I often have cause to reflect on the serendipity that has brought us to Canberra and how, if our timings had been just a little bit different, we may never have made it here at all.
It’s three years now since our Australian residency visas were granted. Back then, after a couple of years of getting our documentation in order, gaining all the right evidence of Mrs CBRbound’s professional skills, and securing state-sponsorship from the ACT government, everything aligned in a wonderful post-Australia Day email which told us that we could start planning a life down under.
For us, the crucial piece of the jigsaw puzzle was Mrs CBRbound’s skills profile matching up with a job type on the ACT skills shortage list which is published every few months.
Every now and then, out of idle curiosity, I still go back and look at that skills list to see what our chances of getting in would be if we’d delayed things by a few extra months or years.
The simple fact is that since we came here, the Australian economy has stalled and jobs have become much scarcer than they were three years ago. As you might expect, this has resulted in many occupations being removed from the skills shortage list. As a result, I’d say that for the CBRbound family, the migration window slammed shut almost as soon as we touched down on Australian soil.
If we’d had the same thoughts and followed the same process just a year or two later, we would never have been able to come here. Perhaps the same may be true had we tried a few years earlier.
Fate can be a funny thing sometimes and, much as I might speculate occasionally about whether the exchange rate will be kinder in a year or two, or whether house prices were more favourable a few years ago, or if we could have timed things differently to mitigate the impact on the kids’ education, such thoughts are nothing more than idle wanderings of the mind.
The fact is we arrived through the only window possible for our circumstances and timings, and everything else is just window dressing.
Knowing all that we now know, would we still do it again? I think yes, except that now we wouldn’t have the opportunity and Canberra would have become the great adventure that we never went on.
Whatever the ups and downs, I’m glad we’ve done it rather than forever wondering: what if?
CBR bound 
We’re not there yet (just 7 weeks to go now!) But we had also our moment of serendipity. Originally applying for SA state sponsorship, SA took our job from the skills list just before we wanted to request state sponsorship. Only ACT was left, and knowing nothing about this cold strange place didn’t help our enthusiasm to switch our visa application to ACT. After a nights sleep we did anyway and planned our recipe visit to Canberra. We immediately liked it and also a second visit was a big success (taken Mom with us so she could already see where we would end up)
Let’s see how it works out when we really live there for a few months/years but for now we are grateful faith pushed us towards this big country town/little capital city.
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It’s always good to be balanced in your approach to these things and to be clear that this isn’t Disneyland — there will be ups and downs to any place. What I would add though is that, now that our two-year indenture period has expired, and having explored a little more of Australia since we’ve been here, we have no desire to move anywhere else in Oz. If we do uproot ourselves again, it would be to leave Australia, not to leave Canberra which I think has more to offer than almost anywhere else we have sampled.
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