Biosecurity officers at Port Kembla deal with all sorts of things; beetles, stinkbugs, stagnant water on board ships and... the vehicles from the movie Fury Road.
Yes indeed, the trucks and cars used in the most recent Mad Max film came in through Port Kembla, once filming in South Africa was over. “It’s not too often you see stuff like that come in,” said senior Biosecurity officer Kelly Tindall. “We see plenty of used cars and used trucks but we don’t see stuff like this coming through very often.”
The vehicles were kept in a closed shed away from prying eyes, as the film hadn’t been released at the time. Tindall said there was a bit of a fight to be among the lucky staff members to inspect the Mad Max fleet. “Lucky for us there was a bit of it so it took a few of us to get through it,” she said.
“There was also quite a bit of it that needed some remedial cleaning to meet our expectations so we had to go back and re-inspect those vehicles as well as with a different crew, so everybody got to have a look.”
Tindall said she wasn’t a Mad Max fan but she went to see Fury Road when it hit the cinemas because she wanted to look at the cars she’d checked out and cleaned.
What the Biosecurity officers were looking for in those vehicles was the same as for any of the cars that routinely come through the port. When a new fleet arrives and is parked at the port, officers will walk up and down every row to inspect the cars.
“People think with new cars, there can’t be anything on them,” she said. “A lot of the time they come in with with plastic covering on them and that plastic is very sticky. So during the transport they’ll often pick up weed seeds from all over the place. Sometimes, if the weather’s not great over in Europe, for example, they’ll often kick up mud in the wheel guards and we’ll get them to clean that up too.”
The Biosecurity team fall under the federal Agriculture and Water Department. Their job is to check for animals, pests, disease, plant material and seed; anything that could pose a threat to the country’s agriculture industries.
According to illawarramercury.com.au, one of the bigger threats this year has been the brown marmorated stinkbug, on some ships coming from the US or Europe. “They would be a very big horticultural pest for us,” Tindall said. “They like fruit, they like trees. They also like to hibernate in your house and they breed in big numbers so we do a lot of intervention with those ships coming out of those risk ports.”