We don’t hear about half of them, but any time a rare or truly bizarre item turns up from overseas, it’s likely its first port of call was one of the compounds near Fremantle Port.
Case in point is this new pride and joy of the Aviation Heritage Museum in Bull Creek, an ex-Royal Air Force Tornado GR4 which is the only one of its kind on display outside of Britain.
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READ NOWThe ground attack bombers, which were capable of flying faster than the speed of sound, were used during both Gulf wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and most recently against ISIS in Syria.
They were retired from combat in 2019 and a handful made available to museums, including the one set to debut this weekend (June 26) as Bull Creek’s latest exhibit.
The aircraft arrived in parts from the UK in January but sat in a North Fremantle compound for several weeks while the aircraft cleared quarantine. It made the trip to Bull Creek — still in parts — in May.
A team of technicians from the UK spent this week reassembling the Tornado to go on show alongside the museum’s other star attractions.
“We’ve got a Lancaster in the collection, we’ve got a Spitfire in the collection,” museum volunteer Don Crane said.
“These are very very iconic aircraft. This (Tornado) is now the future of the museum moving forward with new exhibits.”
The southern suburbs is home to freight-forwarding businesses such as EES Shipping, which regularly handles bizarre arrivals such as a dodgem car track built and recently imported from Italy.
WA Day revellers may recall the ride as the one that was rolled out as part of the carnival-style celebrations held at the Burswood foreshore on June 6.
And for anyone else who’s ridden a dodgy dodgem at an agricultural show in the past 30 or so years, the fact that there is now a bumper car track in WA that doesn’t look like it belongs in the 1980s is remarkable in itself.
EES managing director Brian Hack said it took about six months to import the show ride, but the wait was worthwhile for its operators and ride enthusiasts.
“Each of the dodgem cars has a drift mode in them — sort of like Tokyo Drift style and from the comments I heard on the day, everyone thought it was pretty cool,” Mr Hack said.
Dodgem cars aren’t the only peculiar objects ESS has helped bring into WA. Mr Hack cited food trucks, schedule 9 medical drugs and old-school Formula 3 cars as among the random imports he has seen.
“A few years back, we helped one of our mates bring in what was an old Formula 3 car from the 70s. This guy paid quite a lot of money for it ... it was a very cool piece of kit,” he said.
Schedule 9 drugs are only for medical or scientific research and are illegal to otherwise produce, own or sell, which throws up importing and occasionally humourous challenges.
“A few years ago there was a medical company that was working with the Singaporean government to test out patches for burn victims but they had medicinal-grade cocaine in them,” Mr Hack said.
“So we took this thing to the airport and as is the captain’s right they can refuse goods if they want and they said ‘I don’t want to take this — I know what it is’.
“I’d taken some clients out to the pub and I’d had a few pints, and so I called up my mum and said ‘hey, do you reckon you can go pick this up’ ... to this day she still doesn’t let me forget it.”