Bali: The media - so loathed by Schapelle Corby during her dark days in jail - got its comeuppance on Saturday, with the convicted drug smuggler hoodwinking it to the end with a canny flight swap.
Corby had been booked on Virgin flight VA46 - a photo of her boarding pass, seat 1A, was even circulated on social media.
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Schapelle Corby leaves Bali villa
Schapelle Corby has left her Bali Villa amid tight security ahead of her return to Australia.
But at the bitter end she boarded a marginally earlier Malindo flight to Brisbane, leaving a plane full of miffed photographers on the Virgin flight.
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The 39-year-old touched down on Australian soil at 5.09am on Sunday with her sister, Mercedes.
A large media contingent was waiting for her at Brisbane International airport, but Corby is getting used to the attention.
Like a butterfly from a chrysalis, the radiant Corby who emerged late on Saturday afternoon after being holed up for days inside a dingy Kuta villa was nothing like the fragile, tremulous being we had come to expect.
Gone was the shrinking, media-shy ex-prisoner who was too afraid to leave the house because she was paranoid of lurking paparazzi.
Here was a celebrity, unshackled from the strict parole conditions that forbade her speaking to the media, who owned her public image and was having a bit of a fun.
She made her feverishly anticipated appearance in dark glasses, partially covered with a patterned scarf and carrying a bag that raised more questions - literally.
"Where's William Tyrell?" was written on the bag, referring to the Australian boy who disappeared from Kendall in NSW in 2014.
On the eve of her deportation, Corby set up a public Instagram account with a sparkly profile picture of her with pink flowers in her hair, which had almost 40,000 followers by midnight in Bali.
She posted pictures of herself farewelling her beloved pups, Luna and May and her Bali family, neighbours and brother-in-law Wayan Widyartha, who was her guarantor in Bali.
The Corby family played the media like a violin. In a postmodern twist, the entire clan turned the cameras back on the media scrum.
Corby's brother Michael - wearing one of the ghoulish masks that have become his trademark over the past days - filmed the carnival from the top of the gate of the Kuta villa.
Mercedes videoed the heaving, frenzied media pack on her smartphone from inside the car. Corby posted a clip on her new Instagram account: "Oooh that's a big one," Mercedes says, referring to a camera looming through the tinted car windows. "If it shines you they can see you with their lights."
"See what I mean when I say feels like a crab?" Corby responded. (When she was released on parole from Kerobokan jail back in 2014, Corby famously muttered under the veil over her head: "I feel like a crab".)
So desperate were the media for a glimpse of the woman dubbed the Ganja Queen in Indonesia, one journalist fell off the wall bordering the parole office - where she signed final documents - falling two metres to a sickening thud.
The Bali corrections chief Surung Pasaribu seemed as ever bemused by the fame of Bali's most famous parolee: "I don't understand Instagram, I don't know how to read Instagram," he said.
But as he pointed out, Corby was a free woman. As of midnight on May 27, her sentence for the 2004 importation of 4.2 kilograms of marijuana into Bali was completed.
He said had she acted like this while still on parole, Bali authorities might have reconsidered her status. "But as of May 27, I think there is no problem. Since midnight on May 27 Corby is free."
Look out Australia, a new Instagram star is born.