American muso Colleen Green has published a Facebook post detailing her ordeal at the hands of Australian immigration as she attempted to enter the country for a four-date tour with fellow Americans Harlem and locals Bleeding Knees Club.
In the lengthy post (which you can read in full below), Green says she was detained in Melbourne after Border Force officials searched her luggage, found records and tour merch, and became suspicious about her intentions while in Australia.
Green was travelling on a tourist visa, which she says was at the advice of her Australian promoter, Bone Soup: “The promoter of my Australian tour told me he had secured a visa for me and to just say I’m visiting friends and everything would be fine.”
Unfortunately, immigration officials looked up Green’s tour dates and pretty quickly ascertained that she wasn’t in the country just for tourism. According to Green’s post, they cancelled her visa, interrogated her, took away her belongings including her medication, kept her overnight in a detention centre and then sent her back to Los Angeles via Auckland.
(Green also says that Border Security, the show on Channel 7, asked her for permission to film “her story”; she declined.)
The mystery at the core of this fiasco is why in god’s name Green’s promoter didn’t get her the right visa. While it’s clearly possible to tour on a tourist visa (it’s certainly less hassle in the short term), it’s also not strictly legal, obviously, and leaves you open for exactly this kind of demoralising fuckaround.
Even more gallingly, a Temporary Activity visa for entertainers visiting Australia costs about $280, and has an average 10-day turnaround – not exactly difficult hoops to jump through to bring a hotly anticipated Californian garage act to the east coast.
It’s likely that Dutton‘s new and improved Border Force is clamping down on these kinds of light visa fraud, which is a real bummer for broke musos hoping to enter the country on the cheap (and the sly). It bodes particularly poorly for musicians coming in for international music conference BIGSOUND – no-one’s keen to see a repeat of this year’s SXSW, which saw plenty of international bands denied entry to the US.
O/S music mates, do us all a favour: pay the man, get the visa. We just want to see you play your shows.
Read Green’s full post here:
UPDATE:
When we reached out to Bone Soup, they told us that they were “deeply saddened” by the situation:
We are a DIY crew that loves independent music, running out of a bedroom on the smell of an oily rag. We are deeply embarrassed that in this instance we ran out of time and were unable to get the appropriate documentation together in time. Letting down an artist and having her experience what she has, as well as letting her fans down is a terrible thing. This has been a harsh lesson and we have made a mistake which we will never make again. We are doing our best to allay the situation and re-schedule a tour for the future.
They also promised that ticket holders would be refunded.
