emelems

I hadnt been to Australia, OH had 17 years ago and always wanted to come back here to live..

We decided the best way was to do a tour around Oz to see if it suited us before deciding to live here forever... we also decided to have the permanent visa in place before we did that so that we could stay should we want to... and we have stayed!

does that makes sense?



Em x

Wendy

Perfect sense

iamthecreaturefromuranus

No amount of holidays and reccie's will prepare you for actually living here.. they may give you a feel for the place but that's all. Plenty of people who went through the reccie process have gone back to the UK and just as many who turned up in Oz to live, having never visited the place before, have found that they love it... no 'right' answer to this one in my opinion.

robtkd1

I've been to Australia once but my wife grew up there. After my one 2 week stay in Perth i was decided that i wanted to live there. We fly out on 27th jan.

Cheetah7

We had been to the Gold Coast, then 10 months later I came to Oz on my own to do some voluntary work in the zoos/vet and spent 6 weeks here - 5 weeks in QLD and a week in Adelaide.

We had never been to Perth though.

cricket1again

I came here for 10 years then was dragged here by my complete b****ard of an ex husband as the loyal wife (I found out later what he was). I loved the UK and didn't want to leave.
Anyway, yes, treat it all as an adventure. That's the only way to keep smiling.

the troubadour

Absolutely right...It has always struck me as beyond strange that people in some cases would give up all in UK to come down to a land that they had never visited often knew little about and presume this was the place they would spend the rest of their lives with out so much as a couple weeks reccie.
My advice would be no matter which country you intend to settle give it a good year,at the very minimun before burning bridges in UK or where ever for that matter.(mean selling up etc etc)
Even one year is barely long enough as sometimes the honey moon period can last almost this long.
I came twice to Australia in different decades both times for extended periods of a year and neither time was convinced that life was any better here,was both occassions more than happy to return to London(Europe in general)
Finally returned on a couple of month holiday which led in part on personal reasons to return here the following year from my then home in France to stay.
Depends on the day asked if made right decision but it looks that i am moving in the direction of splitting life between Europe and Australia with Asia also fitting into the equation.

Wendy

I've been here going on for 3 years! No reccie at all for us, couldn't afford one.

Seems that your visiting before didn't really do much for you if you don't feel that settled.....

framac67

Gibbo

There must be a lot of "beyond strange people" living in Australia. Apart from myself, I could name a fair number who came to this land unseen, having given up everything! After 42+years I don't regret a thing!

emelems

Can see where you are coming from, but not everyone needs to do that... which can be seen as strange.. I didnt need too.. I suppose the logic came from (in my *half witted! LOL!* brain) that if I didnt like it I could move again... for me, I just kinda throw myself into these schemes and hope for the best... I drive my OH insane with my "ah **** it, it'll all come out in the wash.. lets go for it!" type of attitude... he finds my inattention to details quite annoying... and perhaps (maybe I hope!) refreshing too!

Em x

Paula_lou

We visited in 2006 to see just what it was like. We only stayed a month but absolutely loved it


I dont think anything can prepare you for what its like to actually live there until you are, but we could never have given up everything here to move, if we had never even visited before.

Each to their own tho I suppose lol

tezluelle

Yes, I agree. We have deceided the same. We barely have the money for the visa let alone a reccie! We concluded that a 2 - 4 week stay in Oz would just be like a holiday so we would love it like we have loved every other holiday destination we have chosen. I really don't feel we would have got a true picture in such a short time so we have said we will move for the adventure, because we HAVE to try it for real or we will regret it forever. We don't want to be older and saying, 'we nearly moved to Oz when we were younger.' We would much rather say either 'We moved to Oz, tried it for a couple of years but it wasn't for us but was a great life experience' or ' We moved to Oz and WE LOVE IT!!!!'

BuddysMum

My mother was Australian and she died when I was 2 so I always wanted to visit Australia. But family stuff meant I never had the chance.

Then last year I discovered that this entitled me to Australian citizenship by descent so I applied for that "just because I could".

OH and I have been married 13 years and "coincidentally" both have family in Qld. So when one of his cousins announced he was getting married last August (08), we decided to go for the holiday of a lifetime.

We have come back so keen to move over there.

I definitely accept the point that a holiday doesn't prepare you for living and working there, but also we aren't wanting to move over because we believe it to be Utopia. We just want to move for the weather, the larger house and to be honest, we have more family there than here now anyway. So we are applying for the spouse visa....slowly....the in-laws don't want to move over with us and I don't feel we can leave them....so we will be waiting for a little while. (That sounds awful, doesn't it? It isn't really)

jayr

I moved over with family without ever having visited. I got a job with a global company based in Australia before leaving the UK so they provided the visa (457) and paid for removal expenses and airfares and for temporary accommodation on arrival. They even threw in a relocation consultant (waste of time and money) to show us around and help us find somewhere to live.

That all made it easier to move without coming out first, as well as the fact that we could consider it to be "temporary", though we still sold the house and most of our posessions.

Now approaching our 6 year anniversary here with no regrets.