Transported from a Malaysian refugee camp, we were welcomed into Christmas celebrations with burnt barbecued meat and swarms of flies.

"They were boatpeople!" read the headline in The Australian Christian, heralding our arrival, sponsored by the Ainslie Church of Christ.

Still we are boatpeople, a fact that fills us with both pride and dismay.

"Why do you discriminate against boats?" Donald Trump posed to Malcolm Turnbull in their leaked phone conversation.

Turnbull replied that anyone who comes uninvited is not allowed in Australia, even "the best person in the world".

Reflecting on my family's journey helps us to understand those who come uninvited and our thing with boats.

In 1979, four years after the war ended, food rations were imposed across Vietnam due to socialist mismanagement, US sanctions and a series of droughts and storms. Accounts had emerged of hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese soldiers and officials brutalised and starved in re-education camps. Small businesses and homes were looted by government thugs. For all the proclamations of "Independence! Freedom! Happiness!" my parents experienced only persecution and misery.

"If lamp posts could walk then they would go too," went the saying at the time. Alongside the widespread chaos and desperation to escape Vietnam, there was also secrecy, punishment and control. Everyone was watching, listening, whispering. Getting caught meant losing your life savings, banishment to a New Economic Zone, and your family being brandished as false and treacherous nguy.

So the trauma was present well before we left.

I was one-and-a-half and my brother not yet four. We were told there would be around a hundred people on the 21-metre wooden fishing boat.

There were 507.

It was crushing and numbing from day one, when we crashed into another boat, to day six, when we drifted to a tiny Malaysian island.

"We did not cry. Because we worried so much," my father revealed much later.

"Worry" doesn't seem to capture what it was like for Dad, holding my brother, exposed on the deck, entwined with sweltering limbs, the less-fortunate below, constantly thumping against the locked hatch door, crying to be let out.

The "worry" of my mother cradling me in the cabin, huddled next to a man who she later discovered had died of a heart attack. I was sick and close to death. As I spewed and shat all over her, Mum sang ancient lullabies.

The "worry" of sensing that every decision could be the difference between surviving or not; while also knowing that - when confronted by the oceans, winds, ransacking pirates and the anguished masses - your utmost efforts amounted to naught.

This is my family's origin story. It is our measure of sacrifice and love. It explains how we came to be Australians and why we studied hard, worked for so long in a bakery, and why we are so close to one another and a little distant from everyone else.

And it explains why my brother and I, to this day, don't have a birth certificate. Instead, we have UN refugee cards, which we have framed yet find hard to look at. On the cards there's a hand holding a chalkboard as if we were actors in a bizarre film, and the prominent signature of F. Gentiloni, an official whom I would very much like to meet as she/he transformed us from hopeless to hopeful: that is, into refugees.

To many officials, we were flotsam that they had salvaged from the KG1170. Indeed, in the overcrowded camp, the boat defined and organised us because foreign names are hard to remember and there are just so many Nguyens, Trans and Huynhs. And so your name and most importantly, your boat number, determined when you got food, healthcare and that all important resettlement interview.

The more time that passes the more I realise how we are still Huynhs from the KG1170, the 392nd boat to arrive on Pulau Bidong.

My father never sleeps for more than a few hours at a time. If he's awake and idle, then he's agitated. Watching TV, his fists are clenched. And if he's waiting for an appointment and unsure about what will unfold in the minutes ahead, Dad does what I call "air calculating" or "air sketching", as if he's mapping an escape.

Like many who endured hardship and loss, my mother's pantry is horribly full, because you never know. Before she goes on a holiday Mum spends days filling then refilling an open suitcase, preparing for her journey. After coming home, she unpacks in a jiffy.

When Scott Morrison moved into his Prime Minister's office, I imagine he also thought carefully about what he would pack and place on his bookcase. There are pictures of his family, football memorabilia and biblical references. But among all the meaningful knick-knacks that the PM could have displayed, he selected a glistening boat. Forged out of steel by one of his friends and constituents. A trophy proclaiming, "I Stopped These".

I wonder what the PM thought as he chose that sculpture and gazed upon it.

Perhaps he was reminded of how as immigration minister he took control of our borders?

Perhaps he thinks about how he saved lives at sea? Although there are no people on his trophy, and it says "these" not "them", and "stopped" not "saved".

We have a thing with boats.

Forty years on, Dad, my son and I are making three wooden boats. We borrowed the design from the PM's trophy which looks a bit like the KG1170.

Three boats representing three generations of our family under one roof and at home in Australia.