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.
Ashley Kalagian Blunt 