Let Me In !!!

  Perth, Australia
Sunday, July 20, 2008

the train west

I'm sitting in the lounge car of the 'Indian Pacific' train, heading back east to Melbourne, and realising the last blog entry I wrote was in the same location on my trip west, a month ago! It's certainly been a busy month in Western Australia, but not in terms of checking off tourist highlights...





Helen met me off the train in East Perth, looking as fabulous as when we were students together in London

Stanley & Helen

23 years ago - you'd think she would've made some effort to look rough, really, to pick up a friend who had spent days sleeping on a train and resembled a dog's dinner...! And I realised fairly quickly that it wasn't just her style and looks that had remained unchanged: her timekeeping is still as appalling as ever and her life is still a rollercoaster, lurching from one crisis to another, with a love-life worthy of a far-fetched soap opera! But she is thriving on it all and is radiating health and happiness in her home in the Perth Hills with Stanley the cat and Princess the dog, her adoring suitors, her buzzing social life, and her thriving business.

me and Princess

It was great to see her, after a four-year gap, and to catch up on all that has happened in the interim. She was busy working much of the time but around her schedule she bullied me into not leaving the house without make-up; we sweated at the gym; dissected the complexities of her relationships; walked Princess in the bush; discussed my options for what to do next with my life; learned more about reds 'with legs', at her wine appreciation class; perfected our extraction and milk-texturing on a coffee course; spent far too much money shopping (though plenty of it spent on 'Target' bargains, you'll be proud to hear, Linda!); she managed to squeeze in a treatment on my old shoulder injury; I cooked lots, and we had a few sociable evenings meeting friends of hers for dinner. Possibly the highlight of my stay was our cinema outing to see 'Mamma Mia': if you haven't yet, DO IT! We looked at each other in alarm, during the first couple of minutes of cheese, thinking it was going to be too painful to bear, but then it kicked off and it is just fabulous - Meryl Streep looks amazing, my mate Colin Firth is wonderful, Pierce Brosnan... my God, what a gorgeous hairy chest!, the Greek extras are perfect, and Julie Walters, as so often, steals the show. We laughed and sang all the way through and I am relishing the prospect of seeing it again. Helen and I decided that if a mutual friend of ours hosts a wedding like that when we are in our fifties, she will definitely be the Tania character and I the Julie Walters... bring it on!!!


I also met lots of really interesting people courtesy of Helen and her friends in high places! - the entertaining Ross

Helen at Desmond's office

Emmett (of the Emmett Technique, a therapy Helen practises - google it!); Glenn, head of the WA mounted police, who took us riding one beautiful sunny day; Michelle, astrologer extraordinaire who did a superbly insightful reading for me; Danielle, medical secretary, with my kind of taste in expensive footwear; and Desmond, the orthopaedic surgeon, who generously paid me to do poor typing (followed by excellent editing!) on the days that Helen works as his receptionist, and who later turned out to be an immigration miracle worker.

Heln and myself a la Degas!

Helen found me another job too, with us becoming a double act as a pair of life models for an art class! Just as well I don't have too many inhibitions... yes, as she told everyone, "we strip for cash!". It was surprisingly relaxing, in fact, spending two hours in the nip, in a range of poses held for 1, 2, 5 and 15 minutes, in front of a glass kiln for heat, and with a wonderful intense focussed atmosphere as the artists sketched our every lump and bump (and God knows, all of mine have grown since I came to Aus!). It was almost like a meditation class, lying with eyes closed for 15 minutes on a rug in that heat, with this great concentration in the air. Very liberating - and paid real money for it!


She even set me up on a couple of dates, in an attempt to stop me going

Freemantle harbour

elsewhere by finding me a visa sponsor in sunny WA! The big, hairy goldminer, a client of hers, seemed promising and scored huge brownie points for taking me to the 'Little Creatures' Brewery, but failed my low-boredom-threshold test on date 2 (no, I didn't find his dysfunctional relationship with his mother a riveting topic...), while the other candidate was a lovely fella but a little too folically challenged... it was all good craic though!

Cook, a town with a population of 4!

Hard to believe a whole month has gone by, as the above doesn't seem to amount to very much... but then immigration runs through my head and I remember how I spent most of my month in W.A.! My initial plan was to spend about six weeks in Aus on this trip, catching up with Helen, John and other friends, and seeing a little of the middle of the country, too. Having been here 2 ½ months now, that's yet another set of plans disappeared down the loo... Australia is just huge so I decided to stay a little longer and see a little more... and the more I saw the more I was impressed, and the more I did the more I enjoyed, and the more people I met the more I liked them... and the more of it all that I liked, the less I could see myself returning to live in the rain... comparing weather online, it seemed the Irish summer was very like the winter in the south and west of Aus... so you won't be at all surprised to hear that I decided to look at longer-term options. And that's when the immigration task became a full-time job... After lot of internet research and a lot of phone calls, I had learned that the only way I could stay longer was to extend my tourist visa and then apply for a pricey skilled migration visa; that in the absence of a resident relly to gain me bonus points (and man, did I curse your mind-change that night, Stephen!), I was 10 points short of the 120 required for an independent visa; but that I am eligible for an 'arse-end of nowhere visa', more commonly known as a 'regional sponsored visa'. This will give me a 2 year visa, under which I will be required to live in a regional area of a selected state, but when the two years are up I get permanent status and can go where I like. And it turned out that it didn't actually need to be quite the arse-end-of-nowhere... just can't be the major metropolitan areas. Sorted! Or so I thought...

