How did we make the move to Australia?

So, I already answered the question about why our family moved to Australia. This post is more about the how.

I’m gonna go ahead and acknowledge right up front that this is not going to be a good how-to if you’re personally looking to move to Australia. This is really just for curiosity’s sake. My circumstances are so specific that I don’t know what you could take from this and apply to yourself!

Once my husband and I decided that Australia was going to be where our family landed, we began looking at how to make that possible.

Australia has quite a lot of types of visas. We focused on employment visas specifically, since we didn’t have the money to simply fund our own visa outright.

Occupational therapy is on Australia’s list of careers for which there is a national skills shortage. This means that they are a bit easier to get visas for because Australia is nationally hoping to attract more of them. We looked at how to get an employment-based visa. The typical one is called a temporary residence visa. It allows you to agree to come work in Australia for two years doing a career that is on the skills shortage list.

There are companies in Australia who try to specifically focus on employing OTs who come from overseas. These companies might basically import a few hundred OTs per year, all across the continent, getting them temporary residence visas.

I interviewed with somewhere around five of these companies. They had different levels of benefits, salaries, etc. None of them were like incredibly amazing to me, but all of them were fine. I didn’t know how normal it would be for any of them to accept neuro-affirming, child-led, play-based OT as their normal. But I figured that I was pretty solidly comfortable in defending my practice by now, as well as capable of being a *little* more adult-led if it was required of me for my job. Basically, I figured, “well, I can do anything for two years…”

But i was also aware that we’d be sort of kicking the can down the road, because after two years we’d have to fill out more paperwork and apply for a new type of visa to hope we could stay. At that point, it would cost a lot of money over again and it wouldn’t be an assured thing, either. I’d have to prove that I was being valuable to the country and hope it was enough.

Chatting with an Australian friend, they expressed chagrin that I’d work for one of the big national chains. They asked if I would be ok with posting in an Australian neuro-affirming practitioners’ Facebook group to see if there were any other job opportunities at all, who might be willing to hire me as “The Occuplaytional Therapist” and not just as some person applying for a job.

While doing that, we were still researching and planning as if I was gonna go with one of the big corporations. We narrowed down our chosen state in Australia based on that, because the different states have different rules about what government benefits are accessible to temporary residents. We didn’t want to pay school fees, so we landed on Victoria because they allow even temporary residents’ children to come to school without paying thousands of dollars in fees.

Then I hit a roadblock and a big worry. I learned that if I was in Australia on a temporary residence visa, I could literally only work the job that I was hired for on my visa—including not being able to work for myself. Effectively, if I took a temporary residence visa, I’d be halting my ability to be paid for any Occuplaytional Therapist work whatsoever for at least two years and maybe longer.

I wasn’t sure anymore that that was the right decision. I pour tons of effort into the free parts of OPT every single day. But I was just about to publish a book, had just begun doing paid lectures—was this the right time to put that momentum to a screeching halt?

Then two different companies in the neuroaffirming group on Facebook expressed interest in hiring me to come work for them. Funnily enough, both of them were situated on opposite sides of the bay that Melbourne sits on. If the bay is shaped like a lowercase /n/, Melbourne is at the middle/top of the n, while one job was on the left and the other on the right.

And—crucially—both jobs were willing to offer me a different type of visa. A permanent residency visa!

It’s rare for companies to offer this visa because it requires a massive amount of trust. On a temporary visa, if you get there and then quit your job, you lose your visa. You’d have to leave the country. So companies like to offer temporary visas because you’re guaranteed to stick with them. But on a permanent visa, there’s no legal requirement at all. Once you’re in the country, you’re part of the country. I could theoretically quit immediately if I was going to be a jerk about it. (I have no such plans.) So, permanent residency employment visas are really rare. But both employers felt like they knew and trusted me because of my work online.

Plus, they actively *wanted* me to keep doing my OPT work! And so did I! 🥰 and with that visa, I could work however I wanted!

So, we began researching the areas Geelong and the Mornington Peninsula. The more we researched, the more apparent it became that Geelong was more geared toward young families, and Mornington was more geared toward older, wealthier retirees. We felt like we’d fit in much better and find more of what our family needed in Geelong. Plus, the more I got to know the employer, the more I liked them.

So, it was settled. I signed paperwork in April 2024 accepting the job. Now we just had to actually start the process.

We used the Down Under Centre to help guide us through the whole visa process—both me and the employer. Since, unlike the huge companies, they’d never hired anyone from overseas before! It was a muuuuuch longer process than either of us expected. Lots of “hurry up and wait”, and frustration with the lack of communication. Everyone was surprised at the visa situation since it’s truly so rare for anybody to get permanent residency visas.

The process of getting the visas was mostly just pushing paperwork around. They wanted address history for years and years, background checks from everywhere (which was a lot since we’ve lived in the US and UK), basic medical checks, taxes and financial information, all our identifying documents, etc, etc. This process finally got finished on December 14, 2025.

At that point, we could legally have moved to Australia any day. We just needed actual time to do the logistics like packing up our stuff and disentangling from our lives (the kids’ school, husband’s work, etc.)

We used a shipping company called Seven Seas for shipping our stuff. We ordered a box that is basically part of a shipping container. We measured out on our wall and floor exactly how big it would be and bought plastic totes to fill it. Then we began filling the totes with stuff, but very specific stuff. The kind of stuff you want to have for your life forever, but don’t need right away, because it would take 6 months to get there. So mostly sentimental things and Rev Dr TOPT’s books (he’s an avid book reader/collector). The stuff was shipped a couple of days before our plane flights.

The photo is of our first attempt at measuring out the wall and floor to figure out how to pack our stuff. It shows a basement with painter’s tape on the wall and floor, and stacked plastic boxes filling the space to figure out the best way to organize our stuff in height and width. My husband is partially visible as he assesses the layout of the boxes.

The last step, and a truly anxiety-inducing one, was finding housing once we got here. We could’ve gone to stay in a hotel or Airbnb but strongly felt that if we could get into our actual house ASAP it would be easier for the kids and allow me to enrol them in school in time for them to start with term 2. I tried very hard to find houses on my own but kept getting dismissive or noncommittal replies from the realtors and landlords.

It turns out that it’s very hard to independently set up a rental situation from outside of Australia. It’s partially a legal requirement and partially a very strong social expectation that you will personally tour a house before you rent it because you have to sign off on its condition. Also, landlords like to scan you against a national database to see your history of being a good renter. Lacking both these things, and in a market where every house had a half-dozen or more potential applicants, nobody would give us a chance. Not to mention how hard it was to try to phone places or contact anybody, since I’d have to be up in the middle of the night to do it.

So, we hired a company called Rental Search Australia with only two weeks left to go. They were incredibly kind and reassuring, helped us get the information we needed to make our profile look better even though we were coming from out of the country, and helped us snap up a house that just keeps on being more and more perfect for our family the more we discover about it.

And then we just had to slog our way through ten billion hours of planes to get here! I’ll write about that next time — about the literal “day(s) of” the actual move itself.