Know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em

Time for me to pay up. Readers might recall I blogged the urban-mythlike account of an amateur photographer in the Victorian town of Geelong who was visited by the police shortly after taking some arty sunset snaps of the Shell oil refinery on Corio Bay. I made a bet that the Age would take no steps to verify this - on the face of it - implausible story. Well, they did.

Now that the gaps in the story have been filled out, it no longer sounds like an urban myth. The man taking photos was approached, quite correctly, by a security guard, who noted his car registration and reported it to the police. None of that was in the original account: instead we had a 'men in black' scenario of police mysteriously knowing who he was, what he'd done and where he lived.

I had suspected that if there were a germ of truth in the story, it would probably involve an overzealous constable, which appears to have been the case. The most sensible statement so far comes from Geelong's Chief Police Inspector Wayne Carson:

"While they are not breaking any law, if you take photos (of industry) in the current climate don't be surprised to be asked by police why you are doing it."

Exactly.

The photographer, Mr. Hans Kawitzki, has come out with predictable observations that this is just like being under the Communists in his native Poland [see correction below]. (I think I hear Gerard Henderson's clipping scissors in the background). He also came out with the ever-popular:

"If this is now happening in Australia, it means the terrorists have won."

Yes, right Hans. So by that logic, if a terrorist is free to conduct photographic surveillance of a target and succeeds in blowing it up, the terrorists will have...lost? Or to put it another way, if I have a choice of two alternate terrorists-have-won scenarios, I'll choose the one in which I'm not allowed to photograph an oil refinery, rather than the one in which my legs have been blown off on the 8:42 to Flinders Street.

The Age probably thinks it's being screamingly clever by pointing out that two major Australian libraries have large holdings - much of them accessible via the Internet - of the work of Wolfgang Sievers, well-known for his striking photos of industrial installations. Sievers has been retired for decades, and I don't think even your average jihadi would be dumb enough to plan a bombing based on photos that, at their most recent, are more than twenty years old.

Update: The Age has updated this story, now with predictable advice from Liberty Victoria - whose annual general meeting is held in a bathing box at Brighton, I believe - that freedom-loving shutterbugs everywhere should refuse to follow Police advice not to photograph 'sensitive' sites. Let Freedom ring!

Further update: Mr Kawitzki has contacted this blog to point out the error I made about his nationality. He is a native of Germany and not Poland, and the comparison to restrictions on photography in Communist Poland were made by another member of the Geelong Camera Club. This was stated in the original Age report, and the error was entirely mine, resulting from a too-hasty reading of that piece. My apologies to Mr. Kawitzki.