Practical Guides

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

In our first year in Melbourne, I thought the hardest part of driving here would be adjusting to the roads themselves. Cars in Australia are right hand drive, and everyone drives on the left side of the road. Back in my home country, it is the opposite. Left hand drive, driving on the right, same

When we first arrived in Australia, the word tax made my stomach turn a little. Back home, tax was something that just happened quietly in the background. Here, it felt like one more thing on a long list I did not understand yet. New job. New bank. New everything. And now this too. If you

There is a feeling that nobody really warns you about before you move to Australia. It is not the homesickness, although that is real. It is not the cost of living shock, although that hits hard too. It is the quiet, persistent feeling that everyone else has figured something out that you have not. That

I wish someone had sat me down before we arrived in Australia and said this. The first 90 days are not about getting ahead. They are about getting the order right. Because when you are new to a country, everything feels urgent at once. Finding a place to stay. Looking for work. Figuring out transport.