If you want to know who of your family and friends went where and came back when, simply go to www.naa.gov.au. Click on "RecordSearch", then on "Passenger arrivals", and type in the "Family Name", and select from the displayed search results - which you can enlarge to 200 per page - by clicking on the displayed icon in the "Digital copy" column.
There's just one limitation: your family member or friend must've travelled BEFORE 1973 because, because of privacy reasons, later Incoming Passenger Cards are not yet available in the public domain.
I've just found my best friend's Incoming Passenger Card when on the 9th of October 1972 he flew down from New Guinea, where we both had lived, to Brisbane, from where he took the XPT to see me in Sydney.
After several years in New Guinea, I had just accepted a big promotion to Group Financial Controller in the head office of the company whose Bougainville contract I had helped to kick off. My mate Noel had come to Sydney to ask me to join him on an island-hopping adventure through the Indonesian archipelago. After all the hard work on Bougainville, I was due for a break and could easily have asked for a couple of months' leave but, as always, put my career first, and so Noel left without me.
Sydney never agreed with me, and I was soon back in the islands, that time in the British Solomon Islands Protectorate. More than fifty years later, my career no longer counts for anything whereas two months hopping from island to island would still be a treasured memory today.
Regrets, I've had a few ...
