Your passport contains the distilled essence of Australia. Study its images carefully during the interminable minutes in line at Immigration. Each image is a puzzle piece. Fit them together, and you will know what it is to be Australian.

Australian passport images, in order of appearance

• Parliament, featuring the largest free-standing stainless steel structure in the southern hemisphere
• A kookaburra who really wants you to know about travel insurance
• A Tasmanian devil suffering lockjaw
• Surf lifesaving chicks about to launch floaty things into the water
• A camel caravan
• A thorny devil
• A depressed wombat
• A water tank, windmill-thing and what might be a station house
• People sitting on car bonnets observing a horserace
• An even more depressed platypus
• A man being cruel to a herd of cattle
• An open-mouthed saltie
• Cricket
• A smarmy koala
• A noble dingo who definitely hasn’t eaten any babies this week
• Two scuba divers checking out coral
• Beachgoers
• A page translated into French, Australia’s unofficial second language
• A pointy-nosed chipmunk?
• A highway leading to distant hills, with trees
• A love-struck emu
• An RV hitched to a ute, maybe Uluru in the background?
• A bearded dragon who’s ready to party
• A kangaroo whose grandfather was a horse
• Two ladies in togs holding a rope in knee-deep water staring down a big wave
• A lone surfer
• A patriotic eagle, the eternal symbol of Australian freedom
• Just a regular echidna
• A rural town hotel that definitely has a pub
• A semi-truck (the designers must have been getting desperate at this point)
• A sulphur-crested cockatoo who just came out of the dryer
• Maybe a bilby?
• Girls playing rugby in skirts because females play sport too
• Another lizard-type thing – wait, is that a goanna?
• Sailboats on a harbour
• A man in an overcoat and fedora staring off towards some power lines or possibly a fence with a definite serial killer vibe
• Also a lot of plants. Give me a break, I’m not a botanist.