About me

Hello there!

An actually photogenic photograph of moi.

I’m a twenty-something British expat who finally made it Down Under in November 2013 after nearly twelve years of talking about it and four aborted Working Holiday Visa applications. I’m currently based in Melbourne, Australia.

In September 2010, after a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Japan that spring, I enrolled in a  Japanese beginners evening class in Oxford where I was currently living. There, randomly enough, I met my partner of nearly three and half years, a British expat who had recently moved back to the UK after spending most of his life growing up in Melbourne. A mutual love of and interest in Japan brought us together and consequently set in motion my life-changing journey.

In December 2012 I submitted my application for a Partner Visa (subclass 309/100) under Australia’s family migration scheme. This brings me to why I decided to set up Wrestling with Wanderlust. Travel has always been a big passion of mine and for a long time I have fantasied about what it would be like to live abroad. However, I never expected that I would actually undertake such a huge and life-altering move – planning to emigrate is very different to taking a year out or doing a working holiday! So, in order to document the exciting, terrifying, and extremely stressful application and emigration process, I decided to start keeping a blog.

Wrestling with Wanderlust aims to be a record of what I went through during the application process and the big move itself. Hopefully it will prove useful to future couples applying for a 309/100 Partner Visa and anyone else generally looking to make the journey to Australia. Now I’ve got here safely, it will also be a platform for writing about settling in to life Down Under, and all the challenges and joys that entails, as well as covering things to do and see in my new home city of Melbourne. I originally hoped to travel around Australia for several months after first arriving, but for a variety of reasons, this overly-ambitious idea has been postponed for a while. My plan now is to hopefully take off in about two years’ time, when I turn the big 30. How I go about attempting to plan and do this will also feature here. For the time being however, I intend to explore Melbourne, my home state of Victoria, and further afield as thoroughly as I can.

Lastly, I don’t want to ignore the place I’ve left behind, my home of over twenty-seven years, the UK. I intend to use this blog to  write about how I feel about leaving the UK behind, what I miss, what I don’t, and how on earth I’m managing to deal with leaving behind my family. I’d also like to cover trips I’ve taken and things I’ve done previously whilst living there that may appeal to any would-be UK visitors.

So what can readers expect? Content on Wrestling with Wanderlust will come under six main categories:

• The Big Move: posts relating to the visa application process and emigrating to Australia.
• Bucket List: posts relating to things I wanted to do before leaving the UK.  Aussie bucket lists will be added in the future also.
• Oxford Living: posts on things I really enjoyed about living in Oxford.
• Travel Bug: posts on planning and organising my long-awaited backpacking trip, in addition to general travel focused posts.
• Life Down Under: posts on settling in to life in Australia, things to do and see in Melbourne and the surrounds, and generally what we get up to here.
• The Big Trip: posts on the (hopefully) forthcoming 2016 Aussie Adventure.

Thank you for taking an interest in Wrestling with Wanderlust, hope you enjoy reading!