There are many notaries in Australia who have various levels of understanding of their craft. I see all sorts of notarial work come across my desk. To become a Public Notary an individual must be a practising lawyer for five years and then sit an exam. There have been many lawyers who have become notaries and found the market saturated. Further many practising notaries do not keep up to date with the latest standards in notarial practise.

I would like the humble reader to understand what is required to get an Apostille that needs to be notarised first. The main thing to look for on a document that has been notarised is a signature on each page. The alternative is to have a Notarial Certificate to group together a group of documents. If the notary has only notarised the signature page and the other pages have been left untouched then only the page that has been notarised can get an apostille. This may be a problem for the people who receive the apostilled document.

DFAT puts a stamp on the back of the notarised page where there is a blank page on the back of the notarised page. If there is not a blank page then DFAT will put a covering page and bind the two pages together with some nice green ribbon. This may be a little awkward to undo if your apostilled page is part of a larger body of work.

In conclusion for multi-page documents make sure the notary has either put their initials on every page or there is a covering notarial certificate and the document has been bound together by the notary.