Quoll

You’ve probably already budgeted but just in case you haven’t, don’t forget the international school fees for your kids plus any child care you may need if your DH can pick up work because you won’t get any subsidies. Darwin is one of those vegemite places, you either love it or hate it. Most Aussies would tell you to avoid it like the plague but if you like the hot and the wet you’ll be fine. Just don’t take any good leather stuff, it’ll get mouldy. Being in education yourself you’ll be in a good position to help your kids catch up when they get back into the U.K. system but reports from returnees suggest that U.K. schools are pretty good with helping catch ups. Good luck, it’ll be an adventure for sure.

Yup we have a Nectre and its great too. My DH is an urban scavenger so apart from last year when we arrived back from UK and the DS had depleted the wood pile, we havent bought wood in years. We've got enough for probably this winter and next in the pile now.

Sympathies! You may well be like many of us destined never to have your family on the same continent! I don’t think there is an easy decision. I guess I am surprised that your advice says Aus is better for you financially especially as you won’t have built up a huge super pot here but I can see that the lack of an inheritance tax here is appealing. There’s also the issue of getting back into the property market here which can be quite eye watering and you don’t want to be getting a mortgage, even if you could. I do see the appeal of being on hand to support an elderly parent - we did that for nearly 9 years and am guilt free whereas if I’d have left them to their own devices I would not have been so sanguine. I guess you need to consider where your needs are to be best met. Where will your interests be best catered for, which of your kids is most likely to produce grandchildren and which is most likely to be stable. Where does your partner want to be? Do they have family and friends they may not want to be parted from? Your son going to Aus might have that streak of adventure which sees him swanning from state to state and ending up in Arizona! Sadly, at our time of life we have to make the decisions which suit us and let our kids fly. If you and your partner believe that your life in Australia would suit you better than a life in England then you have the luxury of making that choice. We did choose to return to Aus, I must add but my DH is Australian and we have a house here. If we had gone to U.K. in our working years and not just in retirement as carers for my parents, I most certainly would have stayed and I think my DH would too but in our situation it wasn’t feasible. Good luck with your decision! May I suggest a coin toss? If your first outcome leads you to say “best of 3” then I think you have your answer!

I take knitting needles all the time and never had a problem. Not tried a crochet hook but i should think if you've got a wooden or bamboo one you dont mind losing, take that in your carry on rather than a nice metal one. Dental floss boxes double for scissors unless you've got a clover cutter. You'll defo need yarn in quarantine - vacuum packing it takes less space!

Have you actually been bumped off a flight or are you just launching a Blame the Government for everything "just in case" attack? IIRC it was your choice to leave the country and you did so, knowing the possible repercussions - I am sure you understood at the time that it was a risk but you decided it was a risk you had to take. I understand that airlines are more likely to prioritise those who are on the return half of a ticket (someone on another board in the same situation as you was assured of that and has returned unscathed) so chances are you will probably be just fine or will the Government's decision to force you into quarantine result in another "I am a Human Rights Advocate" diatribe?

Mea culpa, you are correct! Live and learn. As long as the parent was a citizen by descent before their birth though. So they would need to be dependents on the spouse visa in the first instance.

They cant get it through you. You would have had to have lived in Australia before they were born.

How long did you live in Australia prior to their birth? if you didnt live in Australia at all before they were born then you cannot hand down citizenship to them because you have only acquired your citizenship by descent. If you were to go now, your wife would require a partner visa with your sons as her dependents.

Interestingly, not very many convertibles here at all. Most people don’t want the exposure to the sun when driving and much prefer to drive in air conditioned comfort! You can get Caron cakes and the like from Spotlight and Lincraft have their own version. I’ve found an almost Stylecraft replacement in Fiddlesticks 8 which crochets up quite nicely but marginally heavier. Although on the other side of the country from where you will be Bendigo Woollen Mills has a reputation for being good workhorse yarns (and their back room in person has some nice little gems!) and they do online although the demand because of COVID means they’re a bit overwhelmed at the mo.

Seven Seas gave us a starter pack with a few boxes and bags for tvs etc. Got most of the rest of our boxes from the local Storage King and they were fine - medium size for management purposes. We also had a number of boxes of books and many of them we put into plastic boxes that we got from Dunhelm or similar and most of which had been used for storing stuff we weren't using. For inventory you can put down categories eg "dining service" "winter clothing" "books" "children's games" etc. My DH wrote on the outside of all the boxes the key things that were in them and on the inventory form he basically repeated that. He numbered and weighed every item and put item number and weight twice on the boxes - front and back. There were a couple of items we thought might be contentious so we labelled them clearly and made a point of identifying them on the inventory.

LOL closer to 2/3 full really and we could have got the dryer and the freezer in quite easily but had decided it probably wasnt going to be worth the effort. We were surprised that it fitted so easily as our mock up led us to believe we would be closer. I think the bike went in after that pic though.

