Hi I have forgotten,can the statments be written as a joint statment or do they have to be seperate one's? Can I just give them a brief account or do I have to write a mills and boon story because I am no good at putting it into flowery words. thanks lorri

They should be separate as whichever one of you is an Oz citizen needs to pledge to support the non-citizen for your first 2 years in Australia, including accommodation and financial assistance to meet reasonable living needs.

Remember that your relationship with your partner will be assessed as part of the application process, so saying some nice things about how you got together, things that attracted you each other and how you support each other in your day to day life will go a long way!

Good luck - the form filling is tedious but worth it in the end.

Just to add to this, when we did ours we each wrote about half a side of A4 summarising our relationship history. We were asked to provide something much more verbose and in the end wrote about a page and a half each which was fairly difficult as we've only been married for 5 years, together for 7 and no kids. It was just a more sentimental, fluffy version, but I'd definitely shy away from a bullet list or something too brief.

Scott

For the first part on my application (TR), we submitted a joint 2 page typed statement. We basically spoke about how our relationship started, where is was and our plans for the future. We also detailed how we supported one another emotionally and financially. It was accepted with no questions asked.

Good luck!!