Walker & O'Neill, P.A. (LexBlog Australia)

A cruise ship employee, who describes himself as a music director of Royal Caribbean, was jailed in Australia for obtaining and accessing child abuse photographs and videos. Forty-four year-old Dana Moran reportedly came to the attention of Australian Border Force officers earlier this year when he flew into Brisbane International Airport. Following a baggage search,...

A fire erupted on the balcony of a guest cabin on the Pacific Adventure cruise ship around 3:15 A.M. yesterday (Australian time) off the coast of New South Wales. The P&O Cruises’ cruise ship was carrying over 3,000 guests and a crew of over 1,000. Newspapers reported that many guests were forced to evacuate from...

An Australian passenger has gone overboard from the Quantum of the Seas Wednesday night as the Royal Caribbean ship was sailing from Australia to Hawaii. We first reported on the situation after reading about it in the popular cruise blog, Cruise Hive, yesterday afternoon. The incident occurred around 11:00 p.m. on Tuesday (Hawaii-Aleutian standard time)....

A young woman went overboard from the Pacific Explorer cruise ship and was found dead in the water approximately seven and one-half hours later. She is the 374 person who has gone overboard from a cruise ship or ferry in the last 25 years, according to cruise expert Dr. Ross Klein. Her identity has not...

The Celebrity Eclipse docked in Sydney, Australia with, depending upon which news outlet you read, anywhere from 100 to over 1,500 people infected with COVID-19. The Daily Mail reports that “far more than 1,500 people” on the cruise ship operated by Celebrity Cruises were positive for COVID-19. The Australian newspaper reports that around 300 people...

A number of news outlets in Australia are reporting that the Queen Elizabeth cruise ship is experiencing a COVID-19 outbreak. The country of Indonesia took the extraordinary step of blocking the Cunard ship from calling at port in Bali. Neither the cruise operator (Cunard) nor ship owner (Carnival Corporation) would disclose the number of infected...

7NEWS Australia reports today that 200 passengers infected with COVID-19 disembarked from the Grand Princess in Melbourne, Australia after the Princess cruise ship completed a thirteen-day around-trip to New Zealand. There are no public accounts of the number of infected crew members. 7News Australia reports on its Facebook page that “200 COVID positive patients have...

The president of Carnival Australia and P&O Cruises Australia, Marguerite Fitzgerald, told ABC Business yesterday that there had been an increase in COVID-19 infections on the Coral Princess once the cruise ship reached Fremantle, Australia but the number allegedly remained “limited” and “managed well.” She continued to refuse to release an exact number of infected...

Cruise ships are returning to Australia, New Zealand and Tahiti amidst reports that four cruise ships (two operated by Princess Cruises and two by Royal Caribbean) are rife with COVID-19. Three of the ships have one hundred or more COVID-19 infected guests on each ship. Royal Caribbean has one ship heading to Australia with reports...

When I read the news this morning that a COVID-19 outbreak involving around one-hundred passengers and crew members occurred on the Coral Princess, Princess’s sister ship to the Ruby Princess which had one of the earliest outbreaks of COVID-19 in Australia two years ago, I felt as if I were trapped in a scene in...

Today the Government of Australia extended the ban against cruise travel to a minimum of three months: Extending the human biosecurity emergency period by three months GregHuntMP #auspol pic.twitter.com/K8KujktTE7 — Political Alert (political_alert) December 8, 2020 Newspapers across Australia report that Australians are restricted from overseas travel or cruise ship holidays for at least three...

A number of crew members aboard the Ruby Princess have requested assistance as the cruise ship remains drifting off the coast of Australia for over a week. The crew members, who have requested to remain anonymous, have stated that several of the most seriously ill seaman have been transported from the ship. The crew is...

Today we received the following information from several crew members on the Voyager of the Seas which is sailing an Australia itinerary after departing from Sydney. The future scheduled ports include Mystery Island and Vila in Vanuatu as well as several ports of call in New Caledonia – Mare, Lifou, and Noumea: “The Voyager of...

A cruise passenger reportedly went overboard from a Norwegian Cruise Line ship, according to several newspapers. The Norwegian Jewel was on a 12-day Australia-New Zealand cruise when the passenger went overboard near the east coast off the Mahia Peninsula of New Zealand’s North Island. The man went overboard around 7:00 P.M on Sunday (New Zealand time)....

A radio program in Sydney, Australia, the Alan Jones radio show, is reporting that Cruise and Maritime Voyages’ Vasco Da Gama (formerly the P&O Pacific Eden) lost power to its engines in the Gulf of St. Vincent off Adelaide, Australia earlier today. The radio station 2GB’s Steve Price spoke to passengers onboard, who reportedly said: Approximately...

