My Australian Working Holiday Visa

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(Totally unrelated but pretty photo of Krakow)


 I feel like telling you guys the story of my next step in planning for my big trip: applying for a working holiday visa. This allows me to work and travel around Australia for up to one year.

My experience getting my working holiday visa was somewhat daunting. I’ve heard it can be quite confusing, and if you don’t do your application correctly the first time and it gets cancelled then you can never apply for a WHV again. Not like the stakes were high then.

There are a lot of eligibility requirements you have to meet in order to apply for a WHV, including having sufficient funds in your account in order to be able to get a flight back to your home country. This was the main thing I was worried about as I’ve been saving as much as I can, but with constant car troubles and other unexpected pay-outs, it’s been a bit of an uphill battle. Time has not been on my side either; the Australian Government website recommends that you leave at least 2 months for your application to go through, and it’s around that time now. I wanted to do everything with plenty of time so I don’t need to panic about not having the correct visa.

So as soon as I got *just* enough money, I applied for it. The process itself was actually slightly more stressful than I had anticipated. There were of course, reems and reems of forms to fill out, which was absolutely fine until I got stuck with a couple of things. What is a birth certificate identification number anyway?

Another moment of panic for me at this stage was when a big red bar appeared across the top of the web page saying my passport details were not suitable or something. Had I messed up and now I can’t resubmit the form?

No, it turns out I had just selected ‘British subject’ instead of ‘British citizen’.

So yeah that’s pretty much how confusing it was.

After what seemed like an eternity of forms, it was like I had blacked out in a stressed daze and then woke up in a pile of documents and birth certificates. In the end the visa set me back a total of AUS $491.40, which was £276.38.

The silliest part of this story is the time I spent waiting for it. The Australian gov website said that 90% of cases are sorted after 17 days, so when 17 days came and went, I started to panic.

After re-checking my emails, it turns out I had already been granted the visa but I had just read the email wrong. So I was panicking for over 2 weeks for nothing.

So, the lesson is, read your emails! (And never leave me to do anything on my own oh god how will I go to the other side of the world by myself)

Time now for me to get excited for my trip; it’s really happening now!

Shepp x

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