The panic began when I discovered that in order to qualify for any skilled migration visa, the applicant must have worked for 3 out of the previous 4 years, at the time of application... and of course I have not taught since the end of the last school year, giving me only until August 31st this year to fulfill the criteria and be eligible to apply ... but in order to submit an application, I need a positive 'skills assessment' (for which the Aussie Teaching Council relieve me of $450 in order to spend 6-8 weeks inspecting certified copies of my paperwork - which at that point was in a mixture of locations in Ireland and England - and declare that yes, I am indeed a qualified teacher) and a state sponsorship offer, (also taking 6-8 weeks to process, and requiring a whole list of friends and professional contacts in the given state... none of which I had made yet)... and it was the already the beginning of July...I had a challenge on my hands and a very tight deadline!

Thank God for email... there followed several frantic messages back home to the wonderfully efficient Sharon, Orla, Fiona, Andrea and Mary (thanks girls!), who, between them, with stunning speed, managed to provide me with the full range of required documents including qualifications, birth certs, college transcripts, pay slips, teaching council registration, references etc., etc... all copied and certified, thanks to Orla's persistence, by a bored garda at Sligo Barracks. Things were looking ok... and then, the night before my cut-off point for the Aussie teaching council, I found out that Garda certification is not acceptable here! Aaaaarrrggghhhhh!!! Sunk!!!! And then I remembered Desmond the surgeon, with his lovely 'medical practitioner' stamp, qualifying him to certify documents as well as to perform surgery! So, after a sleepless night, and a dash across the city to his office, that application made it into the postal system just in time.

The regional application was longwinded and time-consuming, but I had fantastic luck along the way. I was only interested in Victoria or W.A., as I want to be somewhere where I already know people, and, of the two states, Victoria was the only one with a processing time fitting in with my deadline, so that's the way I went. I stole the names of all John's friends and listed them as my own (dinner's on me on Friday for that, John!), and was provided with lots of useful local education info and stats by his sister, Carol. After several more days on the internet and phone, I had spoken to representatives from assorted teacher unions, education departments, human resource offices, recruitment agencies, and newspapers, and was able to quote them and list them as 'professional contacts', and then I really hit the jackpot, finding a teaching couple from my chosen region, through a travel forum: they were wonderful, putting me in touch with a range of teachers and principals in the right area and also with the regional director of education, with whom I have arranged a meeting next week to discuss opportunities! So that application was looking fairly impressive and also made it in in the nick of time... things were looking up.

Then, 2 days ago, the ever-resourceful Desmond, who thinks I should be settling in WA (and not even considering anywhere else!) called me to say he had arranged a meeting for me with an officer at the WA State Migration Office, whom he had persuaded to bypass the usual procedure and email my cv off to the regional offices immediately... with the result that a couple of hours after the meeting I heard back that I was 'in demand' and WA would sponsor me too! So now it looks like it's all going to happen, and I have choices on location, into the bargain!

Nothing is certain, of course. I have to wait for official confirmation of my skills assessment and state sponsorship, then submit the full visa application by August 31st and then it will be March by the time I know if they'll actually let me in. But that's fine... in the meantime, my tourist visa has been extended for a few more months and John and I are teaming up as travelmates again for a big drive round the country before I try and squeeze in the rest of my original route (is February any good for you, Sue?) and return to Ireland to pack a few crates to ship down-under! And you know me, I could get to Bolivia or somewhere and decide I actually want to stay there instead... but I think it's worth going through the immigration torture here in order to keep my options open... I just don't think that, after the year I've had away, I can return to living in the cold and rain, it's just too limited. Weird how trusty psychic Elizabeth told me before I left that she could see me being away a lot longer than planned and also selling my house... seemed a ludicrous suggestion at that point, but it's now seeming really quite likely!

So that's where I'm at, and that's why you haven't heard from me for a while... the immigration process has been consuming me and it has been extremely stressful! But it's done for now, so I am now en-route back to Melbourne to win some snakes playing the Minister's Cat with John, to raid his beer fridge, to be laughed at as I repeatedly land on my bum while learning to cross country ski, to visit some schools and extend my contact list, to meet Jeanette's friends Hilary and Geoff, and to plan the big drive... so, it's all good!