How we chose a region before we chose a house

My wife has wanted to move to Australia for as long as I have known her. It came up every couple of years and then went away again. On the walk to our pub quiz one evening she said it again and neither of us said the thing that usually ends it, and by the end of that week she was emailing recruiters and joining the Facebook groups properly.

She is a UK-trained GP, two years post-CCT, and before that she was an obstetrics and gynaecology registrar. I build iOS apps.

The visa decides everything after it, so that came first. There is a points route, where you move under your own steam and nobody has to hire you, and it is the slower way to do it. A doctor doesn't really need it. Clinics sponsor all the time, so the question for us was only which sponsored visa.

Some of that ease is a UK thing rather than a doctor thing, as far as I can tell. Being UK trained puts her on a quicker registration path than doctors from a lot of other countries get, and I would not assume any of this reads the same way if you trained somewhere else.

A 186 takes you straight to permanent residency and we ruled it out in the end because it takes longer and is a bit more involved. So we went for a 482, the skills in demand visa, which is temporary and tied to the clinic that nominates you, and which can lead onto a 186 later through the transition stream anyway.

I am on it as her dependent with full work rights, so I can work for anyone once we are there. Her job still comes first, and the rest of our life gets arranged around wherever that job is allowed to be.

I didn't understand how much work that word allowed was doing.

I started on Seek. I searched for the roles I do and the answer came back almost entirely Sydney or Melbourne, not mostly, almost entirely, and that one search set the boundary for everything before we had thought about a single suburb.

Melbourne went quickly and I won't pretend it was rigorous. Good weather is one of the main reasons we want to go, and the more we read about Melbourne the more we hit the same phrase, four seasons in one day, and a climate people describe as closer to Europe than to what we were picturing. My wife had been to Sydney years earlier on an elective, which is the placement medical students arrange abroad in their final years of training. That was the extent of the analysis. We ruled out a city of five million people on vibes, and if you do this yourself you'll probably do something similar, so you may as well be honest with yourself about which of your decisions were the careful ones.

So we had New South Wales, and that is where the research really started.

She couldn't take a job in central Sydney, because of a classification called Distribution Priority Area, or DPA, which the Australian government uses to steer doctors towards the places they are needed most. International medical graduates are restricted under section 19AB of the Health Insurance Act 1973, and working in a DPA location is what makes them eligible to access Medicare. Central Sydney isn't short of GPs, so central Sydney was closed to us.

I should be straight about how I learned that, because it says something about how these searches actually go. I didn't read the legislation. My wife picked it up from the Facebook groups and my own working knowledge came from job adverts, which tend to say whether a role is DPA or not. That was my filter, a label on an advert, and it was enough to be useful and nowhere near enough to be expert. If you want to check a place properly rather than trust a job ad, the department publishes a health workforce locator that will tell you how somewhere is classified. If you are the non-medical half of one of these moves that is roughly where you'll be too.

Then the second constraint, which was me. Any iOS role I get is probably going to be hybrid with office days in Sydney CBD. My limit was 75 minutes each way. What I actually wanted was 65.

Put those two things on the same map and you get the thing I wish we had known in week one. Her constraint pushes outward, away from the city, and mine pulls inward towards it, and they are not the same pin. Where she works and where we live are two different questions, and nearly all the advice out there treats them as one.

Where she works and where we live were never the same question. Working that out took us about three weeks longer than it should have.

Sam Rowley

Here is what we did, over and over, for about a month. A recruiter sends through a clinic. We find it on Google Maps. We look at the towns roughly 25 minutes from it in the direction of the city, because 25 minutes was what she was willing to drive. Then a second search on each of those towns, to see what it takes to get from there into the CBD. Under 75 and the town stayed on the list. Over and the clinic was dead, and the clinic was usually dead.

We leaned on Claude a lot to narrow things down and it was genuinely useful for getting from a blank map to a set of names worth checking. We stayed sceptical of it though, because we kept getting false positives, and they all had the same cause.

Water.

North of Sydney the map is full of what look like lakes, and a suburb can sit what looks like no distance from the city while the actual journey goes around all of it. Woy Woy is the one we remember. It is about 43km from the CBD, which sounds like nothing, and the train to Central is around an hour and fifteen. That's not a disaster. It was inside my 75 and outside my 65, which made it exactly the sort of borderline case that eats an evening. On this coastline the straight line between two points tells you almost nothing, and you can't skip the second lookup.

Doing that by hand, one clinic at a time, is the whole problem. Every recruiter email cost us half an hour of map work before we could even say no.

We dealt with six recruiters or so over about a month, some in Sydney, some in the UK, some elsewhere in Australia, and a few of them were big firms that specialise in placing medics.

The mismatches weren't subtle. Roles in Newcastle, which is DPA and fine for her and hopeless for me. Suggestions that we look at Perth, or at places remote enough that my job doesn't exist there. We had given people the commute constraint and a lot of them were clearly working from a list of vacancies rather than from anything we had said, and we rejected a lot of roles.

The big firms also pushed corporate clinics, which my wife had been told to avoid. That advice came from the Facebook groups rather than from experience, so take it as received wisdom rather than fact. The version you hear repeated is that the rates are worse, the support is thinner, you are more of a number, and a high turnover of new doctors dilutes the patient list you might otherwise build. True or not, it shaped what we said yes to, so it belongs in an honest account of how we decided.

Somewhere in this we stopped thinking about the Sutherland Shire, which had been my early favourite, and started looking further south at the Illawarra. Coastal towns, Wollongong as a proper city rather than a commuter dormitory, and on the face of it a workable run into Sydney.

There was a money reason too, and it is a hunch rather than a rule because we only saw it happen once. She came close to signing with a clinic much nearer the CBD that offered nothing at all for relocation. The nicer and more convenient the area, the less a clinic has to pay to get someone to come there. If that holds generally then the desirable postcode costs you twice, once in rent and once in the package.

The recruiter who actually got us there lives in the Illawarra and runs a small and fairly new outfit, and the difference between him and the others is that he listened to my commute number and then went looking. He found a clinic down there, drove to it, and sent us videos of the place. He has since been to our house in the UK because he was over here anyway. We have an ongoing relationship with him and I am not being paid to mention him, and you should read that paragraph knowing it.

That is the clinic she signed with. The Illawarra was on neither of our lists when we started.

I built something out of this, and the timing matters because it would be easy to say it found us the clinic and it didn't. There was an overlap, but the region search was done by hand in Google Maps with a lot of tabs open. What was obvious by the end was that the process had a shape. It was the same handful of inputs every time and I was doing the joins in my head, and that is the part that stuck with me.

A signed contract sounds more final than it is, so I should be plain about where this actually stands. The visa isn't lodged. She has to get through AHPRA registration first, which is the medical register over there, and until that is done there is nothing to lodge. The house has to sell. Any one of those can stop the whole thing rather than just slow it down, and we have no date for anything.

So we have a region, a town where she will work and a set of suburbs we like the look of. We haven't chosen where to live yet, and that is a different search with different inputs, which I'll write about once we have actually done it rather than before. For now the map on my laptop still has the tabs open on it.