Moving to Australia – Part Eleven

If you are new to this series and would like to start at the beginning, please go to Moving to Australia Part 1

From last weeks post about the medical you will know that ours got sent off to the Australian authorities some time around the 1st of June 2007.

Given the events surrounding my medical, I was left waiting nervously.

But I wasn’t left waiting for long. Kind of. You see, you don’t actually get the results of your medical and you don’t actually receive any kind of confirmation that you have passed the medical. But we did receive an e-mail from our MARA migration agent on the 19th of June 2007.

Firstly, let me just quickly remind you that our application to emigrate to Australia was based on a points system. Well, we were a little short on points. “We” needed 115. I had scored 0, (over 45 years of age) and my wife had got 110. So, “we” were 5 points short.

NB. The points system has changed since 2007 when we applied, you can read about the current points system on my Points Calculator page.

But we could secure an extra 5 points by making a Capital Investment of $100,000 in Australian government bonds for 12 months. This was actually a good deal at the time. They were paying just over 6% interest and the pound was very strong against the Aussie dollar. But never mind all that, it got us the points!

Now back to that e-mail. Our agent had received a request from our case officer asking for the payment of our Capital Investment. This was surely good news.

Or was it? We had to be inclined to believe that the Australian government would not ask for this money to be paid unless they were happy with our medicals, would they? No, of course they wouldn’t. Or would they?

It’s amazing how irrational your thought process can be at times like this. It really didn’t make sense to either of us that the money would be requested and they would then say no. But it was still a possibility. So that’s why I say we weren’t waiting for long, kind of.

So we electronically transferred over the money and it was received in Australia on June 22nd. They also needed some signed forms in order to open the account properly and we completed those and sent them recorded delivery by Royal Mail.

They never showed up!

So I went to our local Post Office clutching my “Track and Trace” receipt and asked them to find out where my documents had gone to. After surveying his systems he declared he had no idea where it was and added “the last time we saw it was heading for Africa”.

“But I paid for Track and Trace” I said, “so trace it”. He looked at me as though I was mad and said rather indignantly “Well we can’t trace it if we’ve lost it can we?” before he went on to explain that if it didn’t show up within 28 days I could come back and fill in a compensation form.

Thanks mate.

We re-did the forms and sent them by courier.

Despite the delay, at 6:30 a.m. on the morning of 18th of July 2007 we got a telephone call from our migration agent. Our visas had been granted!

I do not normally smile at 6:30 a.m. but on the morning of the 18th of July 2007, you couldn’t stop me.

For a full chronological list and brief description of all the posts in this series about how I moved to Australia, please visit my page How to Move to Australia.