Suddenly I’m Not an Australian

About three weeks ago my passport was stolen. I would not have realised it had gone, except that the overseas development aid organisation that I’m registered with as a volunteer e-mailed to say an overseas client was interested in my working with their group. I looked for the passport. Hunted everywhere. It didn’t help that I had moved, in February, from a large home where I’d lived for thirty years to a much smaller one, where things still lay around in boxes waiting to be unpacked. 

I had gone overseas in July and August on another volunteer assignment, but returning home—my memory of this was vivid—I had put my passport, with the sheet of paper with my photocopied airline tickets, Medicare and credit card details, driver’s licence, and so on, in the unlocked night-stand drawer.

There had been painters. But surely tradesmen weren’t interested in passports.

Then I remembered the warnings about identity theft.

I reported it missing on the Department of Foreign Affairs website. There is a cold clarity to websites; you cannot over-react, panic, or really make mistakes. When you finish, you hope that wherever your report goes, some human being on the other end will take the necessary steps to assist you. I could also make an application for a new passport online.

There was just one hitch, a major one.

I had married an American army officer in 1973 and, with the Vietnam War in full swing at the time, the US authorities were taking no chances that anyone less than ideal would sneak into the Land of the Free as a serviceman’s bride. I needed to supply character references from the local constabulary, the local parish priest (thank you, Father O’Reilly, enjoying your just rewards in heaven), medical checks by the expensive doctors specified by the embassy, and of course, surrender all my documentation.

My father had to guarantee that, should my husband be killed in combat, I would not be a burden to the American taxpayer.

I stubbornly clung to my Australian passport, pointing out that, as a journalist, I needed it for my work, and as I was unable to qualify immediately for a US passport, it would be unfair, unjust and undemocratic to take it away from me.

Reluctantly, after many phone calls to superiors and after much worried teeth tapping with her pen, the clerk at the US Consulate General in Sydney (a Southerner, like my new husband) handed me back the passport. The look she gave me spoke volumes; I didn’t deserve to live in the USA and I probably didn’t deserve to be married to an American war hero either, one who had won both the Silver Star and Purple Heart in ’Nam. That was 1973.

I had previously renewed passports, several times, without fuss or alarm. This time, it seemed, was different. Now I needed proof of citizenship.

My parents, Ceylon Dutch Burghers, had held British passports. When war came to the island, my father was an engineer at the British naval base of Trincomalee. He’d helped to man the anti-aircraft guns as waves of Japanese Zeros swept low over the base in a surprise raid and pilots in various states of disarray raced to their planes to take on the attackers. He’d enjoyed telling the story of the young pilot who’d raced from shower to cockpit in a flash: “He must have been an Australian, a Brit would have stopped to put on his trousers.”

My mother, nursing in London, had been whisked back to Ceylon where her fluency in three languages, Sinhala, Tamil and English, propelled her into administration at the headquarters of the Supreme Commander, Lord Mountbatten. 

Unfolding my parents’ yellowing Australian citizenship certificates, signed with the dashing flourish of the then Immigration Minister, Dame Annabelle Rankin, I thought of their lives, their war, their arrival in Australia last century. 

After I had held on for about twenty minutes on the Immigration information line, a gentle-voiced woman called Rahida said, calming my fears, “Don’t worry, we will sort this for you, you need to fill in the form and bring a cheque or money order for sixty dollars to our office. Someone will see you, but we are very, very busy, you understand.”

The 119 form, in the section which was relevant to my case, needed the signature of a witness who had known me for ten years or longer, and needed to be one of a long list of professions including dentist, accountant, member of the defence forces or a federal public servant. Oh yes, I thought, remembering my thirty or so years toil as a federal public servant in several of Australia’s larger departments, and took the form to my friend Di, a former DFAT officer who had been Australia’s Ambassador to Nepal.

Her pen poised, ready to sign, she scanned the fine print again and stopped. “Oh God, it says the person must be currently employed. That cuts me out. I’m retired, like you.”

We thought of former colleagues who might be called upon to vouch for me. Many, like us, had retired and left Canberra, heading for the south coast or Queensland. Others, unknown to us, had died. 

Close to panic, I visited the office of a senator I had known in my journalistic past life. A staffer, who looked like someone’s teenage son (he may well have been someone’s teenage son!) consulted, came back and said, “The House is sitting, but there’s a five-minute slot in his schedule. If you take the forms in, he’ll sign them.”

I hiked up to Parliament House to see the senator, clutching the forms and the required set of passport pictures. Unflappable, affable and kind, he met me in the vast Marble Hall and signed the forms. “I’ve known you for at least twenty years,” he said, as he gave them back to me.

Almost sobbing with relief, I walked down the hill to the bus stop, which had been moved from its previous location for security reasons, narrowly avoiding a Commonwealth car hurtling its parliamentarian passengers away to the airport.

Next morning I was at the department’s Braddon office, armed with forms, passport photographs, birth certificate, parents’ naturalisation certificates, my marriage and divorce papers, from Madison County Court in Jackson, Tennessee, and pay slips from the Department of the Attorney-General.

The other two ladies in the waiting area were also Australian, though one had an English accent and both, like me, were elderly and nervous.

I sat down in front of an officer with electric-blue fingernails, and, hoping desperately to ingratiate myself, told her I used to work for the department and mentioned a former colleague, hoping desperately that she, too, had not retired or died.

She seemed to soften slightly, and smiled. “Before my time, I’m afraid.”

But as she checked my documentation, the electric-blue fingernails were efficiently tapping her keyboard. “Kirribilli?” she enquired, and again I almost sobbed with relief. Somehow, somewhere in the bowels of bureaucracy, I was documented, I was no longer Not An Australian. I had first applied for a passport while flatting in Kirribilli, working at Fairfax as the lowest form of journalistic life possible, a C-grader. In Sydney, in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, mini-skirts, and the Pill, when the most exotic foreigner was Kamahl in a caftan, crooning to the ladies of the Bankstown Leagues Club.

“Okay, that’s all I need, we’ll call you in ten to fourteen working days time,” blue nails said.

I hastily shoved my papers, all those necessary documents, proof of a past life, into the plastic folder and exited through the automatic glass doors. Remembering, with foreboding, what a French newsman once quipped over coffee, “All zees people coming in,” he said. “Soon, not Australia—Australistan.”