Police officer Vicki Shipley catching border sneaks out the back of Bourke

In a sunbaked stretch of land known as the Corner Country, the region’s lone police officer is bracing for a spike in surreptitious, and illegal, border ­crossings.

Tibooburra’s only police officer, Senior Constable Vicki Shipley, with her fiercely loyal chihuahua, Mickey. Vicki in northwest NSW. Picture: John Feder

Out the back of Bourke, in a sunbaked stretch of land known as the Corner Country, the region’s lone police officer, Vicki Shipley, is bracing for a spike in surreptitious — and illegal — border ­crossings.

The senior constable, based in the tiny town of Tibooburra, in far northwestern NSW, has revealed that desperate travellers have been cutting holes in the dingo fence that separates her state from its northern neighbour throughout the year and creeping into Queensland in contravention of COVID travel restrictions.

She now fears the reintroduction of a strict border lockdown following the outbreak of a coronavirus cluster on Sydney’s northern beaches will result in a fresh wave of illicit state border crossing attempts. She warns that she will be on lookout for anyone breaking the rules.

“There’s been a heap of people coming through here and trying to get across the border into ­Queensland during the lockdown this year,” Ms Shipley said. “There’s a gate in the dog fence that separates Queensland and NSW — called Warri Gate — and, when the border’s been locked down, there’s been an actual lock on it to prevent people going across. But some people have just been driving straight through it and pushing it over and others have been cutting holes in the fence to get through.

“I don’t know if they think that, because it’s so remote and isolated out here, that no one will notice — but I’ve been manning the gate and on the lookout for people breaching the rules.

“So far, I’ve only had to give out one $1000 fine because people are usually crossing into Queensland.

“Instead, I’ve had to call the police station in Thargomindah — about 350km north of the border — and let the officer there know that someone has crossed the border ­illegally and that they’re heading his way, and he takes care of the job from his end.”

While Tibooburra is just about the most remote place in NSW and a 14-hour drive from both Sydney and Brisbane, Senior Constable Shipley said the impact of the COVID pandemic had been acutely felt in the town of fewer than 100 people.

“COVID has actually made the town busier and we had a lot more tourists here because they can’t travel out of NSW and there’s a lot of families touring around the state instead,” she said. “That’s meant we’ve had a lot of people passing through from different areas of the state, which of course increases the risk of a COVID transmission, but the whole town has managed it really well and taken the health precautions seriously.

“We’ve only had three possible COVID cases, which all eventually came back negative, but we’ve still prepared a local campground as our isolation point just in case we have any confirmed ­infections,” she said.

Despite the increased duties caused by the COVID lockdown, Ms Shipley has managed to maintain her own special brand of community ­policing throughout the pandemic.

Since relocating to the state’s most isolated police posting a year and a half ago from Wollongong, she has discovered there is “no real crime to speak of on a day-to-day basis” and, while making regular drives of up four hours around her vast police beat in her trooper, devoted much of her time to planning ways to help improve life in the outback town.

Outside her regular hours at the station, she now teaches an aquarobics class at the school for its nine students and their parents, hosts a community morning tea, runs trivia and bingo nights at the town’s two pubs and even leads an early morning walking group — all accompanied by her ever-present “police dog”, chihuahua “Mickey”.

In a town such as Tibooburra, where people talk about how long they have lived there in terms of generations rather than years, her efforts have seen her accepted by locals as one of their own.

“They’ve all been very friendly and helpful and let me know that, if anything goes pear-shaped, they’ve always got my back,” she said. “There was one night when it was dark and it was late and I was having to deal with a guy from out of town who had become very intoxicated and I was trying to get him to go and sleep it off.

“He wasn’t mucking out though. Then I heard this voice behind me say: “I’ve got you.” It was one of the locals.

“When I turned around, I saw all of them were walking over to stand beside me just in case there was any trouble.

“To get that sort of community support as a police officer is priceless and makes it all worthwhile.”