It is comforting to know our Customs Service is alert and thorough. Arriving home from our South Sea Island odyssey, Oriana docked at the International Terminal and we were subjected to the full monty. I don’t know what they were looking for, but they peered into everything except our body cavities. In my bag I had a new camera, an electric typewriter and my electric watch that had worked for about ten hours, all bought in Suva. Apparently I had exceeded the limit and was required to pay import duty. If the watch had been working, I would have worn the useless thing and been spared.
So I was a bit miffed, more so knowing that the young man getting the once over from the adjacent officer had left Sydney with a derelict guitar in a good case and came back with a duty free Stratocaster, the old guitar now bobbing around mid Pacific. But my problem was nothing compared to Peter’s.
Attention was drawn to his raised voice as he protested. The officer’s gloved hand held a tiny dirty looking scrap of something, so tiny I couldn’t make out what it was. But it was generating grave concern among the protectors of our borders who gathered around, handcuffs at the ready.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a roach, innit!”
“I see, so its marijuana and you admit it is your property.”
“Waddaya mean ‘my property’?”
“You knew it was there. Right?”
“A course not!”
“But it was in your luggage so you must have known.”
“Listen mate,” he concluded with impeccable logic,
“If I’d a known it was there, I would a smoked it wouldn’t I!”
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Reminds me of my original entry into Australia in 1969. Ex-hubby and I arrived by freighter from the USA. We were the proud owners of permanent Aussie visas, but our eight fellow passengers were all tourists. Ship had come via Panama Canal, where we'd all purchased a good month's supply of duty-free liquor to fuel our nightly drinking sessions at sea. But two of the male passengers - young US guys whom we called 'the draft-dodgers', as that was their avowed aim in travelling overseas - had also purchased large quantities of some unidentified drug in Panama, which they didn't share but quite obviously consumed throughout the crossing. When we docked in Sydney late on a Sunday night, Australian Customs agents came on board. Hubby and I were travelling with all our worldly possessions, including several cartons of books, and Customs boffins went through each and every volume, asking numerous questions in some confusion and eventually confiscating a very high-minded ethics tome which happened to have a semi-naked statue on the cover! Then as they poured over our underwear, looking for god knows what, the two young male passengers walked right by our cabin door, carrying the remains of their weed in a bag and waving us a spirited goodbye! We had arrived in a land where literature was more suspect than drugs!
ReplyDeleteHilarious (and so is your story Chartreuse). Impeccable logic indeed.
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