The very name contrasts at great disadvantage to the Australians with the laid-back, friendly smile types who do the same jobs in New Zealand. Here we talk of "the Customs and Maf crowd" or "the Immigration people".
My own moments of discomfort with the usually unsmiling Australian Border Force have been slightly annoying. A discussion about the need to discard a half-can of drink and being pulled aside after a facial recognition camera insisted I was a well-known Middle Eastern terrorist wanted in 16 countries and high on Interpol’s list of undesirables. The family waited patiently while the Australian Border Force, with some reluctance, allowed me to proceed. I said nothing. A remark about getting a facial recognition machine that actually works would probably have earned me a night or two in the cells.
All that was just a few years ago, so it was no surprise to learn last week the Australian Border Force had given my barber a hard time.
Michael Shanks, known around the Exchange as "The Wizard of the Scissors", was told the whitebait he had brought to The Lucky Country to give pleasure to his loved ones exiled there was denied entry.
We all know that goods must be prohibited. The Australian Border Force list of banned items, while long and a touch paranoid, is full of common sense. For instance, you may not bring in body armour with anti-ballistic or anti-fragmentation properties or dog collars with protrusions designed to puncture or bruise an animal’s skin. Fair enough, but Michael was told there are now new rules requiring fish to be gutted before entering Australia. Michael was ... um ... gutted, because there is no better way of impressing your loved ones in Australia than by arriving on their doorstep with a supply of New Zealand whitebait — a delicacy they’ve been longing for, and in its absence, may even have been planning to move back home for.
So gutted the whitebait must be.
The first step is, of course, to catch your whitebait. You can tell the loved ones the catch came from a couple of days with your net at the Waikouaiti River or, to be more realistic, during a trip to the West Coast. They need never know the whitebait came from a seafood wholesaler who specialises in mail order deliveries. (Naturally, such firms now decline to send their product to an Australian address).
It may set you back about $70 to get 500g of whitebait but that should make maybe eight really good fritters. It’s not cheap, but it beats a week squatting by the riverbank in the West Coast rain.
Large whitebait may be gutted using a razor (but not an electric shaver). The larger whitebait (more common in Australia) are easier to gut this way but they lack the subtle flavour of the smaller New Zealand version, so it’s probably not worth the effort.
Gutting your smaller whitebait is no easy task either, but any good cookbook will explain the procedure.
You will need one sewing needle and 5cm of cotton thread. You thread the cotton through the eye of the needle and then fold it in half before tying a good-sized knot at the end. Work the front of the needle into the mouth of the whitebait and gently work the needle through to the back end of the whitebait. Once it emerges from the rear of the whitebait, give the needle a sharp pull taking the knotted cotton through the whitebait and out at the back end. Thus you will clear the unwanted insides of the whitebait in one easy action.
If you are old enough to have done some time in the army it will remind you of the pull-through held in the butt of your rifle to use for the regular cleaning of your weapon.
A decent fritter should have at least 40 or 50 (or more) whitebait so to produce a good serving for one of your loved ones you will have to perform your cotton pulling about 800 or 1000 times.
By then, you may be feeling a little frustrated in your effort to bring some whitebait joy to the transtasman loved ones, but help is at hand.
I’ve solved the problem of circumventing the Australian Border Force by booking airfares to Dunedin for my two Australian-born grandchildren at a time which coincides with a day when the Best Cafe in Stuart St will have whitebait on the menu.
Not cheap? True, it does seem expensive, but no amount of money is too much to spend on avoiding having to pull through 2000 whitebait.
— Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
