Law degree to transform lives

Educating influence ... the inspirational Ngoc Tram Nguyen.

A university is offering a scholarship to help students from poor backgrounds, writes Yuko Narushima.

A Cabramatta street kid who believed in the transformative power of education is the inspiration for a new law scholarship at the University of NSW.

Australians who have never met Ngoc Tram Nguyen may already be familiar with her words. Her forthright assessment of how young Vietnamese people in the suburb were judged opened a highly acclaimed 2003 film.

''They think we are low-lifes capable of nothing. They think we are finished people,'' Nguyen said.

The Finished People, directed by Koah Do, attributed the quote to a 19-year-old street kid. But Nguyen became much more. At the time of her sudden death at the age of 24, she was a mother, a UNSW research assistant and a friend to the academics now starting a scholarship in her name. The scholarship will pay for a socially disadvantaged person from south-western Sydney to study law.

A professor at the university's Kirby Institute, Lisa Maher, first met Nguyen in 1995 as part of her field research in south-western Sydney.

''She was exceptionally bright, very street savvy but, at the same time, vulnerable,'' Maher says. ''She was 'street frequenting', I guess is the best way to describe it, when people move in and out of home and spend a lot of time on the streets.''

The heroin epidemic of the late 1990s touched young people across the suburb. Teenagers were often caught between the old world of their parents' Vietnam and the new social attitudes of Australia, Maher says. They were socially dislocated while refugee parents worked long hours to establish their families in Australia.

It was Nguyen who steered the academic's health study on heroin use in a new direction, explaining why young people were hesitant to open up about their experiences.

''There were much more pressing priorities than catching blood-borne infections like hepatitis C or HIV,'' Maher says. ''People were just trying to stay alive, trying to keep the police off their backs and trying to avoid being arrested.''

She recruited Nguyen and began studying the relationship between young people with Asian backgrounds and police in Cabramatta.

Wendy Swift, from UNSW's national drug and alcohol research centre, and UNSW law dean David Dixon co-authored the paper.

The purpose of the Ngoc Tram Nguyen Scholarship is to tap in to the potential of people such as Nguyen, and will be awarded for the first time next year.

''She didn't have a lot of formal schooling but she was one of those people who have intellectual ability just blooming out of her,'' Dixon says.

''You could tell that if she was just given the opportunity to develop that, she could do anything that she wanted to do.''

Nguyen was set on becoming a lawyer. She was enrolled in a foundation course at the university and was blunt about her ambition.

''I'd like to get a degree so that what I have to say will be heard and listened to by important people who can't say that I haven't been there and done that or that I'm not educated,'' she said.

''My main aim is to help my friends and my community, maybe not straightaway but some day. At least now I can see that day.''

Source: Sydney Morning Herald