Planning a Working Gap Year in Australia

Working and Travelling Down Under

Australia has long been a favorite destination for British gap year travelers after an antipodean adventure. Indeed, last year Australia granted around 30,000 temporary working visas to British gappers. One of the big advantages of Australia is that, if you’re planning on funding your fun by picking up work along the way, it’s normally not too much of a problem in Oz. Here are a few tips on organizing your big trip:

• First up, you’ll need to get hold of a Working Holiday Visa. This will allow you to stay in Australia for up to a year, during which period you can leave and reenter the country as many times as you like. The key criterion for a successful applicant is that they are between 18 and 30 and can provide evidence of having sufficient funding for the trip – a bank statement showing £2,120 and a return plane ticket. You can apply online at Australian Immigration Department.
• You don’t want to be paying any more than you have to on travel. One option is a Round-the-world ticket which will set you back something like £1200 but will incorporate stop offs on the way there and on the way back so might be ideal if you want to see a bit more than just Australia on your travels. If you don’t plan on going anywhere else then a straightforward return ticket to Australia is the way to go. It’s worth shopping around a bit for this; a good fist port of a call would be a flights comparison site like Cheap Flights or Opodo. At the time of writing flights to Australia were available for as little as £589 from Heathrow to Sydney flying with China Eastern.

• There are a few options when it comes to getting from place to place in Australia; with such vast distances between the major cities most Australians tend to fly; if this is something you plan on doing you’d be well advised to book in advance which should keep the cost down. You might alternatively prefer the freedom of road travel which, whilst it would mean long hours in transit, should at least give you a far better taste of the country outside of the main metropolitan centers. One option is to rent a car or alternatively you could consider a bus – there’s a Greyhound network or a variety of tour companies like Wayward Bus or Oz Experience. These are likely to be a bit more expensive but are dedicated to backpackers so your journey will be more than just about getting from A to B and will probably end up more fun.
• As a working backpacker it’s likely the sort of jobs you’ll be looking at will be fairly menial and not terribly well paid, but hey you won’t be doing anything for that long and when needs must… Fruit farms and bars are typically a good option. Agencies like Freespirit, who specialise in placing backpackers in temporary work could be a good place to start but you may find that the most fruitful approach is to simply ask around – bars, restaurants and shops will typically have a pretty fast staff turnaround and frequent job vacancies.
• Make sure you sort out some sort of travel insurance before you head off. It’s easy to overlook and might seem like an extra cost that you can do without but if anything unfortunate should happen you’ll certainly be thankful you’ve got it. Again, shop around; there’s plenty of insurers out there like AA Travel's travel insurance and Directline, but think about what you plan on doing – anything particularly adventurous or potentially dangerous is unlikely to be covered with a standard policy. A good option might be a policy specifically tailored for backpackers – Go Travel's travel insurance offer Backpackers Insurance that covers a wide variety of activities including cover for bar work and fruit picking.