Up Sticks articles

When the job moves around, where do you live?

2026-08-28T00:00:00Z

This one is made up. The family doesn't exist, but the search is real and so are the numbers, so you can see what the answer looks like rather than take my word for it.

Say a carpenter gets sponsored to Perth. The visa ties them to the firm, the firm builds houses right across the metro, and the sites change every few months, so there is no one place they go to every day. Their partner works in the city, five days a week and fixed. Between them they have two kids, one in primary and one about to start secondary, and they are renting for the first couple of years on a budget of about seven hundred a week. Now find them somewhere to live.

The problem with a job that moves

If you are a nurse or a teacher then work is a building and the building stays put, so you measure from it and you are done. A trade doesn't get that, because the site they are on today isn't the site they will be on at Christmas and neither of them is the thing they actually report to.

What stays still is the yard, and that is where the day starts, where the ute gets loaded and where the paperwork lives, so that is the pin you measure from. For this example it sits in Myaree, south of the river, which is the sort of place a builder keeps its operations. The partner's office is the second pin, in the middle of the city, and the two of them are about eleven kilometres apart pulling in opposite directions.

That is the whole problem, and it is the same one we had in New South Wales. Where one of you works and where you live are not the same question, and when both of you work the map ends up with two centres instead of one.

What went in

The city is Perth, the yard in Myaree is a 35 minute drive at most, and the office in the city is a 45 minute drive at most. They need primary and secondary schools, and rent up to seven hundred a week.

Both of those are drive times, because the app measures driving at the moment, rather than a train timetable. It gives a normal figure and a peak one for every leg, and every number below is the peak, because that is the run somebody actually does on a work morning.

Two places, two limits

The yard is a suburb, not a street address. A site changes every few months; the operations base does not.

What came back

About sixty-nine suburbs match, the list shows the nearest thirty-nine, and reading through it the map falls into three groups.

The list itself

1 to 4

5 to 8

8 to 11

Three scroll positions of the same screen, at one scale. Every row carries the same two bars in the same order, so the shape of a suburb reads before the numbers do.

There is a south-west group that suits the carpenter and makes the partner drive, which is Kardinya at five minutes from the yard and twenty into the city, then Coolbellup at nine and twenty-two, Bibra Lake at eleven and twenty-three, and Hamilton Hill at fifteen and twenty-eight. Then there is a ring of inner suburbs that flips it the other way, where Perth itself is twenty-seven minutes from the yard and three from the partner's desk, Wembley and Victoria Park are both twenty-seven and twelve, and Mount Lawley is thirty and eleven. And then there is a middle, where neither of them wins and neither of them really loses, which is Como at seventeen and fifteen and Wilson at sixteen and twenty.

Two fixed points, and everywhere the list put them

Close to the yard, longer to the city
Close to the city, longer to the yard
Splits it

Peak minutes to the yard and to the city, in that order. Suburb positions are true; the coast and river are drawn schematically.

The bit worth stopping on

Kardinya comes out on top and I don't think anybody would have guessed it. Five minutes to the yard and twenty into the city both sit a long way inside what the family said they would put up with, which means neither of them is spending their life in the car to make the other one's job work. Three quarters of the households there are families, it is mostly houses rather than flats, and there are fourteen primary schools and six secondary. Murdoch station is three and a half kilometres up the road, with twenty-four trains an hour at peak and a direct line into the city.

The one nobody would have picked

Both bars sit well short of the limits the family set. That is the whole result in one card.

The rent is seven hundred, so they would be sat right at the top of what they said they could pay, and that is the trade you are making. Better to see it than to be told about it later.

The obvious answer is the wrong one

Look at the city entry again, because Perth comes third on this list and it earns it on paper. It has the cheapest rent of anything in the top ten at six hundred and four a week, a station a minute away, and three minutes to the office. For a family who have just arrived somewhere new and want to be central while they work the place out, that is the obvious move.

Third on the list, and still the wrong answer

Kardinya

Short to the yard, comfortable to the city.

Perth

Nearly at the limit one way, three minutes the other.

The same two bars on both cards, in the same order. You do not have to read the numbers to see which way each suburb leans.

It is also mostly apartments, 45 percent families, and twenty-seven minutes from the yard, which is more than five times the Kardinya figure and the thick end of the carpenter's budget every morning. For two adults with no kids it is probably the right answer. For this family it fails on both of the things they actually said mattered, and it fails while sitting third.

That is the part I would want anybody to take from this. The suburb that suits your situation is rarely the one you would have named, and you won't get to it by reading lists of the best suburbs in Perth, because those lists have no idea where either of you has to be on a Tuesday morning.

What you'd do with it

You favourite the middle group and the top of the south-west group, and then you go and look at rentals in five suburbs instead of fifty. If the firm is putting you up for a few weeks when you land, you already know which side of the river you want that to be on.

None of this tells you whether you would actually like living in Kardinya, and that is a question for a weekend and a car once you are there. What it does is stop you spending the first month of a new life in a new country working out that the cheap flat with the good train line is fifty minutes from the yard in traffic.

How we chose a region before we chose a house

2026-08-28T00:00:00Z

We are not in Australia yet. I am writing this from the north of England with two kids, two dogs and a signed contract on the other side of the world, and I am writing it now rather than after we land because the part people get wrong happens before the move. You don't start by choosing a house. You start by choosing a region, and almost nothing written about moving to Australia helps you do that.

A walk to the pub quiz

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.

Two people, two maps

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

The month of doing it by hand

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.

What the recruiters changed

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.

Wollongong and the coast south of it, the region neither of us had considered when we started.Photo by Pavel

Afterwards

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.

Nothing here is settled

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.