Major change being made to the Australian passport application process
While Australians can renew their passports online, the process to obtain a new passport requires Australians to either apply online then lodge an application in person at Australia Post, or complete a paper application and lodge it a post office.
Soon Australians will be able to apply for a new passport online without having to go into a post office making it easier and quicker for people to apply for a passport digitally, DFAT said in a statement to 2GB.
Licensed Post Office Group executive director Angela Cramp told 2GB the change had been years in the making and was expected to be introduced in the coming year.
Ms Cramp said some Australians still relied on face-to-face contact and wanted to make sure their passport application was lodged at an Australia Post office so a person could check they had the correct documents.
For some people, applying for a passport was a very stressful experience because they were worried about having the correct documents or not getting their application approved, she added.
'Most people do want to come and make sure that their passport is lodged at a passport at a post office, and we check all the documents for them,' she told 2GB.
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ABC News
28 minutes ago
- ABC News
The forgotten adventurer who kayaked 50,000km around the world
When German Oskar Speck came ashore on tiny Saibai Island in the Torres Strait, he was greeted by three Australian policemen and the cold shock of arrest. It was September 1939, and the kayaker had just spent seven years paddling from Germany to Australia, an astonishing 50,000-kilometre journey down rivers and across oceans in his collapsible kayak. But instead of receiving a hero's welcome, he was arrested and sent to Victoria, where he was interned at a wartime camp in Tatura. The world had changed since Speck had begun his voyage in 1932. Just three weeks before his arrival, his country, led by Adolf Hitler, had invaded Poland and was now at war with France and Britain. But why did Speck spend years navigating long stretches of rough ocean water on a kayak made for leisurely river paddling? And what happened to him after he was arrested? Born in 1907 in a village near Hamburg, Speck's life following World War I was difficult. He'd been forced to leave school at 14 and began working at a time when Germany was grappling with the harsh penalties imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. Along with millions of other Germans, Speck soon found himself unemployed. In a 1987 interview with SBS journalist Margot Cuthill, he described this period as "catastrophic". But lured with the promise of work in the copper mines of Cyprus, he came up with a solution that combined his interests in geology and kayaking. "I owned a collapsible boat and was a member of a boating club," he told Cuthill. Despite not knowing how to swim, Speck packed his kayak, drove to the southern German city of Ulm and began paddling the Danube River towards the then-Yugoslavian border. Speck's kayak was nothing like the modern fibreglass kayaks that are common today. Made from laminated rubber and canvas, its light wooden frame allowed it to be taken apart for travel on the train or the bus. It was named Sonnenschein — German for sunshine. Speck paddled through Austria and Hungary, passing cities like Vienna and Budapest before reaching the Yugoslav-Bulgarian border. "Then the Danube started to get boring and I had heard that nobody had ever sailed down the Vardar in Macedonia before. So, I decided to paddle to Skopje in Macedonia and become the first," he told Cuthill. He eventually reached the port city of Thessaloniki in Greece. Here he learned that "faltboots" — folding boats like the one he was using — were "not built for the sea". "Take just one wave wrong and your boat will spin sideways. You'll turn over and be swamped. Your first capsize on the open ocean will be your last," Speck told the Australasian Post in 1956. But he learned new skills that would help him sail and paddle the kayak in ocean waters as opposed to the river. He was forced to hug the coast so he could sleep on land each night, which meant enduring long open-water crossings between islands that sometimes lasted 34 hours. By the time Speck reached Cyprus, his original idea of working in the copper mines had lost its appeal. "I wanted much more to make a kayak voyage that would go down in history. It was about now that I first said to myself, 'Why not Australia'?" he told the Australasian Post. Meanwhile, Back home in Germany, Hitler was busy brutally establishing his dictatorship. According to Penny Cuthbert, curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum, Speck then completed his first extended ocean crossing, paddling two days across open water without sleep until he reached Syria. He applied for permission to travel through the Suez Canal but was denied. So he folded up his kayak and caught a bus to the Euphrates River instead. Once there, he paddled through the Syrian city of Raqqa, Iraq's capital Baghdad and the southern port town of Basra. According to Vanity Fair, on the Euphrates and along the Persian Gulf, the river's shoreline was "so barren that just finding food and water became a serious problem". For 14 days he didn't see a single person and survived on dates growing on the riverside's trees. At one point, gale winds forced him onto a tiny island for a week. His only company was a decomposing corpse that had washed ashore. Then his boat was stolen. "Somebody must have seen me landing, pulled my boat into the water and disappeared. "There I sat, wearing only my shorts, no passport, no money, no luggage, no boat, nothing," he told Cuthill. The culprits turned out to be the police themselves, who led him back to his boat after Speck offered to pay them a substantial bribe. A sponsorship with the Pioneer Folding Boat