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Under legal changes now in effect around Australia, adults are limited to three legal changes of name in a lifetime, not including instances that involve marriage, divorce, or circumstances of domestic violence.
For Tamra Kamalesh — or Arpita, as she is now legally known — it means a youthful whim is a name she's now stuck with in her passport as it was her third legal change of name and she missed the deadline to change it back.
Her first name change was just a few weeks after her 18th birthday in 1994.
"I was christened Tamara Stumbles back in 1976. A few years after that my father changed his surname, so my sister and I never shared his surname," Ms Kamalesh told Nadia Mitsopoulos on ABC Radio Perth.
"So a week or so after my 18th birthday I decided to adopt his surname, which is Kamalesh."
At that point her name became Tamara Kamalesh.
A few years after that, when she was 22, she decided to drop an a from her first name, becoming Tamra Kamalesh.
"I legally changed everything at that point — driving licence, tax file number, everything pertaining to who I was became Tamra Kamalesh from then on," she said.
A trip to Nepal
Aged 25, Tamra travelled to Nepal and joined a Rajneesh commune. (Supplied: Tamra Kamalesh)
A year later, on an extended trip to Nepal and living in a commune connected to the Rajneesh movement — dubbed the Orange People in Australia — she was given a new name by a guru at the commune.
"He changed my name to Osho Arpita," she said.
"I left Nepal and went and moved in the UK for 10 years and socially introduced myself to people as Arpita.
"But I didn't change anything legally until a few years later. I came back to Melbourne and went through the process of changing my name legally to Arpita Osho Kamalesh.
"But I kept my bank account, driving licence, passport, everything as Tamra."
That third name change was registered in Victoria in March 2001.
Terrorism prompts review of laws
Just six months later the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in New York took place, an event that would ultimately lead to a change in rules that meant Tamra was now stuck, on paper, as Arpita.
Still living in the UK, Ms Kamalesh changed her name back to Tamra by deed poll in 2008, but never registered the changed name in Australia when she returned in 2008.
Tamra Kamalesh in Nepal around 2000. (Supplied: Tamra Kamalesh)
In the intervening years, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) endorsed a strategy to clamp down on identity theft and the use of stolen and assumed identities.
One of the agreed measures was to limit the number of times adults could legally change their names without extenuating circumstances.
Addressing the WA Parliament in 2018, Attorney-General John Quigley said the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Act needed to be updated accordingly.
"There is … limited provision to decline a change of name even if there are concerns regarding the reasons for the change," Mr Quigley said.
"Nor are there limits to the number of times a person can change their name.
"These factors have been identified as considerable risks and weaknesses regarding change-of-name processes across Australia."
The amendments to the act granted some exclusions to the restrictions on name changes, including in the case of marriage, divorce, or where a person needed protection from domestic violence or other security threats.
However, the wheels of legislation change ground fairly slowly and the changes did not take effect until October 1, 2022.
An expired passport
Meanwhile, living in Melbourne and practising as a psychologist under the name Tamra Kamalesh, Ms Kamalesh had let her passport expire.
When she went to apply for a new one, she had passed the date when her passport could be renewed, and she had to apply from scratch using current identity documents.
"I had to apply for a passport through papers rather than being able to do it online and was informed that I could only have a passport in the name of Arpita Kamalesh issued," she said.
"I explained that I'd never used that name legally despite changing it in 2001.
"And they said that I could apply to Births, Deaths and Marriages in Perth, where I was born, and I was told 'No, you've changed your name three times.'"
Ms Kamalesh was refused in her change of name application on the basis that she had exhausted her lifetime allowance.
Loading...In her appeal to the State Administrative Tribunal (SAT) she argued that rather than changing her name, she was reverting to a previous name.
She also argued that she felt unsafe travelling overseas with a passport in a name that did not match any of her other identity documents, including her drivers licence or bank cards.
"It feels quite fraudulent travelling on a passport in a name that I've never legally used," she said.
The SAT rejected her application, but said she could appeal to the Supreme Court, or that if she found herself in difficulty overseas due to her name she could apply for reconsideration of her case.
"The fact that they've said 'Oh, if you travel overseas and have a problem come back to us' I thought was quite comical, actually," she said.
"I thought 'Yep, that is when it becomes an exceptional circumstance — when I'm stuck in a foreign country with nothing to corroborate who I am because everything else, my bank cards, driving licence, everything else, is in the name of Tamra.'"
She said she spoke to the ABC because she thought few people would be aware the law changed two years ago, in all states and territories, and she absolutely regretted her third name change, more than two decades ago.
"It was a bit of a hippie whim to change my name at 25 to Arpita," she said.
"I don't regret changing my surname or dropping the A, but if I had known back then that there was a possibility that I wouldn't be able to change it again, I would never have changed it to Arpita."