Passports renewal: The sadness of farewelling your old passport

I'm the proud owner of a brand new passport. Bright blue cover, clean pages printed with blue and orange leaping kangaroos. And a whole new passport number to remember. (The last one took me about nine years.)

I was sorry to see my old one decommissioned. In fact, I felt a sense of panic when, during my renewal interview, the post office clerk took out a pair of scissors and brutally cut its front page in half. While I was hardly in the same predicament as someone who finds herself stateless through war or natural disasters, I felt extremely insecure to be without the one document that was unassailable proof of my identity.

I'd grown very fond of that old passport. It had been my travelling companion for more than nine years and had gained me access to all manner of fascinating places and people. It was never once rejected. (I'd had a few hairy moments with my previous passport.) Even when it was so full of stamps and visas that border officials would look at me with suspicion, it always got me through.

I was also fond of the photograph in the front of it, a fresher faced, more youthful me.

Ten years ago, while there were some restrictions about the way you looked in the picture, you could get away, slightly, with dropping your chin a little and doing a bit of work with makeup so that the photo was flattering. I know people who had their images taken by professional portrait photographers because the photograph was valid for an awfully long time and they wanted to look their best across a decade.

But those days are gone and the rules for the new biometric photos are far stricter, because the computer needs to recognise the exact parameters of your face. If you don't want the cameras to reject you at the border, you need to look exactly as you do when you step off a plane – washed out, exhausted, with bags under the eyes heavier than those you checked in.

I can tell you this is exactly how I look in my new photograph, taken by a junior sales assistant in the basement of one of those passport photo specialist places. Cecil Beaton she was not. And now I have to live with it for another nine years and six months. Not 10 years, as it says on the title page, because many countries require that travellers have six months available when issuing visas.

Still, unflattering photo aside, I am delighted to finally have the passport in my hands. I'd been without it for 26 days, as the local branch of Australia Post temporarily misplaced it. (Next time: go to actual passport office.)

This is not to criticise the process for renewal, which is relatively painless these days. And fast-track passports can be amazingly speedy, less than 24 hours if you're willing to pay.