What's it like living in Australia?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was considering moving out of this Eastern European hellhole and apparently I am eligible for an Australian work visa. I am now seriously thinking about it.

But I’ve never been to Australia, not even close. I’m kind of worrying that life there might be a bit… too different for me to handle.

So, if you live anywhere in Australia or have lived there for at least a few months, I am interested in anything you can tell me.

For example: What’s the general “lifestyle” in your city? Are people generally friendly? What’s the night life like? The weather? The beaches (I’m afraid of sharks)? Is food expensive? How much do people earn and pay for rent? Are there some nice parks in the big cities? Is it clean? Are people mostly religious? What about crime, is it safe to go out late at night? Are there a lot of tourists? Where are most of the the tourists from? Are there any strange Australian laws I should know about? Well, just anything you can tell me would help me imagine this far-off land better.

2

It’s fine, thanks.

It’s safe, the people are very friendly, the temperatures are generally at least warm and occasionally very hot indeed. Though you hear lots of stories about deadly creatures (spiders, snakes, sharks, drop bears, etc), you’ll almost certainly never encounter them.

Standard of living is high, and the job market is a bit tight, while houses are getting ridiculously expensive. I believe that’s happening similarly in most of the Western world.

I live in Melbourne, which is quite a different atmosphere to Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, or Darwin, each of which are uniquely their own.

Also, the women are very, unbelievably pretty.

3

Here’s my answers based on my time in Perth, Western Australia.

Australian summers suck. Although we’ve got some weird weather at the moment, they tend to be oppressively hot.

I’m pretty sure that such things are more expensive here than in other countries.

There are parks you can walk in both north and south of the river, including a big nature reserve, Kings Park, on the hill overlooking the city.

They tend not to wear their religion on their sleeve, in my experience.

I’ve never run into trouble despite being the sort of person who goes on walks at 3AM in the morning, but there are definitely some people to watch out for, like idiot frat boy types coming back from Northbridge (a suburb with lots of bars).

There are both tourists and foreign university students, and they’re from all over the place.

5

I live in Sydney where the winters are mild and the summers are generally humid. The price of food here is cheaper than in regional cities but accommodation is more expensive. Public transport is woeful, unfortunately.

I think we are, in the main, fairly friendly and welcoming. Can’t speak about the night life because I’m a bit past all that going out stuff. Sydney is generally quite safe, unless you happen to listen to shock jocks on the radio who love nothing more than to talk up how likely one is to be glassed in a pub or shot in a drive-by.

Some people are religious but we are largely live-and-let-live folk in that regard.

Sydney is a very multi-cultural place and we do get a lot of tourists.

As to the ease or otherwise with which you might get a job, I think that depends on the type of employment you are seeking.

6

Is it full of things just waiting to kill you? Because that’s the impression I got from reading Bill Bryson’s book. He seemed alternately amused and terrified while there.

The book:

7

That’s Bill Bryson’s schtick, so I’d take it with a grain of salt.

8

I spend a year travelling and working there, and spent a reasonable amount of time in Tasmania, Melbourne and Brisbane.

Weather- Tasmania’s not all that different from Europe, weatherwise. It doesn’t get so much of the incredibly hot stuff, and it does actually get rain on a semi-regular basis. I presume you’d be planning to go to the mainland though? Well, it depends on area a lot, but yes, it can get far too hot (and cold- and switch between the two really fast! The year I was there, Christmas day was actually colder where I was, in Melbourne, than where my parents were, in Northern England- but only two days earlier, it was meltingly hot). But air-con is so widely available, unless you’re working outside, you can work around it a lot.

I loved Brisbane- it’s decent size city, modern, friendly, lots of stuff going on- good nightlife, but not just a mad party place. It’s possible to find reasonably priced places to live there- I can only directly compare rent to the UK, but I had a place cheaper for a short-term contract there than I do here, for a similar size, and it was in a much nicer area. It does get too hot, and when it rains, it rains.

Minimum wage is high compared to Europe, I think wages generally are higher- and house prices are lower than Western Europe certainly (my cousin, a nurse, and her husband, a plumber, recently bought each of their two daughters a house, pretty much outright. My mind boggled.) Food prices I’d say are higher, clothing is suprisingly expensive, but it’s hot, so you don’t need to wear so much of it :wink:

You might encounter redback spiders, and see a snake hightailing it off under a bush, especially if you go somewhere rural. Just don’t poke them. The dangers are massively overrated, same goes for sharks. I did meet one person who had been bitten by a shark (a wobbegong, yes, really, he poked it). Redbacks do show up in cities (said cousin did have an infestation of the buggers once) but most people just count them as a nuisance rather than a serious threat.

