Aussie Xmas lunch is often say a seafood salad with fresh crayfish, prawns, crabs, ham

For those who have a traditional xmas roast, this is often eaten later in the evening when its cooler

You'd probably enjoy NZ better

I'm a stay at home mum but thinking about retraining (Only ever worked in retail). My husband is a Data Network Engineer (He works for a cable company).

What is the job situation like in Australia for IT people?

Its a misconception that OZ is a hot country, the only place where the weather is warm all year round in the far north of the country such as Darwin where few people live. In the rest of the country, in the eastern states such as NSW ( Sydney) VIC ( melbourne) where most of the population lives the weather only gets warm to hot 3 months of the year during summer and even during those 3 months theres only around 15-20 days where it gets really hot over 35c degrees. It snows in many parts of Australia during winter and there are ski resorts. Where l live in western Victoria it got down to -2c degrees a few nights ago , 6 months of the year the average temperature is around 16c degrees and during summer we only had about 10 really hot days.
If you move to OZ you will only find the weather warm or hot 3 months of the year during summer, Perth and Brisbane tend to have longer hotter summers, If you move to NSW, VIC or TAS l doubt you will find the heat a problem.

Winter in Southern NSW. ( click picture to enlarge)

To check out actual minimum and maximum temperatures at major places around Australia, on a day by day basis, for the last 13 months look at this:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/index.shtml

Current temperatures in OZ 9.30 am

Sydney 13 C
Melbourne 6C
Hobart 5C
Adelaide 14C
Brisbane 14C
Perth 13c

Sydney and Toronto have pretty similar weather in summer.



Jeremy

Our mornings are freezing Even in summer they are cool. The funny thing is though the day warms up and up and by 3 or 4 pm its at its hottest, thus making for lovely evenings to sit out in (and i think i'm right in saying the lightest?) Our skies have been blue for weeks, i love autum here in Mel, its by far my favorite time of year

Varies with the area I believe ... as I have posted elsewhere I think a bit more leg work and meeting people face-to-face than in the UK would hurry the process along.

There are jobs in Brissie for various flavours of IT person, a decent hard-working engineer is always in demand ... in the absence of that they call on me

It's starting to sound better and better

I'll probably have a search myself but what are the big ISPs in Australia? My hubby works fo NTL and his work is quite specialised towards ISPs especially cable.