Just a day or two after Christmas we swung cheerily into the drive, holiday music blaring its last. Our disbelieving eyes fixed instantly on the open window. Then the open door. We'd been robbed!
Hearts pounded. We crept towards the house. Music still blaring.
Never has there been such a mess as this. In every room the floor was strewn. Every drawer, every cupboard, every cabinet had been emptied. Even the shoe box we kept Band-Aids and Aspros in. Stuff everywhere.
Touch nothing, we were told. Leave everything as it is. So we trod gingerly through the wreckage, then sat stunned, and waited. The laptop was gone ... and coins from the Salvos dish ... and a red coral necklace ...
The sergeant had been 'on burglaries for three years', he said, but it had been only in the last few months that he had come across so many cases of identity theft. We qualified as victims of identity theft because our personal documents had been taken. All swept up with assorted hardware and carried away in our own green pillow case.
Identity starts, as it always has done, with the name by which one shall be known in the community. From there it grows exponentially. To that certificate of our birth we may add, as we grow and age, a credit card, driver's license, Medicare card, citizenship certificate, passport, electoral enrolment, property title, Council ratepayer notice, certificates to practise trade or profession, certificate of marriage, will, power of attorney, Seniors Card, Commonwealth Health Card.
About the only one we didn't have in our life-time collection was a death certificate. It will come.
In this complex world personal identity has become thoroughly bureaucratised and cross-referenced. For every component there is an identity number; for most there is also a password. The identity system for each of us is cumulative and comprehensive. It gate-keeps our entire lives and mandates our passage physically, geographically, socially, and in terms of status, rights and responsibilities.
The system may be comprehensive but it is not coherent. A new ID number comes with every card, and each needs a password of varying configuration. For most of us there is no easy way to rationalise this plethora and commit it to memory. We need a record. And records make us vulnerable, however cleverly we disguise them.
We maintained sufficient composure that