Today, she is a prosperous entrepreneur in Sydney who races her Ferrari for fun on a Sunday. She exudes success.

And for that, she thanks the people of Glen Innes who took her in as a stranger. 

“The Glen Innes people”, she says today, “I always treasure them so much.  Families took me out on weekends. They brought food over for us.

“The people of Glen Innes are very generous and that deserves to be known in the town and everywhere else”.

When she was a refugee, a committee was formed and it sponsored her as a migrant and then paid for her schooling in the town. A couple paid the school bills and insisted on anonymity.

Le’s father had fought and died fighting for the South Vietnamese forces. On April 30, 1975, he was killed in their home town of Tra Vinh on the Mekong Delta. It was the day of the final defeat. His charred body was later found.

For the following five years, the family suffered sorely under communist rule. As former enemies, Le Thach says today, her older sisters were barred from university. The family was discriminated against and put at the back of the queue for everything by the regime. 

Le says that under the communists most of the things her mother did were against the law,. This persuaded her mother to send her and a sister out of the country. She could barely keep her big family fed so she decided to seek a better life for her children.

But escaping Vietnam was not easy. It needed money so her mother worked and worked. Her plan, kept to herself, was to send the members of her family away a few at a time to offer each of them a better chance.

She started with Le at the age of 11 in May, 1981, together with Le’s older sister and the sister’s new husband plus a brother.

They were smuggled on to a small, wooden fishing boat on which they spent eight days on high and dangerous seas before reaching a Malaysian island.

She says today that they were at the end of their food and water supplies when they reached what for them was freedom.

But land-fall in Malaysia put her and the others in her family into the refugee system – and that’s where Glen  came in. A group of citizens formed the Glen Innes Refugee Resettlement committee and sent the waif with nothing onward towards eventual, hard won success.

Her papers in order thanks to the committee in Glen Innes, she arrived in the town in 1981 without a word of English.

That’s not quite true. She says, today, that she had one word: “hello”

And soon, a second word: “banana” because a nun at St Joseph’s School where she was enrolled gave her a banana to eat and mouthed the new word to her.

The teachers in the school realised they had to teach Le Thach English, and there was, they learnt, a Vietnamese student in Armidale, studying to be a scientist. They got in touch and he gave Le a big, heavy, Vietnamese-English dictionary which she carried everywhere in those pre-internet days.

She learnt English fast and says that within two months she could communicate. 

She was bright and says that she eventually excelled at St Joseph’s school in Glen Innes.

“I started Year 6 in Glen Innes and by Year 7, I came equal first in science and first in woodwork”.

She says that whatever racism she might have experienced was tiny compared with the kindness of people in Glen Innes where she was one of very few Asians – there were a few people involved with Chinese restaurants but that was it. 

What drove her?

This is complicated but she says today that the hardship in Vietnam spurred her on. “I decided that I would never be poor. That pushed me harder and harder. I knew I had to work really hard”.

As time past, other members of her family – sisters – came from Vietnam and a nucleus of family built up in Sydney so eventually she moved there.

And thrived. She got married and she and her husband opened pharmacy stores and other types of retail stores in Westfield shopping centres.

She has eased back on that because her mother who came and died in Australia urged her not to work too hard. The work ethic was so strong that her family tried to rein it in.

She is still in touch with people from the committee that welcomed her, particularly its chairman Bruce Robertson and Ken Barker.

There was controversy in the town but the welcomers outnumbered the rejectors.

Ken Barker said: “They came from a refugee camp in Malaysia and they didn't know if anybody wanted them. And suddenly they turned up here. and they found people who wanted them and cared for them. To be wanted and care for and loved is a very basic human  need and and that's what they got when they came to Glen Innes.

“They couldn’t believe what a wonderful country it was. They wanted to know what the government wanted because we organised some social security for them and they said what does the government want us to do for this money. And we said ‘No, nothing’.

“It's for you to live on until you find a job.”

She did find a job and never stopped.

She now drives a Ferrari and goes back to Vietnam once a year to see relatives. She says the main reason is to remind her children where their roots are and where their parents came from.

For her good fortune, she thanks the people of Glen Innes. “Their generosity deserves to be known”.