If you’re transporting the furniture and all then I would say it would be very tight unless everything was flat packed. Shove in a couple of beds, dining set and a 3 piece suite I’d think it would be full to overflowing! We had about 80 items - mainly in medium/large removal boxes but they definitely varied in size from a bike box to DH’s tool box.. We measured out the volume in the dining room then piled our stuff up in the 3 dimensional space we taped out. In the end we actually fitted more into the actual cube than we appeared to have in our test space and we did have a bit more room to play with but we wouldn’t have got a 3 piece suite and beds in there too - we didn’t need to take furniture at all. Edited to say, looks like I did put perfume in there but as I use so little I am surprised that I did! DH did the labelling, with weights and put anything potentially contentious at the back for easy inspection.

Bringing a car, unless it is something very special is likely to be a waste of time and money. Yarn on the other hand - if your go-to yarns are Stylecraft, Drops, Rico, James C Brett then bring loads because they’re all great yarns and you can’t get them here (not easily anyway).

I agree with Marisawright - don’t cull your craft stuff, especially not yarn, beads or fabrics! I brought 35kg of yarn over in our movecube and if I’d known then what I know now, I’d have lashed outa day put in another 35kg!

I think you have your answer there. Your employer should pay your fares home though so that’sa bonus.

You may only have to pay for school fees if you go down the route of a temporary visa - which no one on here would recommend with a family BTW, not unless you plan on moving home at the end of it. You may choose to get private health insurance if your DH is going to be earning a lot and you do it to avoid the Medicare surcharge but on a PR visa you will be covered by Medicare. It's not the NHS and it's designed as a co-pay system but Pommy migrants seem to insist that it must be free like the NHS and they hunt out bulk billing (free) practices. If your OH has PR, you will have exactly the same. As for working, I assume you have 4 years teacher training at a Uni? That could be a first degree plus a Uni based PGCE (not an on the job training qual). If you don't, then you won't get a job as a teacher no matter how long you may have been teaching overseas. Whether you get a job or not rather depends on where you live, what subjects you teach and whether there are any vacancies. Some states like you to do rural and remote positions before you get a look in at permanent positions - there is always a lot of competition for positions in places that people actually want to live in and they prioritise those who have done their regional work in offering permanent plum positions. If you're maths/science though you'll have no problems

I thought you were going with your husband and if he can get a visa, you all go as dependents on his, you dont need to get a 189 of your own.

You'd better have your ticket and be ready to leave, they've given you enough time. It's not so difficult to get a flight out of the country as it is to get one to come in.

Of course you all need visas! Visas are to get you into the country so unless you fancy staying in UK while your DH heads off to Australia, you will need documentation to allow you into the country. However, You dont need your "own" visas, you go as dependents on your husband's visa. If you dont actually have a baby, just a bump, you will need to wait until the baby arrives before they will need documentation.

You might want to live in Australia regardless of state but each state is entitled to be sure that people they offer places to are committed to life in their state. A lot of people have been accepted by one state but then immediately reneged and gone to another and, quite rightly, they get mighty miffed about it. I'd agree with the others, don't put your life on hold, if the garden needs doing then get on with it. Assume you'll be staying then anything else is a bonus.

Oh how I miss Waitrose!!!!

Was thinking academically. Nothing is going to make them sporty if they arent already and school wouldnt be helping them catch up with that. I would imagine that Toowoomba kids are going to be pretty hard anyway and not much is going to harden up a softy, especially not expecting a school to do it. Admittedly Queensland is educationally more rigorous than Canberra but my UK yr 2 grandson is doing what my Aus yr 5 granddaughter is doing (he knows his tables and his writing is better!).

Cant help with specific schools but dont sweat that he will be behind his age peers here - UK kids are generally well ahead at this age.

Good on you for seeking help! I hope you find a counsellor you get along really well with. How long should you wait? That’s really one of those pieces of string questions and posters will generally give you the “give it 2 years” mantra - personally, I’d start making overtures to see what you could possibly reclaim of your previous life and how easy it might be for you to step back into it. Start with jobs, could you/your OH get back into work? Perhaps let that drive your time frame. Start applying for jobs you would kill to get so you know that you’ll be moving with something in hand. It may mean you leave in a hurry but it can be done (I don’t advocate the 3 days it took us but a couple of weeks is doable!) We were back for nearly 9 years and I have to say it was the best thing ever. I got “me” back, I wasn’t depressed any more and my health- both physical and mental- improved out of sight. If we had been younger we might have stayed but we left it too late and it wasn’t financially pragmatic. I do hope that you don’t let any guilt get you down - and don’t let it drive you down one particular pathway or another. Move - or not - because it will be the best thing for you not because of what other people may be feeling. Good luck with it all and look after yourself because nobody else is going to do it for you!

Correct. But you never can tell when a state may suddenly impose fees. Suppose it all depends on their need to balance a budget.