It’s a pretty safe country, so long as you don’t do dumb stuff like head off into the outback to wrestle taipans and forget your water bottle. The violent crime rate is low compared to just about everywhere, I didn’t feel threatened at all, that I remember. Slightly skeeved out by bogans with no sense of personal boundaries when it came to girls, but that was about it.

There are religious enclaves around, but religion is not a big deal to most Aussies (my cousins excepted, annoyingly). Apart from my family, I don’t think the topic even came up in the whole year I was there.

Tourists are common, and largely English/Irish/German, with a few from everywhere in Europe, and to a lesser extent from the US and Canada. Most tourists are concentrated on the East coast, Melbourne and Adelaide. And Uluru. Obviously.

Hope some of this is helpful!

9

Filbert:

But what about the drop bears?

10

I’m from Adelaide, capital of South Australia and 5th largest city (behind Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane).

Adelaide city centre is small and compact, a square mile in a grid layout surrounded by parklands. The city is easily walkable - I could show you the free museums, botanic gardens, cinemas, university, business distict, restaurant district, outdoor shopping mall, pubs, clubs and food markets within a 30 minute stroll. Living expenses are cheaper than in the bigger capital cities.

Adelaide has a reputation (at least among locals) of being a ‘backwater’ compared to the other eastern cities, though the smaller-town vibe could be a positive or a negative depending on how you see it. Nightlife is there, but generally only on the weekends unless you know where to go. A few student-friendly places will be big on Wednesdays and Thursdays but come to the city on a Monday night expecting to party and you might be disappointed.

Most people live in the suburbs rather than in the city centre itself, which IMO is a problem because it means the city life ‘dies’ on public holidays and the aforementioned Monday nights for example. There are some nice inner suburbs which are fairly central while remaining fairly cheap to rent. Depending on where you live and work, having a car might be necessary.

Beaches here are great and we don’t have the jellyfish that plague Sydney beaches! Only a few hours south of the city the coastal area becomes quite rural, and South Australia in general has some absolutely beautiful untouched shores. Kangaroo Island and the wine regions are other popular tourist destinations in South Australia.

Around 70% of South Australia’s population lives in Adelaide, so you can see that, compared to Europe, that’s a lot of unpopulated land in the rest of the state.

To give you a really rough idea of money matters (not sure how this compares to the Eastern states):
Bus ticket - around $4
Beer - around $16 for a 6-pack of decent Australian beer, around $7/bottle if bought in a pub.
Rent - I pay $130/week for a room in a nice sharehouse about 10 minutes away by car to the inner city.
Cup of coffee - around $4 in a cafe.
Loaf of bread - $1.50-4
Takeaway meal in a city food court (say a curry dish or chinese food) - $5-9

Adelaide is also multicultural and, minus a few areas that I wouldn’t walk around in by myself at night time, safe. We have hot, dry summers and mild winters.

Another thing - if you were coming on a one-year work and travel visa and wanted to stay for a second year, you’d need to do at least 3 months work in a ‘rural’ region. The whole of South Australia including Adelaide is considered ‘rural,’ for visa purposes so you could do those 3 months work in a comfortable city, if fruitpicking wasn’t your thing :slight_smile: (same goes for Tasmania I think).

11

I’m not sure this is true: I don’t have the figures, but a lot of tourists in Australia come from East Asia, particularly Japan, though as they get richer other countries are catching up. It may be because they are more visible – but you can also see it in the signs in places where tourists go, since the second most common language in the signs is Japanese.

12

I’m an expat that lives in Sydney, and I agree with all this, especially the expense of accomodation. Fortunatly, to my American eyes the wages are huge, and this helps. Dunno how they compare to Eastern Europe.

I love Sydney, I’m pretty sure I’ve gushed about it on the boards here. I think it’s beautiful. The people are awesome (including my husband), the food is great, and the coffee is fantastic. A perfect spring or summer day is just a little bit of heaven for me, if I can go for a run and then spend the rest of the morning in a cafe people watching.

