Vietnamese museum pitches for new site to secure future

After an unresolved dispute on its original proposed location in Victoria's Footscray, the Vietnamese Museum Australia is now being considered for Sunshine.
Artist impression, Vietnamese Museum Australia. Image: Architecture render by Konzepte Melbourne, Supplied. A terracotta-coloured architecture shaped like a round-edged square. Text on the building says 'Vietnamese Museum Australia'. People are seen outside the museum with trees in the foreground and background of a urban landscape.

In late 2019, plans for the Vietnamese Museum Australia (VMA) were announced for Footscray in Melbourne’s inner west, an area with a rich history of Vietnamese migration and home to intergenerational diaspora communities. Land deposit was paid for 222 Barkly Street (also known as 120 Donald Street) to house the four-storey Museum. The original plan was for construction to begin 2023/2024 so that VMA could open by April 2025, in time for the 50th anniversary of the Fall of Saigon and the arrival of Vietnamese refugees in Australia.

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Celina Lei is an arts writer and editor at ArtsHub. She acquired her M.A in Art, Law and Business in New York with a B.A. in Art History and Philosophy from the University of Melbourne. She has previously worked across global art hubs in Beijing, Hong Kong and New York in both the commercial art sector and art criticism. She took part in drafting NAVA’s revised Code of Practice - Art Fairs and was the project manager of ArtsHub’s diverse writers initiative, Amplify Collective. Celina is based in Naarm/Melbourne.