Petkula73

Very true. We were in Sydney a couple of years back and tried to buy three day passes on a Saturday afternoon for some sightseeing. It came to something like $51 and the guy in the ticket office told us not crazy and come back tomorrow. We did and saved $43!

Just wait for summer. You'll hardly turn it on. The great irony of all this though is that although Australia has some of the worst TV going, the average Aussie bogan feels the need to go and fork out two months of his annual wage on an IMAX sized 4K TV for his "good room". Watching the five feet high faces of wooden presenters with their unnaturally bright white teeth and botox must be terrifying. Channel 7 newsreaders are the worst - they make the Stepford Wives look normal.

+1 Personally, I find this is great though. Because it's so utterly shite here I'm happy to turn it off and do something else. Anything is better than watching garbage like "The Block", "MKR", "Masterchef", "Shark Tank", "The Voice", "The X Factor", "Dancing with the Stars" and all the other junk. I'd rather stick pins in my eyes than spend an evening watching puerile crap like that. Even the sports coverage is pants - Channel 7 do a great job covering the AFL, but how many advert breaks can you squeeze into to a game?! Same with the cricket on 9. The England v Australia RWC match last weekend even had ad breaks when they were setting up for a lineout! Has anyone else noticed how loud the backing music is on all these type of shows by the way? You can hardly hear what the people are saying half the time.

I decided that it wasn't worth the hassle and anxiety (having sold cars before privately), so the day before I left I sold mine to WeBuyAnycar. I would have made maybe a grand or two more holding out privately, but it's so unpredictable.

Hi Wonder if anyone knows the answer to this... We are planning a camping trip in Jan and will have a powered site. We've done this previously in Europe with no issues - you just by an electric hook up with an RCD and powerboard on the other end and away you go. I've looked and looked on the internet and they don't seem to sell them here though, so it seems you need to buy a 15 amp 15m long cable to run in to the campsite power, then connect it presumably to a 10 amp RCD and run a surge protected trailer socket off it? All seems very Heath Robinson to me. Am I missing something here? I'm hugely paranoid around electricity, so looking for belt and braces approach. I know all Australian campsites theoretically have RCDs by law but personally I'm not trusting them.

Welcome to Australia - everything is more expensive here. You'll get used to it. Bunnings have a reasonable selection but you'll get better deals if you can find a nursery.

If it's anywhere near your router, stick a cable in it rather than using wireless. You'll get a much quicker and more stable delivery of data in to it. Same with anything connected to the internet really - cable is best if possible.

There's a big tiger snake living in the bushes a couple of kms down the road from us in Half Moon Bay. Everyone is getting very excited. Loads of people trying to take photos of it every day.

Yes, great place. Ask for a knife and fork and they look at you like you're from another planet!

They do. To be honest, aside from a few stonkingly hot days in summer, temperatures in Tasmania and Southern Victoria aren't a million miles off summer and spring days in the UK. It'd be rare that the inside your house went over 25C.

As above there are loads of options. Personally I wouldn't bother with the free VPNs. They are unreliable, slow and frustrating. Pay a few dollars a month and get something you can live with. We've used UnoTelly previously and they were great. We only stopped using it once Netflix arrived here.

I have to say that this is probably my only disappointment from living in Melbourne. I find the Indian curries here absolute crap if I'm honest. Bland, sweet, creamy, tasteless and over priced. We gave up looking a couple of years ago and stick with the wonderful Greek, Chinese, Italian etc that the city has to offer. I grew up in West Yorks, so unfortunately I'm a bit too discerning when it comes to what makes a good curry. If it's not on a par with the Mumtaz in Bradford it's a let down. Strangely, when I've been to India the curries there are also pretty ordinary. I asked why this was to an Indian guy at work and he said basically the British are the ones who demand spicy curries, the Indians themselves normally eat pretty mild ones. What we'd call Indian food is actually Punjabi and Kashmiri food, brought over by the displaced people after Indian independence. When you get out in to other parts of India, the food is completely different. Mainly vegetarian, lots more rice and much more fish, lime and coconut the further south you go. It's very tasty and we especially loved the Southern Indian breakfast food, but it's not what you'd call "British style". If anyone can recommend a place in Bayside that can do a proper Chicken Jalfrezi, Dopiaza or Bhuna (i.e. swimming in ghee and properly hot) I'll come round and give you a kiss!!

+1 Best part of Melbourne in my humble opinion. You won't get much for $850K though.

I don't think there's any difference to be honest. Personally I wouldn't bother shipping them half way round the world as you can get brand new ones here for not much more than you'll pay to ship them. Same with all white goods. When we moved over we looked at the cost of a 40' container and had a long hard think about whether it was worth shipping most of our stuff. In the end we decided it was a much better investment to go for a Move Cube for 1000 pounds for the essentials and buy the rest of the stuff new here.

