Bundaberg

I've been living here a while now and I can't seem to understand how the direction signs are so badly done in Australia cities.  There are signs for some junctions but none for others.  And they are usually at the junction, this isn't helpful when the road is several lanes wide and at the opposite side of the junction there is a road sign.  But if there is a sign is it usually for the city centre  which can be pretty far away in an Australian city and doesn't really help when you are trying to find other suburbs, that are not the city.

Don't get me wrong some things are done pretty well, such as street names everywhere and easy to see.

I have my visa, so no worries there. I've been to Australia before backpacking, but it was a long time ago now.

It's the thought of not having a job going over and finding one.

I sent in the form to transfer my visa to my new passport over a year ago. Did it when I got the new one. I checked a few times after I sent it in but forgot about it. just checked online and it still has my visa on my old passport.

What do I do, we are hoping to go soon.

- try to do it again,

- go to the embassy in London?

- Bring my old passport with me when traveling?

Did anyone else have this problem?

Quitting a good job and secure income to go to Australia and arriving with no job! My family think I've lost it!!

It's been a dream to go for years, but now it's becoming a reality its getting scary.

What have peoples experiences of getting/finding work in Australia been? how long did it take? Afraid it could take months and end up going home with my tail between my legs.

I wrote this a few months ago in a previous thread

"We thought about this for a while. I already had my qualification recognised. We thought about using a agent because we heard scare stories about how complicated the process can be. So we decided that we'd do the EOI ourselves first to see if we'd get and invitation to apply. We did this as an EOI is free and we'd loose nothing if we weren't successful. Make sure you have everything in your EOI for your points and that you can back these up. If you want to include an English test for extra points, you need to have it done before to have it included in the EOI as you need to put in your test number.

Anyway, we got an "invitation to apply", and said to ourselves "do we get an agent now?" so we decided to look through the form and fill it out as much as we could, and then suddenly we finished it, you can save the form as you go through it. So we thought then where do we attach our documents. I rang the helpline and they are very helpful. It's after you pay for the visa that you can upload the documents. We didn't have a big enough credit card limit so we put the money on the card a few days before and rang the credit card company to say we'd be making a large payment. We didn't want them to block the payment as it was an unusual large payment abroad.

So after we did that we got our documents together.

Qualification Recognition

Letter of Reference

Police Certs

Certified Copy of Passports

Defacto relationship

Most there are simple to get.

The police cert was free (live in Ireland :cute:) the UK one cost a fortune (I lived there for a few years)

Proof of Defacto relationship caused the most worry to us but when you go through everything you have more than you realise. We had, old (more than 1 year) and recent letters with common address, rent contract, flight bookings from email, photos from holidays infront of famous landmarks. Anything with both of your names on it is good.

Medical - we waited till asked.

So we uploaded all that (except medical) and waited. After a month I think, they sent a letter (via email) "request for more information". They requested the medical tests. So we looked at the list of medical centres that they have on the immi website. I rang the hospital instead of doing it online but you can do either, I did this to get a price, as I rang a few, there is a difference of a couple of euro. It's not paid for by the public system here as it's for a private purpose, I'm not sure what the story is in the UK. So while on the phone to the last one I booked it with them as they were the cheapest. So that's why we didn't book online.

Medical was grand, nothing mad. Urine test, blood test. Reflexes, X-ray etc.

The hospital uploads the results to immi so you don't have to do anything.

A few weeks later we got our visa.

We applied for a 189.

The one piece of advice is that you need to read everything a few times to make sure that you have filled in everything, and filled in correctly. Maybe print it out and highlight everything you've completed. Everything is uploaded to the website. So that was very straight forward. You have to upload documents for the main applicant and below that for each additional applicant.

Overall I'd say immi did a great job with the website and whole application process. I found it good and rang the helpline when I had questions.

If you have any other questions, maybe I forgot to mention stuff, just ask."