Perez

My absolute favourite has to be "she'll be right mate!"

Hi, We are moving to London next year and are planning to take a long holiday in South America (6 months) after leaving Aus. We are wanting to ship back personal effects (clothes, kitchen stuff, laptop, documents etc). We will need to have our stuff stored prior to being shipped - ideally we'd be able to time it so our stuff gets to the UK around the same time as us. Can anyone recommend a service that they have used? I was looking at services like Seven Seas (15 boxes - roughly $2k inc 15 weeks storage). Thanks in advance, appreciate any suggestions.

Not mandatory but if you want to leave Australia and come back then you'll need to travel on an Australian passport. I read on the DIAC site that when you get citizenship, your PR visa on your original passport expires - therefore no right to return on that document. For details about passport applications, see this site - https://www.passports.gov.au/web/forms/entrypoint.aspx

Citizenship ceremony was yesterday, a nice feeling to have that certificate in hand! Now we just need to apply for our Aussie passports! Good luck all, hope you get yours sorted soon!

Here's my timeline so far: Date applied - 04/03/14 City/Council area - Port Phillip Online / Paper - Online Date received the acknowledgement email - 04/03/14 Date of the Citizenship Test - 19/03/14 Date of ceremony - 28/04/14! Type of ceremony (Urgent/Normal) - Normal

I would suggest using photoshop or another image editor such as GIMP, Paint.net... capture each page and save as a separate JPEG.. upload as required. This worked for me although was a bit fiddly. Bit of a painful process and not one for the technophobe! With regard to certification, online docs don't need to be certified, but postal ones do. Conflicting information exists on the DIAC site, but I confirmed this with them by telephone. So I uploaded all documents as JPEG, none were certified and I was fine. I took the originals to the appointment and they checked them. Good luck!

Wow, 30 years is a lot! I guess the only thing you can do is give it your best with whatever information/records you have. When I applied for PR it was 10 years. I was able to get around the last 9 years by searching for booking references in my gmail account - i.e. seraching for anything from airlines such as Easyjet, Ryanair, any holiday companies I could remember, along with any stamps in my passport. Managed to pretty much sort it, but it was a pain to obtain all that information! With regard to visits to Europe where there are no stamps, I doubt they have any visibility of such trips, so if you miss a few I'm fairly certain there will be no comeback.

My wife had her appointment yesterday and online it's showing as approved, so we just need to wait for a date. My council is Port Phillip. The immigration officer said it's not one of their busier councils so hopefully it won't be too long. No rush really as long as it's in the pipeline.

Letter received today - application granted! It was dated last Weds (the same day as my Citizenship appointment). Didn't take them long! Just need to wait for a ceremony now!

Your best bet is to call DIAC and ask for advice. I'm sure this situation will have occurred before (and no doubt regularly with people applying under the same code as you!) I imagine if you answer to the best of your ability you will be ok. You might wish to include a letter with the P80, describing your situation.

Correct... a police check is only required if you have spent 12 months or more in a given country since being granted your permanent residency (as per http://www.citizenship.gov.au/applying/files/pid_docs/conferral_checklist/) - Good Character Documents section. The Aussie one, you have to complete a police checking form and submit as part of your application (or provide the details during your online application) - you don't need to apply for an Aus police clearance certificate like you might have had to when applying for PR.

Hi SKW... can I ask what local council you fall under?

I applied (online) last Tuesday, and received an email today with my citizenship interview/test appointment. Also based in Melbourne. My test is next Weds. Hope this helps!

Thanks. Submitted my application. I called DIAC and they advised to do as best as I could with regard to attaching the images. They said that if images couldn't be attached then certified documents would need to be sent to them by post. It was suggested that this could be done at the same time as the application, in order to reduce any delay caused by them having to ask for them. In the end (with a bit of fiddling with image qualities), I got all the pages under 500kb (and still readable). So now I just have to sit back and wait to get invited to an interview!

Hi all, I'm about to put in my citizenship application but am a little confused. Hoping someone has already gone through this successfully and will be able to offer some advice. With regard to attaching documents to the application (scanned forms such as the police checking one) as well as documents, the site guidance specifies that the files should be jpeg format and less than 500kb per file. In the case of multi page files (such as the police checking form), what needs to be done? At the moment we've scanned each page as an individual jpeg, and will upload individually making sure the page number is in the filename. Is this the way to do it? It's a bit weird that they won't take other formats such as pdf as this would make it much easier! Thanks in advance for any advice!