Stranded javelin thrower mailed himself from London to Australia in a cargo crate

In the mid-1960s, Australian javelin thrower Reg Spiers was stranded in London. He had come to recover from the injury that ended his Tokyo Olympics bid and taken an airport job to earn a ticket home to Adelaide — but his wallet, with all his savings, was stolen. With his daughter's birthday looming, he decided to post himself to Australia.

The plan came straight from his job. 'I worked in the export cargo section, so I knew about cash-on-delivery with freight. I'd seen animals come through all the time and I thought, if they can do it I can do it.' He also knew the maximum size of crate air freight would take, and had his friend John McSorley build one to spec: 5ft x 3ft x 2.5ft, with wooden spigots at both ends operated from inside, and straps to hold him while the crate was loaded and unloaded.

To avoid suspicion the crate was labelled as a load of paint, addressed to a fictitious Australian shoe company. Since sending such cargo would cost more than a passenger seat, the cash-on-delivery rule was the point: the freight would travel first and he would worry about paying on arrival. Packed with tinned food, a torch, a blanket and two plastic bottles — one for water, one for urine — he was loaded onto an Air India plane bound for Perth, chosen as a smaller airport than his real destination.

The journey took three days: a fog delay in London, a stretch of the legs aborted by descent (leaving a can of urine that Paris baggage handlers took for an English joke), four hours upside down in the Bombay sun, then Australian swearing about the crate's size in Perth. He let himself out in the bond shed, cut a hole in the wall, put on a suit and hitchhiked into town — in time for his daughter's birthday.

The exploit is built entirely from insider knowledge: COD freight terms, crate size limits, handling routes and the bond-shed routine.

Mislabelling himself as paint for a fictitious company defeated the only check cargo faced in 1964 — paperwork.

Cash-on-delivery inverted the payment barrier: the airline carried first and tried to collect later, and in the end never did.

The escape hatches — inside spigots at both ends, a hole in the shed wall — meant every chokepoint had a planned exit.

Domain knowledge of a system's rules — size limits, payment terms, handling routes — is the raw material of exploits: an insider can route around barriers outsiders cannot even see.

McSorley, hearing nothing, alerted the media and Spiers became an Australian sensation; the airline never collected the shipping fees, and a politician telegrammed him five quid with the note 'a gallant effort by a real Aussie'. Air industry insiders say it would be impossible today: holds are pressurised but all cargo is security-screened. Spiers' later life turned darker — he vanished from Adelaide in 1981 facing cocaine conspiracy charges, was arrested in Sri Lanka in 1984 and sentenced to death for drug offences, successfully appealed, and served five years in an Australian jail.