In terms of finding somewhere to live, although I and other Sydneysiders love to bitch about ShittyRail (Cityrail) compared to the US and probably to where you live, it’s great. Try to get a place near a rail station. Buses are prevelant, but take longer. Public transport in Melbourne when I’ve been there seems better, but bitching about public transport seems to be like commenting on the weather.

There’s a big drinking culture, something that surprised me (but I have embraced it, oh yes I have.)

I found people very welcoming and helpful when I first moved here, so there you go. Hope you can make it over. :slight_smile:

13

Beer is extremely expensive. They call trash cans “bins.” Food and housing are a bit more expensive than they would be here in the US. And it’s fucking hot in the summer. Other than that, it’s a lot like paradise. I’d say go for it, it’s not like they won’t let you go home!

14

It’s because Americans are suckers for that stuff. They eat it up, for whatever reason. They love to imagine Australia as filled with dangerous and deadly creatures.

Put it this way: I’m 46 and have lived my entire life in Australia. I’ve spent quite a bit of time outdoors, and I have friends who have travelled right around the whole continent and camped out all over the place. I’ve known a lot of people over the years, and have a wide variety of friends and acquaintances.

I’ve never been bitten by anything worse than a mosquito. Nobody I have known has ever been bitten by anything worse than a mosquito or stung by anything worse than a bee.

While it’s possible to get bitten/stung by some pretty nasty stuff here, you have to go looking for it and goad it into attacking you in an idiotic Steve-Irwin-style manner. For anyone else, the chance of encountering anything any worse than you’d encounter in any other country is as close to zero as makes no difference.

15

My family lived in Australia (Sydney & Wangaratta) for 4 years, and so I have known various Australians all of my life, and just a month back, I was hanging in New Orleans for a week with a good friend who lives in Melbourne.

He explained to me just how incredibly expensive beer is in Melbourne, and how a 6-pack of local brew at the corner store is around $15; Knowing how much beer this buddy of mine drinks, all day-every day, he must spend several thousand bucks a year on the stuff…

16

Yes, beer is about twice as expensive as in the U.S., but wine is much the same price.

17

Huh. I thought you were in Sydney. Did you move or do I just have that wrong?

Bwuh? Where in Western Europe? When I am very very bored and catch a few moments of UK house shopping type TV shows I am always astounded at how low prices are in the UK, outside of London, compared to here.

18

I’m probably going back there (Melbourne) to live soonish. It’s a good place to live - equitable and tolerant.

But yes, things are expensive. I can actually buy Australian wine here in Japan cheaper than in Australia for the exact same product (something to do with a domestic sales tax that does not apply to exports).

19

One odd thing I found when I stayed in Australia a few years back was the clothing prices: I remember needing some jeans and some t-shirts, so I went to a small department-type store (think Target, or some such, in the States) and couldn’t believe the prices on jeans–incredibly cheap, like 10 or 15 bucks (Ozzie bucks) a pair. But I also found the prices on t-shirts incredibly expensive, also 10 or 15 bucks. (Typical US pricing: Jeans cost at least $25, t-shirts run as cheap as 3 bucks on the street in NYC.) Wacky. I’m wearing my Ozzie bathrobe as I type–bathrobes cost about the same.

20

First of all, thank you everyone who took the time to reply, I really appreciated reading it :slight_smile:

I’d actually be open to any options, but yes, mainland is what I think of when I think of moving there. From everything I’ve read so far (in this thread and my google searches) Brisbane sounds the most inviting. But only slightly, because all the “big” cities sound like nice places to live.

Ahh, I didn’t know that so that’s good to know. Admittedly, I’m still doing my research on all this immigration stuff.

Wow, apart from some complaints about the costs of living, it all really sounds quite nice over there. Lots of things are going through my mind right now, kind of exciting if I actually am able to go through with it and be selected. Thanks again everyone for replying!

21

It’s an attractive country IMHO - definitely worth considering if you’re looking to relocate. From my visits I’d say the pros are: the sun, the great outdoors (you’d need 100 lifetimes to explore the Aussie bush), the sports, the Shelias, the boozing and the gambling. I’m in the UK, and there’s quite a strict separation between betting shops and alcohol - not so in Aus. Also felt it was quite a family-oriented place with the cities being kid-friendly. That’s just an impression, though.

Drawbacks for me personally would be the sun, the spiders and it’s a bit of a cultural and intellectual Siberia. I guess you bring your own stimulation in these areas with you to an extent, but it will effect what opportunities there are for work.