentlessly obsessed over the Gold Rush, the Eureka Stockade, Ned and the Federation, The White Australia Policy, Donkeys and Diggers, The Snowy Scheme, of extractive agriculture off the back of Jumbucks, of Sunburntness, of Cronulla, of Children Overboard, and even Fridge Magnets. Ironically, these foundations primed me to become a ready expert in the material archives of White Australia.

Even so, standing at the back of these auction houses, like in so many other places, I tried to avoid being noticed. Instead of being in the actual auction room, I started searching for Australiana online, through friends, and deferring to absentee bids. This covert strategy was much more economical and effective if no one could see me. Overtime, I accrued objects including one of only three known surviving leather convict hats in Australia, convict irons, a police truncheon used in the tram workers uprising at the Brisbane General Strike, Internment Camp tokens, White Australia Medallions and an invitation to the White House Rose Garden hosted by Donald Trump to honour the Honourable Scott and Jenny Morrison.

This collection has become an ongoing art project, and archive titled The Nguyen Collection of Anglo-Australian Arts. Like objects held by institutional or public collections, these objects are also being circulated amongst artists, curators, colleagues and peers for regular exhibitions, public education activities and research. Most recently, objects such as a colonial era Günter Chain have been lent to Joel Sherwood Spring for the exhibition ‘Objects testify’ at UTS Galleries; a selection of military and convict items for the exhibition ‘To Forever Ebb and Flow: Queer Time/Migrant Time’ curated by Aziz Sohail at MADA Gallery; and Masters and PhD researchers at UNSW and Melbourne University. Underlying these activities are mutual forms of trust, conversations and experimental exchanges. There is inevitably a functional chaos that arises from being artist lead, rather than a collector or institutional lead holding of quite problematic colonial materials.

Living with these objects is both exhausting and economically draining. However, the flipside of having these materials about and not completely catalogued or organised according to arbitrary categories is that the collection continues to form connections and revelations that speak to me as much as those Vietnamese items that I was trying to reclaim.

Side by side, the so-called ‘Vietnamese’ and ‘Australian’ objects in my growing collection are not that different. Both carry historic traumas and hauntings that, when left to percolate and stored together can bring up extraordinary and unexpected dialogues.

Whilst searching through some objects in preparation for an exhibition, I found an old Australian ANZAC slouch hat dated back to the War in Vietnam. Constructed of stiff rabbit felt, I lifted up the puggaree, a pleated khaki band around the crown of the hat. On the underside was an Australian Department of Defence stamp that marks all Australian defence property. I recognised the familiar broad arrow that I first spotted stamped onto the convict brick from all those years ago.

To this day, the broadarrow, a symbol of British Empire and convict labour appears on all Army issued clothing. Looking through old photos of my granddad who served in the South Vietnamese Army, I saw him wearing what looked like an ANZAC slouch hat. Doing further research into these army hats, I realised my assumptions were wrong. Instead of the Australian rabbit-felt hat, my grandad was wearing a French Army issued Le Chapeau de Brousse (modèle 1949), a cotton bush hat that was indeed inspired by the ANZAC Slouch. After the defeat of France in the decisive battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954, military equipment destined for Vietnam (including these Australian inspired French army hats) were subsequently diverted to supply the IDF in the new state of Israel.

It is through these unexpected slippages and discoveries; through the intersections of these disparate objects in my own research and the research of many others, that as a Vietnamese Australian artist, I can start to reclaim narratives missed by mainstream decolonial discourse. Rather than relying on the patronising ‘good faith’ of museums and institutions to return and repatriate cultural objects, it has been the slow but inevitable cycle of intergenerational neglect and disinterest by the children and family estates of ageing and dying collectors that has allowed people like me to access such material. Cultural discomfort, a lack of appreciation and general unwillingness to fully deal with ones’ own problematic history, has opened up unexpected opportunities for others to pick up your pieces. Eventually, there will be new collectors, new owners, new custodians, new archives—and ultimately—new narratives for these materials.