This feels like a lifetime ago but I still get questions on how I lived in Australia after college! The answer is a working holiday visa (I did a tourist visa too because I wanted to stay longer).  In this post I’ll go through how to get a working holiday visa, traveling the coast of Australia, and how I found work/housing etc. I backpacked for a little over 2 months and fell in love with Sydney along the way, so that’s where I ended up settling down. My experiences below are based off Sydney in 2016 but I would imagine most cities would be similar.

Working holiday visa (Subclass 417) is available in Australia for young adults who want an extended holiday in Australia and want to work there to fund it. It is for people 18-30 years old (or 35 for some countries) and can now be extended 3 times! I am from the United States so the age limit for us is 30.