Leaving Australia twice in thirty minutes

‘Ma’am, can you please come over here.’

In the split second it took to hear those words and realise their implication, I kicked myself. In preparation for my first international flight in more than two years, I’d been obsessed with the essentials of Covid-era travel: possession of international vaccination certificate, proof of Covid insurance and in-bound RAT booking for my destination, Fiji. I kicked myself because, for the first time, I’d forgotten to put the tools for my underwater camera housing in checked luggage.

The young man with shoulder length locks and an absence of facial hair motioned for me to move to a stainless-steel bench where my camera bag had assumed the status of a bomb about to explode. I instinctively reached down to unzip the pocket where the tools were.

‘Ma’am, you are not allowed to touch the bag.’ Did this highschooler think I was going to poke him with an Allen key or take a shifting spanner to his head? I pointed to the pocket. He removed a red and white plastic Grace Brothers bag, a leftover from the last millenium. In my eagerness to demonstrate the harmlessness of its contents, my hand involuntarily hovered over the opening.

‘Ma-am, please do not touch that.’

I looked at my watch: it was almost three hours until my flight would depart. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘so what are my options?’

‘Well, we can hold these items for you until you return. Or we can dispose of them.’

What?? This was no time to instruct the kid in the finer points of camera housings, but I wasn’t about to put up the white flag yet.

‘Sorry, that’s not going to happen,’ I said, looking him square in the eye.

He stared at me moon eyed, his mind likely ratcheting over the chapter on recalcitrant travellers in the baggage screening training manual.

‘How about I go back to the check-in counter with the tools and ask to have them put in checked luggage?’

‘Uh, let me see.’ He walked across to a woman watching items pass through the screening device. As he delivered my request, her brows started to knit in a Frida Kahlo line across her forehead. She looked in my direction and her eyes narrowed. The Cruella de Vil of baggage screening was limbering up to deploy her favourite negative. I thought how I might go about replacing the tools when I got to Fiji.

After what seemed like forever but was probably no more than half a minute, the kid walked back to the stainless-steel bench. ‘Ma’am, you can put these items in checked luggage.’

‘Great!’ It was that easy.

‘Um, Ma’am, you need to talk to Border Force over there’ – he gestured to a bank of kiosks – ‘before you can go to the departure hall.’

Five minutes ago I’d passed through one of those SmartGates that use facial recognition and ePassport technology to check one’s identity. Although I was still in the airport building, theoretically I’d left Australia. If I wanted to put my camera bag in checked luggage, I had to re-enter the country. For that, I needed the co-operation of Border Force, the arm of government that oversees the movement of international travellers.  

Border Force…two words that strike terror into a citizen’s heart. These are the people who intercept asylum seekers arriving by sea, and blow up their boats. They have the power to force travellers to hand over their phones and pass codes. Their activities are sufficiently entertaining to have sustained a TV series over 15 seasons.

I walked across to a kiosk occupied by a smiling male officer. I explained what I needed and waited for him to wave me through.

‘That fellow over there is who you need to speak to,’ my congenial interlocutor said, pointing to a tall man with thinning hair and half-moon glasses perched on the end of his nose. The man was engaged in conversation with someone – a passenger who had, perhaps, secreted a flick-knife in their alimentary canal? – and was not smiling.

I mustered my most apologetic face and moseyed on over to Mr Grimface.  

‘I’ll be with you in a minute,’ he said, mouth corners firmly planted in the downward position.

The stream of departing passengers had thickened in the last 10 minutes. I wondered how many were routinely snagged at the scanner, either unwittingly or otherwise. How many of them had handed over or thrown away their belongings for the sake of boarding their flight?

‘Okay, what is it?’

‘I need to get into the departure hall,’ I said, pointing to my camera bag and the tools which, miraculously, I was now able to handle.

‘We need to do some paperwork. Come with me.’

He led me to another kiosk where he pulled out a form with rows and columns. About ten handwritten entries had already been made on it – fellow offenders, no doubt. I tried reading the form upside down as he entered my details. His script was small and tight. A handwriting analyst would have plenty to say about it, I was certain.

‘Okay. You can go back to the departure hall now, but when you return you will have to come to one of the counters to do a manual exit.’

I was back in Australia! I checked my watch: 15 minutes lost so far, plenty of time yet. I visualised myself in the lounge with a drink in hand. Maybe two drinks.

My heart sank when I saw the queues at the Fiji Airways counter. As I waited behind a returning family with enough luggage for a small village, I remembered that my camera bag had no security. I was about to consign thousands of dollars of equipment to checked luggage with nary a lock in sight.

It took ten minutes to get to the woman who had checked my bags earlier. I was heartened by the fact that she remembered me. I inquired about gaffer tape to wrap around the bag. She disappeared behind another counter.

‘This should do,’ she said, brandishing a roll of tape used to tag luggage for its intended destination. She wrapped several strips of it over the bag, adding a few ‘Fragile’ tags for good measure. I figured a small child could unpick the lot in under sixty seconds.

I returned to the border security kiosks and made for the nearest one. The woman looked bemused as I trotted out my story. Maybe I was her first case of misplaced camera housing tools. ‘You can go now,’ she said, ‘enjoy your trip.’

I checked my watch: I’d managed to leave Australia twice in thirty minutes.