Doing Deals at the Billabong Bar

06/18/1993

The Australian Embassy's Billabong Bar - the hottest spot in Hanoi - is a one-stop contact shop where everyone who is anyone does business. ERIC ELLIS reports from Hanoi.

THE Vietnamese know big spenders when they see them.

And they see them in Hanoi every Friday night about 8.30pm pouring out of the Australian Embassy's Billabong Bar after three hours of power networking around the embassy pool. "Good-aye mite," offers one of the army of fast-learning hopefuls who hang on the fringe of the hottest place in town.

"You want Marlbolo, you want Coke, you want cyclo go home?" The well-charged foreigners are easy picking.

Most Australian missions around the world have a casual Friday night session but Hanoi's Billabong Bar is one where business is unashamedly encouraged, thus confirming the lament of an Australian analyst inside the compound that "we are no longer diplomats. We have become salesmen".

Inside the Billabong, business cards are dealt around like yes votes at a Communist Party Congress, confirming that Australia, which is often accused of being late into Asia, arrived early in Vietnam.

The Billabong has become an institution in Hanoi and is the envy of the non-Australian diplomatic community, particularly the French and the Japanese, who compete for commercial influence in the Vietnamese bureaucracy.

"It has developed in the way that people help each other, a bit like the Japanese do it," said Richard Martin, head of the ANZ Bank's newly minted branch.

"There's no backstabbing, no cutting down of tall poppies."

You know this, the hottest place in town, by the selection, and calibre, of party-goers.

The week the AFR was there, a "quiet session" was underway according to Austrade commissioner Denis Wholley. A hot and sweaty 250-odd crowd pushed into the tiny space alongside the embassy pool.

A sign on the embassy gate - "by invitation only" - failed to deter a posse of Swedish backpackers, who pooled resources for a raffle book of 15 chits, each ticket worth a cold can.

For hopefuls arriving cold and contact-less in Vietnam, the Billabong is a one stop contact shop.

Ho Chi Minh City may be where the business is done but Hanoi, a town of bureaucratic intrigue, is where the decisions are made.

It's the type of town where foreigners lingering in hotel lobbies steel furtive looks at one another, aching to know who you are, what you are doing, who you are seeing.

CHANCES are that later, at the Billabong, you'll find out - meeting if not the decision-makers, then certainly people who know them.

(Another way of finding out is by acquairing any hotel's guest list, readily available from reception, one wonders for how much longer. The most luminous one is the $US200-a-night ($A295) Pullman Metropole, Hanoi's only vaguely five-star hotel).

The Billabong guest list is long and weighty: David Hill, Bob Hawke, Gough Whitlam, John Button and wife Dorothy, Jeff Kennett, whatever minister is in town that week, ex-ambassadors, influence peddlers, Labor Party apparatchiks(the last two categories seemingly one and the same).

Kevin Edwards drops in occasionally, often reminiscing with former WA Deputy Premier, now Hong Kong resident, David Parker. They and the other WA Inc boys form a little social knot which other Australians in Hanoi say tends to be socially ostracised.

The Billabong bar throws up an unusual social mix.

US Department of Defence types, complete with crew cuts, in Hanoi to uncover servicemen missing in action - "the Australian Embassy is always very helpful and courteous" - rub shoulders with backpackers, one of whom this night was watering the embassy wall with recycled 333 beer.

The US military are used to the sprays from businessmen dubious about their MIA insistence and anxious to open up the Vietnamese Eldorado.

"We oughta get a couple of brass name tags made up in the market and chuck'em into the jungle," said a 22-year-old fast-learner who left Adelaide unemployed six months ago and hasn't stopped since, doing odd jobs for all the Australians setting up offices.

"That'd get them going."

A Norwegian shipping executive swaps traveller's tales with a Gordon Gekko-lookalike - replete with braces and striped 80s shirt - soundalike, Australian hotelier, who runs the Saigon Floating Hotel that used to flounder off the Barrier Reef.

The bar is graced by Eugene Matthews, a black American lawyer fluent in Vietnamese, who has positioned himself as a consultant for US business when, rather than if, Washington's economic embargo comes down.

"There aren't too many places in Hanoi where you get this concentration of foreigners," said Matthews.

"If you're tryin' to get to see someone and you know they're in town, they'll probably show up here."