Lo-fi L.A. rock star Colleen Green was supposed to play a half-dozen shows in Australia over the next week. Instead, she landed in a hairy situation with Australian immigration enforcement, who detained her overnight and deported her back to the U.S. during an “emotional, exhausting, and tumultuous” ordeal, as Green wrote on Facebook.
According to Green’s account, her Australian tour promoter failed to secure the correct visa for a professional performer and instructed her to tell authorities she was visiting friends, a method Green didn’t find out of the ordinary. But Australian immigration apparently doubted her—it seems agents may have been tipped off by some merch in one of her bags—and after looking up Green’s tour dates online, they canceled her visa and detained her overnight in a facility she likened to a minimum-security prison. Read Green’s alarming yet witty account of the experience:
Green has since added a comment to her original Facebook post clarifying her story:
*EDIT* even though this has been copied and pasted by a bunch of different people now so it’s kinda too late, I just want to clarify that I did tell the officers initially that I would be playing music over there, and did not know what kind of visa the promoters had gotten for me. And also, that the only other time I have ever toured under the pretense of “tourism” was in Brazil. Every other time, I have had the proper paperwork which was all taken care of by whomever brought me over, and barely looked at by officials.
And she didn’t even get to watch Joy Ride.
“This has been a harsh lesson and we have made a mistake that we will never make again,” Australian indie promoter Bone Soup told the Sydney Morning Herald, saying the company was “deeply embarrassed” by the error. “We are doing our best to allay the situation and reschedule a tour for the future.”