A person (either a cruise guest or crew member) is presumed to have gone overboard from the Golden Princess according to a passenger on the Princess cruise ship. Shortly after 6:15 p.m. EST today (10:15 a.m. Tuesday, January 22 – Australia time), a cruise passenger from Adelaide, Australia posted the following information on Twitter: AIS data show the...

According to ABC News in Australia, a cruise passenger was arrested after he tried to throw his partner overboard from Royal Caribbean’s Radiance of the Seas. According to the Mercury newspaper, witnesses heard screaming followed by an emergency alarm. The Daily Mail identified the cruise passenger as David James Fysh.  According to the Epoch Times,  a fellow passenger commented on the...

A passenger has been reported overboard from the Princess Sun cruise ship today, according to 9News in Australia. The passenger is an Australian man in his 80’s. In a statement, Princess Cruises stated that the passenger intentionally went overboard. The Princess Sun departed from Fremantle, Australia six days ago, and was half way through a...

ABC News in Australia reports that a woman has gone overboard from the P&O Pacific Dawn today. The cruise ship left Brisbane, Australia last weekend on a cruise of the Pacific Islands. The P&O ship is now conducting a search for the missing guest. P&O released a statement today stating that a crew member observed the...

An Australian cruise passenger, Mr. Sun, sued Carnival Australia after the cruise line falsely accused him of exposing himself to two young girls on the Carnival Spirit. According to an Australian new station, the incident occurred during a cruise from Sydney to New Caledonia in December 2016. Ship security personnel were notified that a man had...

A video of a brawl on the Carnival Legend shows Carnival security officers and other security personnel kicking passengers while they are on the floor. Carnival officers are also shown trying to prevent other passengers from videotaping the violence. The video, which was taken by a passenger and aired by Australia’s 3AW693 Talk Radio, is circulating on social...

A Westpac rescue helicopter medevaced a passenger from a Carnival cruise ship off the coast of New South Wales (NSW), Australia yesterday . The 40-year-old passenger was reportedly suffering a stroke on the Carnival Spirit cruise ship about 50 miles from Port Macquarie on NSW’s mid-north coast. The rescue helicopter winched the passenger from the...

The federal police in Australia report that its law enforcement officers and the Australia border protection agency seized thirty (30) kilos of cocaine stashed aboard an unidentified cruise ship which docked in Sydney on November 30, 2017.  Four passengers were arrested on the ship and escorted from the cruise ship – a 41-year-old Belgian woman...

A passenger who went overboard into the Pacific Ocean from the Sun Princess cruise ship as it sailed between Brisbane and New Caledonia was rescued today.  Shortly after 4 P.M. local time today, the “man overboard” announcement came over the bridge. A newspaper in Australia reported that it took about 15 minutes for the ship to...

News 7 in Australia reports today that a cruise passenger on a Royal Caribbean ship arriving in Sydney, Australia alleges that she was a victim of sexual assault by another passenger during the cruise.     The news account states that the Explorer of the Seas arrived in Sydney after a nine day cruise to...

Two crew members and a passenger were reportedly medevaced from two P&O cruise ships within a 24 hour period, according to several newspapers in Australia. The Gold Coast Bulletin reported that Rescue 500, the Queensland Government air rescue helicopter service, medevaced a male patient from the Pacific Pearl about 70 nautical miles east of the...

The widely reported drug bust of three passengers this week on the Sea Princess cruise ship in Australia uncovered serious shortcomings in Princess Cruises’ shipboard security.   We have written about dozens of drug busts of relatively small quantities of cocaine on cruise ships over the years.  But 95 kilos (over 209 lbs.!) of cocaine...

Multiple news sources are reporting that today, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) arrested three cruise ship passengers who were smuggling 95 kilos (over 209 lbs.) of cocaine into the port in Sydney, Australia. SkyNews says that the AFP arrested a 63-year-old man and two women, age 23 and 28, after Australian police with sniffer dogs searched the...

A couple on a cruise spent a little extra for the proverbial room-with-a-view only to find that HAL had a little surprise – it didn’t tell them beforehand about a crew member using a grinding tool outside their cabin’s window.  The YouTube caption says: “Thanks for telling us when you upcharged us $600 extra for...

9News in Australia reports that the Golden Princess cruise ship docked in Melbourne this morning “after hundreds of passengers were struck down with gastro.” The newspaper reports that “more than 300 passengers” on-board the cruise ship are believed to have been affected with a gastrointestinal illness. Princess Cruises spokesman praised the ship’s crew and medical personnel...