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As I mentioned in October, I’ve been going through the process of obtaining Permanent Residency in Australia. This included sending in quite a bit of evidence that Dawn & I are living as a married couple, and have been since October 2005 when I was granted Temporary Residency.  It also, rather irritatingly, included completing the 2 forms that I mentioned in my last entry - which immigration would have received on Friday last week.  Anyway the upshot of this is contained in a letter that I received today…

As of Friday 4th January, I am now a Permanent Resident of Australia!

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Dawn has given an outline of what we did over the Christmas period, and here are some photos from our travels:

Then for new years we watched the fireworks displays (9pm & midnight) at Sydney Harbour!  Happy New Year!

On other news, when we returned home to Melbourne yesterday I had received a letter from immigration - unfortunately not a decision on permanent residency. The case officer has requested me to complete 2 more forms - most of the information required on them is duplication of either what was submitted in October or in my original application from 2005 from when I was granted temporary residency.  I managed to complete them after driving 6½ hours from Eden (NSW) to Melbourne, and posted them back to immigration yesterday!  Maybe I’ll hear a decision this month…

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About a month ago I received an email from the Australian High Commission in London.  This was to ask for evidence from the last 2 years regarding the continuing nature of our marriage, so a decision can be made whether or not to grant me permanent residency.  I had to get statements from a few people, include photos, copies of bills & statements etc - this was all sent off to London last week (sent by courier service, as there are postal strikes happening in the UK!) which they received 2 days ago.

A short while ago this evening I receive an email from the person in London who is dealing with my case - my file has now been transferred to Melbourne.  Makes sense as we’re living there now, however when I received that email a month ago I replied asking if I should send my stuff to Melbourne as we had just moved there - and got no reply. Bit frustrating

A part of Australian immigration is the need to get police clearance certificates, showing whether or not you’ve been a bad boy - so in my evidence I included a UK police check.  The requirement is if you have spent a total of at least 12 months in the past 10 years in any country you need to provide a clearance from those countries.  I spent 8½ months on a working holiday in 99/2000, 1 month in 2005, 2 weeks in 2006, and have been in Australia the past 2½ months - making a total of 12½-13 months…I now need to provide an Australian police check! Doesn’t sound so bad, I know there isn’t any record - however I have to provide every address I’ve stayed at in Australia. This is the thing..during that 8½ month working holiday 8 years ago, I stayed entirely in youth hostels and travelled around a bit I can’t remember every place I stayed at, nor can I remember all the dates!

Maybe I’ll get permanent residency by Christmas..let’s hope we don’t have to leave another country because visa stuff doesn’t work out.

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We’re definitely heading to Australia. Dawn finished her job on Wednesday, and her UK visa expired yesterday - so to make sure she didn’t “overstay” we had a short trip over to France.

It’s been a long while since I’ve been on a ferry across the English Channel, and it proved to be a cheap option to head down to Dover and cross over to Calais. We headed over yesterday, stayed the night, and this morning came back to the UK. The immigration officer asked a couple of questions and wanted to see our onward tickets to Australia, then granted entry to Dawn - the first time she’s been in the UK as a tourist!

It was a bit choppy coming back across the channel which slowed down the ferry, which in turn meant that we had to pay extra for parking at Dover docks - we were over the 24 hour mark by 6 minutes when we got to the car park pay terminal, this 6 minutes costing an extra £5 parking fee!!

We’ve both wanted to have stopovers when travelling between the UK and Australia, so this time we’re making a bit of a trip out of it. It’s going to take 1½ weeks to reach Australia after leaving the UK, and then a further week until we reach our new home - Melbourne! Unfortunately we won’t be going via the Trans-Mongolian railway (Moscow-Beijing) which we had hoped to do, but we will be going on the Indian Pacific once we’ve got to Australia.

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