Good stuff and well done. A couple of pointers to help you settle in: 1. Things here are fantastic, but they can be equally annoying. Same as anywhere in the world really, so just accept the irritating things like Australian bureaucracy at face value. 2. Don't be tempted to compare everything to the UK or anywhere else. 3. Enjoy the things that make life great here and don't worry about the little things. I paid $5 for a bottle of washing up liquid last night for example, but 5 mins later I was walking on the beach at sunset in 30C+ 4. Pick a sports team asap as it's the quickest way in to Australian culture. 5. Any time you have a wobble (as we all do from time to time) take time to talk through why you're upset and what is causing it. Advice on this forum can be really helpful as it's impartial and people will support you without the baggage or guilt trips that come from family members. At the end of the day, we've all been there. Anyway, enjoy it and try not to get eaten by a shark, bitten by a snake or stung by a jellyfish!

Bloody Hawthorn!

We had travel insurance for our 457 (2 adults and 3 year old at the time). No issues at all. You will need to produce evidence of vaccination once your child starts school. The UK vaccination records are fine.

A life lived in fear is a life half lived, as the saying goes...

In my humble opinion I find it a bit depressing that young people are fooled by Jeremy Corbyn. All the things he says sound wonderful, until you scratch a bit further under the surface and realise he has no idea how to actually pay for any of it, other than writing a blank cheque. The whole idea of printing money is just ludicrous. When the world was heading in to melt down in 2008 we had little choice but to bail out the banks and print money, but that was as a reaction to an emergency. It would be so foolish to take an economy in recovery and do this again just for the sake of creating a few thousand short term public sector jobs. Personally, I also found it disgraceful that he failed to sing the national anthem. So what if he's a republican? He is representing his party, not himself. Time to man up and swallow his schoolboy principles. Even Alex Salmond knocked him down on this one, saying he would have sung regardless of his personal opinions. I give him a couple of months before the hysteria dies down and people begin to realise there's a reason that in 32 years as an MP he's never held a cabinet or shadow cabinet role... Hopefully he'll be gone before 2020 and replaced by someone more sensible like David Milliband.

Christmas here is not as big a deal as it is in the UK. It's more like an extended bank holiday and you'll find loads of things carry on as normal. Our bin men even collected on Xmas Day - we were in shock! You'll have loads of options.

You're from near Cambridge? Believe me, Melbourne in winter can be like Cambridge in summer...

Melbourne weather is very similar to Cape Town in my opinion. It can get very hot, but that's unusual. Normal summer temps are between 20-30C, warmer days up to the mid 30s and a few extreme days will be high 30s and up in to the 40s. These temps don't last and it can literally drop 25C from one day to the next. Winters are generally mild and it's rare things get in to single figures during the daytime. Probably about 12-14C would be an average mid winter temp. Winter nights are cool but not generally that cold, maybe about 8-10C on average. I'm from the UK and it still makes me laugh to see Australians wearing hats, gloves and scarves in 15C weather. Talk about soft!

Thanks. I've put the facts over to the estate agent and they've advised us that they have a duty of care and will advise us shortly on what the next step is, so either fixing things or something else. We don't receive a water bill for some reason. No idea why but there is no meter in the property, only for next door. We live in a semi detached (so "town house" here). The bill will be eye watering I suspect. At 3 litres per minute, after something like a month undetected this leak will have drained off something like 6.5 million litres, or 2.5 Olympic sized swimming pools! I appreciate the comment about us not being responsible for damage caused, but we want to act responsibly and not intentionally make things worse. At the end of the day, we want to continue to live here for the next few years. I think acting responsibly also strengthens our hand when the agents next try to jack up our rent. We'll be in a better position to tell them to bugger off...

Hi. Yes, in Victoria.

Hi - does anyone have any advice here? To cut a long story short, we have been renting for just over two years without issue. We're model tenants, pay on time, maintain the house well and so on. We currently have an issue with a leaking pipe between our house and the adjoining property. The pipe is on our side of the wall, and is leaking water under the property, so not causing any immediate damage to either side, but potentially damaging the foundations. Although the pipe is on our side, it needs to be accessed through next door's side of the party wall. Our neighbours own their property and will not provide access until a written agreement is in place to repair work done on their side to an acceptable standard. We agree with their approach (I would ask for the same on the house I own in the UK). The problem is our agents are holding things up, and work can't get started until the agreement is in place. As tenants, this is really none of our business as it's between the two owners (i.e. the neighbour and our landlord). Therefore, we've been without water for 4 days now. We can turn the water mains on for roughly 20 min in the morning and at night, but any more than that risks damage to the properties. My question is therefore, given we can't do basic things like flush the toilet or wash our clothes, at what stage should we ask for compensation (rent reduction etc)? I think this is a tricky situation as if we appear bolshy we may find ourselves looking for a new house in two months time, yet if we do nothing we're putting ourselves through great inconvenience when the agent is clearly not fulfilling their side of the tenancy agreement. Our previous landlord tried to screw us when we moved (refusing to release the deposit and demanding $1200 to renovate his garden in order to sell the house). We ended up taking him to VCAT and won, but this is not something I want to go through again. To my mind, I think if this drags on in to the bank holiday weekend, they should either reduce the rent by 50% for the time the water was off, or pay for us to stay in a hotel until it's fixed. Advice, or previous experience much appreciated!