‘Welcome home’: Desperate Queenslanders cross the border in midnight rush

At the Coolangatta border checkpoint, shortly after midnight, a policewoman greets the wrung-out Queenslanders pointing their phones out the passenger side window: “Welcome home.”

From the next carload, flashing their border passes and moving through without stopping, an exultation from the front seat: “We’re here.”

Some of the first people crossing the Queensland border, which opened earlier than 1am.Credit: Fairfax Media

The line of cars and campers, people so desperate to go home they cannot wait through one more night, is now winding back about 500 metres through Tweed Heads.

“Half of Brisbane’s here, seriously,” says Rob Jones, serving out the final hours and minutes of the months-long lockout in a Wharf Street carpark-turned-camp ground. He wants to see his new grandson.

Others are waiting in the park across the road. The place is full. Phones negotiating the online border passes, which have only just come online, glow from inside the vehicles.

People are scrambling. Is it really time?

History will mark 1am as the time Queensland opened its border to its own after shutting them out for 143 days, but it was, in fact, earlier than this by close to an hour.

Scared of being caught in the queue, or something changing, or of somehow missing out, drivers emerge from the darkness and onto Wharf Street.

But not Tracy Anne. She can’t get her pass. Neither can some others.

Ms Anne moved 800 kilometres to Tweed Heads from Sydney months ago to care for her ailing, 93-year-old grandfather.

Eliza Williams (in pink shirt) helping people navigate the border pass application form.Credit: Zach Hope

Even though there are family members in south-east Queensland only minutes away, they have not been able to cross the border without getting stuck themselves.

“The stress has been phenomenal,” she says.

Ms Anne, standing in a Tweed Heads carpark at midnight on a Sunday, is in the kind of tearful panic that can only make sense in the context of these absurd times.

After all these months, all this hardship, with the border literally around the Wharf Street corner, was it all going to fall apart because of a form?

This masthead watches her move through the steps of the border application only for the words “you cannot enter Queensland” to appear on her phone’s screen.

At the checkpoint, where traffic is moving at the pace of a slow walk, dozens of people gather around Eliza Williams, the angel of the border.

The 30-year-old project manager, who is trying to get to the Gold Coast, is here to ask police if it is indeed a pre-1am go time, but is instead tending to her fellow travellers.

“Oh, you should be a celebrity,” one elderly woman says when Ms Williams helps her submit the troublesome form.

Later, the woman and her partner try to offer a thank-you gift of money. It is politely declined.

“Hello? Can you find it?” the next person asks.

They are having trouble working if they are an X, a G, or a GV or some other jumble of letters. Ms Williams patiently helps them screenshot their proof of vaccination and residence, then helps them upload it to the forms.

When she is busy assisting someone, others try asking the police.

“Can you help me out? Come on, it’s your job, man,” says one man, turned back for having the wrong pass, to the officers. Another man becomes aggressive.

The police, straining to keep the line moving, say they cannot.

People are convinced the online system is not working. Ms Williams believes it’s a case of stressed and hurried travellers entering the wrong inputs.

Whatever the truth, there is no one from the Queensland Government here to help.

“They were all in a bit of a panic, weren’t they?” Ms Williams says, clear of the backlog after about 45 minutes.

“I hope I wasn’t being rude by the end of it,” she says. “I think there really needed to be someone put here to help them.”

Between 20,000 and 50,000 additional people are expected to cross the Queensland border in the coming days.

Many have been surviving these weeks and months on the charity of loved ones, or burning savings to get by south of the border while meeting mortgages and rent at home.

Many are returning jobless and broke.

“You literally don’t know what people are going through,” Ms Anne tells dismissive Queensland friends.

“I mean, look around. Look at all these people.”

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