Searching ships, 1960s

Fred Steed joined Customs in 1945 and worked mainly in opium detection during the 1950s.

'There was one ship, the Carpentaria. I was crawlin' over gunnysacks in the hold and found three little pieces of cork and thought, hello, somebody's been interferin' with the insulation. I put my screwdriver in the screw slot and found moist paint. So I took it off and much to my amazement there was opium around all the refrigeration pipes, about 25 pound of it done up in rubber tubes. This insulation went nearly all the way through the ship. I fetched the chief officer who brought the captain down and I said, 'we want all that removed, will we remove it or do your engineers remove it?' He said, 'the engineers remove it', and we got another 75 pound. That made just on a hundredweight of raw opium in one ship, worth about 10,000 pounds, which was a lot of money.'

- Fred Steed

'That year we made another five or six big seizures. One ship had about 300 weight of opium, which is a lot of opium, stacked around the top of the funnel. There was an informant of course.'

- Fred Steed