In our first year here, we went out to eat on a public holiday. I don’t remember which holiday it was anymore. But I remember the counter. When you’re new, you do the sums in your head before you pay. You look at the menu, add up what you ordered, and get your money ready.

A few months after we landed in Australia, a letter arrived that we almost set aside without reading properly. We were still finding our feet. My husband was still looking for work. Money was tight, and neither of us was earning yet. So when a government letter showed up mentioning insurance, our first instinct was

In the early years after we moved to Australia, we barely sent money home at all. We were still finding our own feet, and building our life here took every dollar we had. There wasn’t much left over to send anywhere else. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to help. It’s just that helping wasn’t

In 2017, my husband and I walked into a car dealership in Victoria, not to buy, just to look. We had our eye on a new car and wanted to know what it would actually cost us month to month. We told the salesperson clearly. We were exploring options. We weren’t ready to buy yet.

When we first arrived in Australia in 2016, my husband qualified for a Health Care Card, and it arrived in our letterbox within our first few weeks. We didn’t know much about it yet. My husband was the one who ended up using it. For transport. He got a concession myki and used it to

How often do you actually get billed for your basics here? If you are new to Australia, you might assume every bill works the same way. We certainly did. We budgeted for our bills every month when we first arrived. Electricity, rent, groceries, all the usual things. It felt organised. It felt like we had

Is your superannuation actually going where you think it’s going? I didn’t ask myself that question for three years. In 2019, I finally sat down and filled out a beneficiary nomination form for my super. I split it fifty-fifty, half to my husband and half to our daughter. It felt fair. It felt like the

Every time it rained, I put a bucket under our ceiling. By morning, it was a quarter full. The carpet underneath was wet. The rugs were wet. This went on for days before the ceiling finally gave way in our living room. By this point we were in our second year renting here. We still

Is the job you were just offered actually the job you applied for? It sounds like a strange question to ask. But it’s one worth asking every single time, especially as a new arrival still learning how employment works here. My husband applied for a role advertised online as permanent. He went through every stage

What does it mean when a form asks if you have a HECS or HELP debt? I remember sitting down to fill out my tax file number declaration when I first started working here. Every question made sense until I got to one line near the bottom. It asked if I had a HECS or HELP