How to furnish a house in Australia in one weekend for less than 1000 dollars? Well it can be done; all you need is a Sunday newspaper, a street directory and a trailer.
The Sunday Times in Perth has over 35,000 classified ads and you can pick up everything you need very cheaply, especially if you enjoy a bit of bargaining. Trailers can be hired from many service stations for about 50 dollars per day.
Moving from the migrant hostel in Perth to the house we had rented was definitely the easiest move ever for us. It must have taken all of half an hour to unload everything we owned – 4 suitcases, 5 tea chests and their contents and 2 bicycles.
By using the Sunday Times we managed to pick up most of what we needed, a fridge, a telly and a dining suite, quite cheaply. The only things we bought new were some mattresses and I reckoned I could construct some beds myself, but for now they would be OK on the floor.
One thing that took us completely by surprise was the fact that the winter months in Perth, July to October, gets cold especially at night when the temperature can approach zero. Australians are generally not well prepared when it comes to heating and the only forms of heating until recently were wood burning stoves or small electric/paraffin heaters. We bought one of the latter and huddled around it in the evenings.
Strangely gas central heating has never been introduced here and now the preferred form of heating is reverse cycle air-conditioning. I have often thought that there is an opportunity to make money here for some enterprising central heating contractor.
The house we moved into was a 6 year old 3 bedroomed detached bungalow, about a mile from the beach and close to our friends, it was perfect for our needs and we had it for 6 months until Christmas.
Suburbs in Australia are very different from what we had been used to in England, the first thing that strikes you is that each house is different, this is because the usual way to get a new house here is to buy a block of land and then choose a house design at one of the numerous builders display sites and have the house built.
House prices in Perth, like everywhere else, have skyrocketed in the last few years and today it will cost you a minimum of 300,000 dollars for a block of land and 200,000 to build a 4 bed 2 bathroomed detached bungalow; Back in 1983 a similar house and land package was yours for less than 50,000.
We had got out of the habit of shopping for our food as everything had been provided in the hostel and it was great to go into a supermarket and choose our own food although we had to get used to different brands of everything from beans to sugar. Lots of things like fruit and fish had unfamiliar names, I remember one of the cheaper fish was called flake and when I enquired what kind of fish it was I was told that it was shark, I always assumed shark would have dark meat but this was white like cod. We bought some and it tasted really good but I couldn’t resist making a joke about a man eating shark.
And that’s how it was for the first few weeks, lots of new things to learn and get used to, you couldn’t get a pint of beer in a pub but you could get a pony, a middy, a pot, a schooner or a jug.
Australia has embraced decimalization much more than England and everything that is sold here is in kilos, litres, and metres. All road signs and speed limits are in kilometres and cars don’t do 30 miles to the gallon but 8 litres per hundred kilometres.
The kids had been fantastic throughout all this period of change and believe it or not had acquired Australian accents after only 6 months. They never complained even though they were changing schools again and treated the whole thing like a great adventure, they embraced the local culture completely and never showed any regrets about moving.
It was now September and I was desperate to get a job so I drove every week into the City to the main job centre as the local job centre just had local jobs but the main one had all the jobs throughout the state.
I had a couple of interviews as a fitter but with no luck, in the end persistence paid off and I landed a job with an engineering firm as a draftsman. The company refurbished diesel locomotives for the iron ore industry and my experience in Crewe railway works was well regarded. After 9 months on the dole this was a major breakthrough for me and I looked forward to moving into the workforce at last.
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