Japonica

Our boxes arrived a few days ago. It's been three months since they were picked up by the shipper (groupage from Canada).

Just out of curiosity...what were the ones that AQIS opened and checked? In our lot, every kitchen supply box was opened (who would ship food??) as was every box of photo albums (don't know what they were looking for there...if we had porn photos or something deviant, I don't think we'd put the pics into albums)...

And of course, the predictable box with tools was checked and the box with the jogging stroller checked.

Nothing had to be destroyed or fumigated, but I just thought the photo album thing was odd.

Anyone else have boxes opened that seemed unusual?

MartinLuther

We had a few opened. The one marked shoes was the obvious one. Another was garden stuff. I must admit we tried to make it as easy as possible for them and I think after 3 boxes they clicked that we weren't pulling a fast one.

The box marked 'Adult Videos' (i.e. videos for grown ups as opposed to 'Kids Videos') was untouched

The Bloke

Maybe they saw something odd in the scans of the boxes. If you watch Border Security, you'll see that smugglers now use doctored kitchen utensils, books etc to smuggle all sorts of things, like drugs etc. Customs can't be too careful.

moneypenny20

May have thought there could be some dried flowers in the albums, who knows, most of the time I think they just open odd ones on the off chance.

mr mover

AQIS would have been looking for , Photos with little flower momentos , ie pressed flowers , wedding bouquets , all photo albums are checked , its amazing what people forget they put in there..... nothing sinister... but it is amazing some of the things you find in photo albums....mm

Alfresco

I'm glad your prints eventually arrived.

seang

maybe they thought you were a very good looking immigrant?

(or wanted to see what a canadian looked like?)

Red_V_Roger

Curiosity … They opened our box marked ‘snow man’ probably to see why it hadn’t melted on the way (it was a big Christmas plastic light up one!)

Kooky.

Just the box marked shoes, and that came airfreight.

(The large wooden vase that had some oasis with dead plant matter in the bottom was not noticed Ditto the full waste bin with a "Do Not Pack" sticker on it )

Japonica

Yeah, I thought it was a random thing too until I put all the kitchen boxes in one area and noticed they'd all been checked as had all the photo album ones.

I provided a contents list with the shippers and each box had its own contents list fastened to the side in those plastic shipping envelopes.

Interestingly, the box marked "shoes" was not checked. Neither was the ones with the sea-shell encrusted jewelry box circa 1970 that the shippers made a big deal about and asked me to forward photos of it on to AQIS.

As for the dried flowers thing...our shipper was insistent...no plant matter whatsoever. So, I ended up ripping pages out of old travel journals that had dried flowers taped to them. And my kid's school art projects with leaves etc. remained back in Canada. I even left behind letters people had written on that handmade paper stationery that has the bits of flowers incorporated into the paper.

MartinLuther

I can see that one. They don't like Xmas decs made from bits of tree. They were probably checking it didn't have an acorn necklace or something.

Our artificial Xmas tree was another box they checked.

Pollyana

Almost every box labelled Christmas Decs gets checked I reckon, paranoia (with good reason, I will admit) about pine cones and bark.

kar-kier

I had 9 boxes of xmas decorations, plus a tree and MANY MANY MANY other boxes and not one of ours was opened!

wanderingwombat

They probably read that as "Hey man, wanna buy some ha.."

Pollyana

lucky you!!! I nearly went into open warfare with AQIS after they charged me for destruction of a hat with PLASTIC berries on it - funny now but $160 at the time I was furious. They only opened about 3 of 42 boxes, and that was in one of them.