Australia on a 417 visa

Are you dreaming of kangaroos, koalas and van life in Australia? A semester on exchange is nice, but a whole year exploring this great country does sound even cooler?🌻 For scandinavians and certain other countries this is totally available on a 417 Working Holiday visa.

What I'm going to go through now is a real life hack for those who dream of an Aussie adventure. Because if you haven't heard about it before, Australia offers various types of work visas, where people from other nations can come to the country and have the opportunity to work and travel (work and holiday) for up to a year. You can even work up several years of residence permit by doing "farm work", and if you want, there are sponsorship programs to become full citizens. For Norwegians this is as mentioned the 417 visa, but if you have a different nationality you might need to apply under a different visa, like the 462.

Farm work on a farm in Queensland

Picking citrus fruits, driving a tractor, and living in a caravan were not things I expected when I boarded the plane to Oz.

The general information about first-year, second-year and third-year visas can be found by clicking here. The main points of the first-year visa are that you must be aged 18-30, pay for the visa itself (635 AUD) and have a minimum sum in the bank of around 5000 AUD to prove that you can support yourself while in Australia. After sending the application, it only took a couple of minutes before I got it approved, and sat down to look at plane tickets.

If/when the visa is approved, you have up to 12 months before you have to use it, otherwise you have to apply for a new one. When I applied for the visa, I was finishing up a 13 - month stay in Sicily, so I thought I would go home to celebrate Christmas before I went on a longer trip again. This was the autumn of 2019, and it is not too difficult to calculate that I then left for Australia the year the the pandemic came. So in January 2020 I sat on the plane to Melbourne, unaware that the virus spreading in China, would soon be spread worldwide.

Anyway, I stayed in Australia throughout 2020, and it really was a fantastic year (if you ignore the pandemic of course). Me and my car Morroklumpen got to explore Australia's incredible landscape as the country gradually opened up again. The 417 visa provided not only the opportunity to experience this wonderful country, but also the opportunity to take work when I needed it to finance my adventures. All in all, I recommend it 100%, it's a year you'll never forget.

Breakfast at one of the many lookout points along the Australian east coast.

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Intro to Aussie life

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