You think it’s a fair game getting a visa to Australia? Think again. For some people – like those unfortunates fleeing bombing raids and famine in Gaza – their plight is a matter of life and death. For others it is somewhat inconvenient, seeing how I got a visa 48 years ago.

I was a traveller from Copenhagen, making the rounds in South East Asia, as one did in the seventies. I soon arrived in Bali.

I immediately fell in love; with the culture, the arts, the deities. Bali had captivated me. Until my attention was diverted most deliciously by another deity, indeed a goddess: she was from Australia, twenty years old, pleasing my senses even more than the culture, the art around me.

I told her a couple of weeks after we had met, “I’ll marry you one day”. At the time she was in the back of a bemo, beeming a Mona Lisa smile at me as she went on a solo trip around the island, not to return for a month, only to set off right away back home to Queensland.

But I was smitten; “please come to Copenhagen with me.” Well, first I had to meet her parents; she had eloped once before, to America.

No problem, I’ll be there. The nearest consulate was in Singapore; bag packed, on the plane, cheap hotel just for the night, passport dropped off at the Australian consulate with my visa application just in time before closing: “come back tomorrow at midday”.

Taxi to the consulate, passport in hand back to the hotel, plane trip booked, ready to dash to the airport; I had a moment for a breather and so opened the passport to look at that visa. Instead there was a stamp: “VISA APPLIED FOR AND REJECTED”. My fellow travellers told me, I’d never get a visa with that stamp in my passport.

Not to worry; off to the German embassy, “excuse me, I need a new passport; with that stamp they’ll never …”

It seemed only reasonable to me that the consul would comply, after all this was an emergency. Long story short, I had a brand new passport the next day. Off to the Australians, back the next day, and – you guessed it – the same stamp in my brand new passport.

Was I deterred? I was a German professional advertising photographer. What do we do for a living? We solve insolvable problems; of the sort much more challenging than the issue at hand. There was only one way: I needed a new passport.

When I picked it up the next day the German consulate official said to me, “I have absolutely no idea how this happened.”

So, with my second brand new passport in two days I was on my way … to Kuala Lumpur. At the Australian consulate they were all at lunch, “come back after lunch”. Yeah, right. Or I could just sit there and pick among the persons coming back from lunch the right one: “would you by any chance be involved with issuing visas?” I know how to pick them. “Wait here,” he said, taking my precious passport with him.

The receptionist said it might take a while; I showed her my plane ticket to Australia with my departure time imminent, could I please see the officer? “No”. But I had seen the door he disappeared through. There he was, that stamp looming over my passport. Without looking up he said, “had some problems in Singapore, did you?”

I spoke to him for about ten minutes of my love story. He listened. Finally he put the stamp aside; “if you go to Australia to work, I’ll personally come and throw you in jail”. “Understood, sir.” Parents met, my goddess came to Denmark, we married, had a baby. Then came to Australia anyway.

Copenhagen was much too cold for a Brisbane girl.