On form 1276 no.84 it says that one has to provide information about any visa one has ever held to Australie and also give info about arrival and departure dates. My husband and I have both had visas years ago in our teens, I lived in Oz a couple of years, but neither of us can remember the date we came or left let alone the type of visas we held

They say, that we can leave the spot with the date blank if we have no dates, but we have neither type of visa, dates or the passports from back then and cannot remember the details.

Has anyone tried something similar and if so, what did you do?

If you came on WHVs, student visas, tourist visas or with families as secondary applicants, jogging your memory may give you some idea of type to put along above definition lines and then just giving a general idea of month [even thought] and year will be sufficient.

Hello, I had a similar problem. The solution was to request a movement record with DIAC using Form 1359.

You normally don't have to "prove" what you had. Give information to the best of your knowledge and specify what data is incomplete/missing.

Thank you for responding Yesterday we looked at the online application for the GSM-independent-175, and we made a "practise-application" When I came to the questions regarding the former visas, it was not enough to just say that it was a studentvisa attended may year 1992. You had to give the date as well (and perhaps the visanumber).
In short, we could not go on to "Next" in the application.
So how does the form 139 help in that regard?
I will check out the form now

I mean form 1359!!

After the form has been processed. DIAC will issue a Movement Record with information regarding all record of dep/arr dates and the visa used during the stay in oz. It will take, i think, approx. 2-3 weeks for the form to be processed. Wish u luck on ur application.

Thank you. I did read the form and one thing bothers me:

1) It says that you would have to give an australian postal adress for them to send it to, but I'm offshore, so what now?

Also - if anyone in here can tell me what to fill out on the onlineapplication, cause the online page REQUIRES that you set a date from the visa grant, which is exactly what we do not have, so in other words, we cannot continue the online application without the date - But perhaps you mean that I can get the 1359 information without having lodged the 175?

Thereby having the date first, and then being able to lodge?

Still it is a problem if they will only send the info to an Oz adress

I apologized since was not aware of this prerequisite. My migration agent was rather meticulous with my visa application since I was from high risk country. Thus, the agent took the liberty of applying for my movement record.
IMHO, approximating the date of arrival/departure to the nearest month would suffice. For example, you arrived in Jan 2010 but do not know the date, then you can put 01/01/10.