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HI
My sister went out to Oz on a WHM visa when she was 22 - 26 years ago. She was a PA in London and assumed that she would be able to temp as a PA in Oz, working her way round the country.
She was wrong. There was no demand for temp PAs at the time. The first job she was able to get was as a shed hand with a shearing team. After 6 months of that she was deemed to have enough experience with Sheep to do a course to become a wool-classer. The shearing Contrctor then sponsored her for a temporary long-stay work visa of some sort. After 4 or 5 years of that, she was considered to have sufficient knowledge of how to grade wool to join the Australian Wool Testing Authority, who sponsored her for a permanent visa.
Nowadays, if you are prepared to do farming-type jobs, you can get a second WHM and I think you can get the second one onshore (though I'm not sure.) Also, my impression is that for a second WHM iit has to be fruit-picking & other sorts of harvesting-type farming rather than animal husbandry, but again I'm not sure
So it is a possible route into Australia for some young people (under 30s) whose skills are not on the lists, but I think it would probably be fair to say that it probably doesn't work for many WHMs. Who might not want to spend more than a year in Oz anyway.
On the other hand, I'm not aware of Merino wool being farmed extensively anywhere except in Australia (not that I know anything about wool-farming) and every last fibre of the wool is exported from Oz. Absolutely nothing is made out of merino wool or merino skeepskin onshore because it is much cheaper to turn it into other things in places like Taiwan. The wool is graded before it leaves Oz, and the AWTA certificate controls the price that it can attract. I don't think it would be possible to get this particular work-experience anywhere except in Oz.
But would you want to do something like that? Learning how to grade opals in Coober Pedy sounds just as dreadful to me, but again, I'm not aware of opals being mined anywhere else. I don't now whether they are cut & polished in Oz, though. These types of jobs are great if you want to see the Outback close up for more than one night but personally, I don't!
Cheers
Gill
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