Moobobs

We are in SA - Yes, that is how it works in here, i'm not sure on other states. We took our UK licences and proof of our new address and that was it, they take your photo and you get your new licence in the post, you pay $57 or something like that there and then. Service Centres in SA are where you go to sort licences, rego, tests for licences etc.

Bank Accounts we applied for while we were in England, we got all documents through by email and just had to make a date with them for an appointment to pick up cards - all very straight forward. TFN - Applied online when we got here Licence - Just went to the local service centre and swapped all over Bearing in mind we secured a rental before we got here so all really easy for us regarding addresses, but the actual process of sorting everything was really easy.

Yes you can, we went through an agent and we were advised not to get police certificate until requested - uploaded everything else and applied for Police Checks in the mean time, CO requested them and we had them to upload a few days later!

Not sure about WA but with SA once we activated our visas and 'settled' we had to inform SA migration of our arrival online then they send us 5 questionnaires via email over 2 years that we are required to fill out - we have had 2 so far, only 4 questions long. And that is it :-)

So 4 months on, all settled! Got a job a couple of weeks after being here, husbands business is going well and our little girl has settled into childcare! Already been on our first break away to Melbourne and we go to Sydney over Christmas! Really loving it here, feel really homesick today though for some reason but so far so good! :-)

We have one! They are great, we do smoothies, milkshakes, all sorts! Not sure what the cheaper versions are like but i can't imagine them to be that much different!

When i stop missing English chippy, Fish, chips and mushey peas!!!!!!!!!!

How did you get to the 1:8 nursery ratio? My 3 year old is at nursery here and it is brilliant, she loves it and the staff are fantastic and that is 1:6 but there are always additional staff around. A lot more expensive here than UK, Base rate is $430 a week for my daughters nursery but that includes all meals, sunscreen, hats, nappies if applicable which we think is great as we didn't have that in the UK - You get the CCR so not actually that bad in comparison. Don't read too much into it, i think you can only truly decide once you have been to see a few schools yourself, I don't think you can make a sound judgement on what you read.

Hello, We came over in June and sold everything via Gumtree and Ebay! We brought some of our daughters toys but other than that regards household things we came empty handed! We bought everything new, Super A Mart, JB Hi-FI, Good Guys, Ikea etc and to be honest it was cheaper than what we were quoted to ship everything over. Also we were worried that we wouldn't have anything in the mean time until we waited for everything to arrive. We shopped around and got lots of special and just arranged for delivery on the date we moved into our rental. I bought our daughter lots of toys on special from Target, Big W and any offers i saw on Groupon! Each to their own though :-)

Yes as above, you can't change the initial entry date - it say's on the grant letter that this date cannot be changed.

Congratulations! It's exciting when you start the process!

We are on a 190 visa, we paid the initial applicant charge, plus secondary applicant and then another charge for our daughter! On top of that we paid migration agent fees, medical fees, police clearance certificate fees. We had SA sponsorship so there was no charge for that last year when we applied. We also avoided the surcharge as that came in after we applied. Very pricey but we are in Aus now and feel it all so worth the money and stress! lol

I agree on that it doesn't take 12 months in all cases. From appointing an agent for our 190 visa in June 2013 it took 7 months for us to get our visa which we got in January of this year, and that was including an 11 week wait on state sponsorship! We moved here June this year - so only took 12 months for us to get the visa and make the move! Good Luck

We went to a clinic in Manchester when we had ours done, our daughters was uploaded by physician there and then, ours around 2 days later, that was at the beginning of January and we got our visa on the 20th! Arrived in Aus in June! Good Luck!

We flew out in June with our 2 and a half year old with Singapore Airlines, we had a 1 hour stop over from Singapore to Australia - having done the journey i was glad to just get it all out of the way! Plus with the service you get with Singapore airlines, our little girl was very comfortable! x