Bringing Instruments to Australia

[takuva]

Howdy folks.
I am coming back to Oz after a while away,and was wondering whats the story with bringing a djembe and/or balafon with me,or sending them by post.
Last time I brought my djembe with me,customs gave me a bit of a hard time about it,and I am a bit worried about sending my balafon only to find out that it will have to be destroyed or some other situation I care not to mention.What a nightmare.aahhhhhhhhh.
Anyway,any info is welcome.
Thanks.

[bubudi]

i would advise against bringing a skinned djembe into australia. chances are quarantine will seize it and you will have to get it irradiated (at your expense), sent back (again at your expense) or destroyed. you could import just the shell without dramas. a balafon should be no problem. just be sure to be extra careful packing the gourds as they will easily get cracked during transit.

[michi]

I second Bubudi's opinion. I've researched this quite a bit and spoken to a number of quarantine officials about this. It is impossible to bring rawhide into Australia unless it is treated. The reason quoted by quarantine is that rawhide can carry diseases, in particular anthrax, foot and mouth disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob (mad cow) disease. The relevant import regulations can be found at these links:

http://www.aqis.gov.au/icon32/asp/ex_casecontent.asp?intNodeId=8519733&intCommodityId=676&Types=none&WhichQuery=Go+to+full+text&intSearch=1&LogSessionID=0

http://www.aqis.gov.au/icon32/asp/ex_casecontent.asp?intNodeId=8661031&intCommodityId=1380&Types=none&WhichQuery=Go+to+full+text&intSearch=1&LogSessionID=0

On 2 August 2010, an amendment to these rules was published. It allows some conditional leeway:

http://www.aqis.gov.au/icon32/asp/ex_topiccontent.asp?TopicType=Quarantine+Alert&TopicID=23289

There are two ways to treat rawhide to make it legal for import into Australia:

• Gamma irradiation
• Lime/alkaline treatment

Gamma irradiation destroys the collagen bonds in goat skin, meaning that a drum skin will break either during irradiation or shortly thereafter (within a week or two).

Lime-treated skins also suffer, depending on the degree to which they are subjected to the treatment. Drums that are routinely imported from Bali have lime-treated skins. The skins are snow-white from the treatment, so they are easy to recognize. The problem with lime treatment is that, like gamma rays, it destroys collagen bonds, so the skins are weaker than untreated ones. In addition, the liming makes the skins go quite hard and brittle, which changes the sound: they tend to sound lifeless, especially in the slaps.

The recent update to the rules says:

Providing guidance to Importers on the sort of documents that may be used in support of the Import Permit application to verify pre-arrival treatments e.g. Government Veterinary Certificates attesting to the pH value reached during the lime/alkaline treatment applied to the drum skin, and that the drum skin is free of adhering fat, muscle, blood, bone and evidence of decay.

The problem with this is that it states neither the required pH level nor the amount of time the skin has be treated for. I suspect that there is a way to treat skins such that they are free of disease but not treated to such an extent that they lose strength. However, the problem then most likely would be that they would no longer look treated; in turn, that then would mean that one would have to convince quarantine of the veracity of any documentation that states that the skins were indeed treated, and to what extent.

If you are planning to bring a drum into Australia that doesn't have the typical snow-white treated skin, forget it: quarantine will make you strip the skin off the drum on arrival or force you to irradiate the drum (or destroy the drum). This happened to me late last year when I took my drum out of the country to the US and brought it back two weeks later. It didn't matter that this was an Australian skin I had fitted in Australia because there is no way for quarantine to verify that claim. (It took nearly half an hour to undo all the rope work to the point where I could flip the rings over the head and peel off the skin—not something you want to do at 6:00am at the tail end of an 18-hour trip…)

I since obtained an import permit for my drum. It allows me to take my drum out of the country and bring it back again, provided the same skin is still on the drum. I had to take the drum to quarantine before I left to have the skin stamped. The officer who did this for me (twice now) was kind enough to stamp the skin from underneath, so the stamps are invisible. On two occasions, I've had no problems getting my drum back into Australia with this permit. (I returned from Bali last night with my drum.)

The import permit costs $165 and is valid for two years. You can apply for it here:
http://www.daff.gov.au/aqis/import/application/forms/biological-materials

When you fill in the application, you should quote condition number PC0600. This number identifies the tagging conditions. (After quarantine made me strip the skin off my drum last year in October, I went through six months of correspondence with them to have this condition created. Prior to that, there was no process at all to allow re-importing of a drum.) Make sure you have a copy of your import permit with you when you re-enter the country.

For your balafon, I don't see a problem, unless it has rawhide on it, in which case you will have to pay for gamma irradiation, or unless it has active borers, in which case you'll have to pay for it to be fumigated.

Cheers,

Michi.

[circleofdrums]

I had to do the same thing when I took my drum from Australia to the US a few weeks ago but
unlike Michi, quarantine stamped my skin and gave me a document to produce at customs
on my return without costing any money. And when I arrived back in Sydney I found out my drum
had been left behind in LA and was coming over on the next flight unattended.

This was a concern to me seeing that customs needed to see the drum and the accompanying
document but when I explained this to them at the airport they had no issues with it and didn't
even open the drum bag, only the side pocket where the aqis document was.

Yes, it's a real pain for us Aussies to get African skins into the country but we need to
respect our quarantine laws to avoid bringing in something nasty that could do irreparable
damage to our primary resources or even more so, to ourselves .

The skins that I have imported here before had been heat treated and came with a vets
certificate but this is no longer acceptable to aqis because, being rawhide,
the finished product is not always consistent. Some skins were nice and dry, others were still moist
and had flesh with blood vessels on them so you can't really blame them for being so strict.

However, I read a document recently posted on the net by an official who works
for the biological division of aqis, stating that irradiation / alkaline treatment of rawhide (goatskins) does not effect the quality of the product. This is not true and I had informed
him of this but to no avail.

Unless aqis agrees to review the processing procedures regarding goatskins and their treatment processes, it will always be difficult, if not impossible to obtain them on a commercial
or personal basis from another country.

[michi]

Last time I had a skin stamped (mid-June), the quarantine officer mentioned to me that they were going to change their procedure: an import permit will no longer be required. Instead, you can take your drum to quarantine before you leave, fill in a form, and have it stamped for re-import at no cost. By the sound of your story, it looks like that process is now in place.

Good news for Australians who want to take their drum overseas!

Michi.