Anh Do

Biography

The boat in which the Do family left Vietnam in 1980 was about nine and a half metres long and about two metres wide. Forty people were aboard. In his autobiography Anh Do describes how, over five days on the Indian Ocean, they were attacked twice by pirates, and how the refugees were finally picked up by a German merchant ship.

He was three years old.

He was born on 2 June 1977 in Ho Chi Minh City. The family settled in Sydney, in the suburb of Yagoona. He finished secondary school at St Aloysius’ College in Milsons Point. At fourteen he started a small business breeding tropical fish. While in his first year of law at the University of Technology, Sydney, he opened a stall selling American Indian artefacts, and later expanded it into four franchised shops. It was at the university, too, that he met his future wife. He never took his combined Business and Law degree as far as practice. Six months before graduation, law firms offered him jobs at sixty hours a week, and he chose stand-up comedy instead. Television followed: the shows Thank God You’re Here and Good News Week, and the Australian version of Dancing with the Stars, where in 2007 he came second. He acted in films by his younger brother, the director Khoa Do, among them “Footy Legends” (2006), which he co-wrote and produced. In 2012 his television show Anh Does Vietnam was released.

His book “The Happiest Refugee” (2010) brought him several awards in 2011: Book of the Year, Biography of the Year (shared with the musician Paul Kelly) and Newcomer of the Year at the Australian book industry awards, as well as the Independent Booksellers award. Children’s books came later, among them the WeirDo series and “The Little Refugee”, the children’s version of his story, written with his wife.

From 2013 Do cut back on performing and took up painting full-time. In the Archibald Prize, Australia’s main portrait competition, he was a finalist in 2014, 2017, 2019 and 2022. In 2017 the public gave him the People’s Choice Award for his portrait of the actor Jack Charles.

From 2016 to 2021 he hosted the programme Anh’s Brush with Fame on ABC TV: while talking with a well-known Australian, he painted that person’s portrait. Critics accused him of preparing some of the portraits in advance from photographs and of getting help from his art tutor. It seems to me that this dispute shows how differently viewers and professionals read his work: for some it is a television format, for others a bid to be taken seriously as a painter.