Company meant Speck had access to replacement crafts throughout his journey. He also had a little bit of financial help from his family. But Speck mostly lived on his wits, raising money by giving talks and writing articles. When he reached the Persian Gulf, he hugged the coast of Iran but a bad case of malaria forced him to pause his voyage. As soon as he felt better, he set off for today's Pakistan, rounding the southernmost cape of India before going around Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and through the Bay of Bengal. Life on the water had become an "endless monotony of paddling", and Speck's body longed for sleep. But when he would stop for the night, it took a long time before he could unlock his hands, which were welded into their gripping posture on the paddle. His kayak was originally a two-seater but had been modified to a six-seater, so he had to use a special technique to store his clothes, maps, food and water. But what exactly did he eat? According to Cuthill, most villagers were happy to welcome him by slaughtering a chicken in his honour. On board he carried coconuts, tins of sardines and meat, as well as tinned condensed milk, which he would sip as he paddled. By the time Burma (today's Myanmar) appeared on the horizon in April 1936, Speck had been paddling for four years. His family was tired of sending him money. They wanted him to come back to work in the new Germany, now industrialising and rearming as a totalitarian Nazi state. In a letter back home, Speck retorted that making the longest solo kayak paddle in history was doing enough for the new Germany. "It would have worked out for him so well to go back," Cuthill tells ABC Radio National's Rewind. "He would have been celebrated, there would have been books made about him, he would have been [Joseph] Goebbels' little pet. "He didn't go back." Some photos show Speck flying a swastika on his kayak, a symbol used by Nazis and their sympathisers but Margot Cuthill says it wasn't because Speck was a Nazi. In September 1935, the Nazi flag became the only national flag in Germany, so he sailed under a German flag. After paddling through Burma, Thailand and then the Malay Peninsula to Singapore, Speck travelled through Indonesia, island by island. Over the course of his journey, he'd been given great hospitality from local villagers, but suddenly something went terribly wrong. On the island of Lakor he was attacked by locals armed with knives and machetes. According to Cuthbert, he tried to defend himself with an unloaded pistol, but was overwhelmed and eventually tied up with buffalo hide, his boat and possessions plundered. Despite being beaten until he was semi-conscious, Speck managed to escape, reaching his boat and paddling all the way back to Surabaya in East Java for medical attention. But when he was well enough to resume his journey, the Dutch East Indies authorities wouldn't allow him to travel the southern coast of New Guinea, instead forcing him to go the long way around. In September 1939, Speck finally rounded the eastern tip of New Guinea after braving huge surf, sharks and crocodiles. Bill O'Donnell, who was 10 years old at the time, was looking out of his school window on Samurai Island when he saw Speck arrive aboard his kayak. "He stayed with us that night, had dinner. During the evening, Dad tuned into Germany on the shortwave radio and it was the first time I ever heard Hitler make a speech," he says "He was carrying on in full voice and Oscar Speck apparently wasn't terribly interested. And then we farewelled him at about 7am the following morning off the beach." Speck soon after arrived in Daru only to be told that World War II had begun and that he was now an enemy. He was ordered to proceed to Thursday Island, located north of Cape York Peninsula in Far North Queensland. Authorities felt it only fair to let him continue into the Torres Strait so that he could finish his voyage in Australian waters. So from Daru, he was able to get to the island of Saibai. Once there, he was greeted by three Australian police officers who congratulated him on his trip and then placed him under arrest. Australia by then was at war with Germany. "They were very friendly and very polite and everything, but I was declared a prisoner of war," Speck told Cuthill. He was transported via Thursday Island to the Tatura internment camp in Victoria. The Australian government arrested citizens born in enemy countries, even if they had done nothing wrong, and housed them in camps like the one in Tatura. Speck managed to escape Tatura by hiding in a tool chest that was being taken out of the camp but he was eventually apprehended in a Melbourne suburb. His punishment was 28 days in solitary confinement and a transfer to the Loveday internment camp in South Australia. Built in 1941 near the South Australian town of Cobdogla, halfway between Adelaide and Mildura, Loveday was the largest internment camp in Australia. The facility produced vegetables and fruit, and had a working poultry farm and piggery. It also maintained a poppy crop for opium production. Speck spent three years at Loveday but was finally released in January 1946, shortly after Germany's defeat and the end of World War II. At Loveday he had learned how to cut opal and within days of his release from the camp he was mining opal at Lightning Ridge. He stayed in Australia, and went on to become a successful opal dealer. Speck never married or had children. In his last letter to his sister Greta many years later, he wrote: "I am satisfied. Recognition or no recognition. "We have a strange situation, one of the most difficult world records to this day and it will still be in a hundred years and wholly unknown. But I am satisfied. The war interfered much more with millions of fates. Why shouldn't I be satisfied?" In March 1993, Speck died at the age of 86, after a long illness. He was buried in Point Clare Cemetery in New South Wales.
ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
Libraries in SA and Victoria among top 10 most beautiful in the world
South Australia's State Library has claimed second spot on a global ranking of the most beautiful libraries in the world, with its Victorian counterpart also booking a spot in the top 10. Global literary tourism initiative "1000 Libraries" placed the State Library of SA ahead of rivals in Germany, France, Austria, Switzerland and England's University of Oxford in its 2025 awards. Trinity College Dublin topped the honours board, claiming first prize, with the State Library Victoria finishing a more-than-creditable seventh. State Library of South Australia director Megan Berghuis said while the library's Mortlock Wing was renowned for its beauty, and that locals had "always known how special the place is", it was pleasing to see it recognised. "It's what a lot of people refer to as the 'Harry Potter library'. "It's got soaring galleries, intricate ironwork and beautiful natural light through the glass roof, so it creates an atmosphere that people just love." Ms Berghuis said what was now the Mortlock Wing first opened in 1884 and originally accommodated the museum and art gallery. "It's a place where people come, they study, they visit, they come from overseas to see it," she said. SA history enthusiast Keith Conlon said the library was the jewel in the crown of Adelaide's cultural centre on North Terrace. "There, smack in the middle is this beautiful building with a fascinating past and with a very important role particularly in its early days," he said. Mr Conlon said it was a long-standing symbol of Adelaide as a "cultured city". "It's one of those permanent structures that says, 'we've been doing this for a long time'," he said. The building has been known by several names, including the Public Library and the Jervois Wing. Mr Conlon said it became known as the Mortlock Wing to honour a significant bequest from the Mortlock family in 1979, who owned the well-known Martindale Hall in SA's Clare Valley. He said the French Renaissance design of the building was rare in SA and the building continued to be revered for its beauty. "Now it's a place for functions, for meetings, it's still used a lot by students," he said. The Mortlock Chamber is currently undergoing renovations to replace the carpets but is expected to reopen in September.
News.com.au
2 hours ago
- News.com.au
Inside wild $250k/year ‘capsule' hotel
A Gold Coast hostel charging $300 a week for 'capsule' beds is delivering $250,000 a year in rent to its owner, as women priced out of the brutal housing market bunk alongside backpackers. Modelled on the Japanese pod concept, Capsuleaccom's Southport facility features stacked rows of 134 single beds, separated by bunk dividers and curtains. Opened in 2024, the business targets backpackers and international students, charging $48 a night or $300 a week. But with rental affordability worsening, the property has also housed vulnerable locals on longer-term stays, some contributing volunteer hours in exchange for a bed. Owner Ian Robinson said the business offered transitional accommodation for new arrivals, most on a student or working holiday visa and without local ties. 'We aim to bridge that gap by offering welcoming short-to-medium term housing as they transition into life here,' owner Ian Robinson said. While not designed for crisis housing, Mr Robinson said the hostel was open to supporting homeless people 'when feasible'. But integrating those guests with international travellers had proved challenging. 'While some situations have worked well, with a positive sense of purpose and mutual respect among guests, this is not always the case. 'Our focus remains on creating a safe, structured environment for those transitioning into Australian life, and managing the mix of demographics requires careful consideration,' he said. Charity worker Karl Westwell, of Agape Outreach, said two homeless women aged in their 40s and 50s were forced to leave ahead of the Gold Coast Marathon in July. 'It's clean and comfortable, but crowded, cramped and certainly not cut-rate at $350 a week – that's what one of our clients tells us she now pays for a capsule,' Mr Westwell said. 'That gets you a single bed under a ceiling you can reach without sitting up, and a curtain for a door. No privacy, no security, no dignity.' Agent's web lies spark turf war Capsuleaccom manager Shanice Attryde said rates were higher during peak times like the marathon, when bookings filled up to 12 months in advance. 'Some guests were unable to extend their stays immediately due to prior bookings,' she said, adding they were offered a full week's extension at the standard rate. Mr Westwell said the charity couldn't find accommodation for the two women, instead providing them with a tent and sleeping bags. 'There is nothing else available,' he said. 'People in crisis are being shuffled like playing cards from this and other accommodation.' He said one of the women had become homeless after a landlord increased the rent at her last permanent address by $180 in two years. Cotality's latest Quarterly Rental Review shows rents increased by 42.7 per cent nationally over the past five years, with Brisbane the country's third most expensive capital at $687 a week. The 1105 sqm Nerang St property housing Capsuleaccom is listed for sale as a freehold tenanted investment with development upside. Records show IG Robinson Developments acquired the site in 2022 for $1.125m. Marketed by Michael Willems and Matt Taylor from Ray White Commercial Gold Coast, the investment returned net annual rental income of $250,000 a year. While a long-term lease was in place, the marketing campaign was currently under review, the agent said. The listing described the building as a 'state-of-the-art capsule hostel' with modern shared kitchens, bathrooms, entertainment areas, and an on-site café. Mr Robinson said providing services for the homeless community had been considered prior to the business opening. 'While the environment meets many of the needs of those experiencing homelessness — safety, community, warm beds, hot showers — we ultimately concluded that integrating our existing guest base with a broader homeless population on a larger scale would be difficult to manage effectively,' he said.
