I’ve moved a fair bit in my short life.  When I was younger my Dad’s job required our whole family to uproot itself once or twice every few years; I can safely say I have criss-crossed Australia more times than I care to count.  I’ve lived in the picturesque Adelaide Hills (place of my birth) on two separate occasions, as well as in suburban Adelaide, a rural mining district, a remote farming and fishing town near the Nullarbor Plain, a suburb of sultry Darwin, a drought-stricken suburb of Brisbane, and now in my present home, in the leafy western suburbs of good ol’ Bris-Vegas.  At one point my family were supposed to move to Papua New Guinea - I have the TB vaccination scar to prove it - though it never eventuated.

For one reason or another I always took moving for granted.  We first moved when I was two years old, so I imagine the whole notion of packing up a life in boxes and shipping it across the country is somewhat ingrained in my psyche.  It wasn’t until recently, having FINALLY been given my British Study Visa, that I started to realize just how much paperwork and faffing about a big move requires.  My Mum told me that she used to keep a list in her diary of things she had to sort out prior to moving, and she used to go over this list every time Dad came home with the announcement that we were starting a new adventure.  It’s prompted me to come up with my own check-list, geared more to a big international move:

• Check visa requirements and apply if necessary.  If it’s the British Consulate you’re applying to, prepare yourself to wait in near-suicidal depression for months on end whilst they give you increasingly conflicting information about the status of your application.
• Check passport is up to date and will not expire while you’re abroad.  If, like me, you originally thought you would only be going overseas once (maybe twice) and you only got a passport with a small number of pages in it, I urge you to reconsider and invest in a larger one.  You never know when you’re going to meet a mildly frustrating but annoyingly good-looking Welsh guy at a funeral and decide that you actually need to spend half your time in the United Kingdom.
• Check you are properly vaccinated and your medical records are up to date.  Edinburgh University seems to have a pessimistic side when it comes to student health - the note I received in the mail from them the other day was in 26pt black underline and read, ‘WE STRONGLY URGE THAT YOU HAVE THE MENINGITIS C VACCINATION PRIOR TO STARTING YOUR STUDIES‘.  Whilst Meningitis C is not a compulsory vaccination for entry into the UK, I’m not risking the wrath of the bold underline.
• Notify your bank, your mobile phone company, and any other utilities (water, electricity, internet, etc) that you will be overseas for a long period of time.  This will prevent you from having your accounts frozen right before you try to pay for a nice dinner at a posh restaurant because your bank suspects that your card is being used by a ‘Cyber Terrorist’.
• If your various billing companies allow it, convert your bills to be sent via email instead of by post.  This is not only a good idea if you’re moving overseas and need to be able to pay bills online, but is environmentally friendly!
• Organize for your doctors records (and dentists records if necessary) to be sent to your new destination.  If, like my GP, they can’t be bothered and trust you to carry around your own medical record, they might just print it out.  Also remember that if you’re taking medical prescriptions with you to your new destination you should also take a letter from your doctor or evidence of the prescription as well.
• Check with your local health authority (eg. Medicare) if you are entitled to free health-care at your new destination.  In this instance I am actually glad that I am moving to the UK, as their NHS allows students on visas longer than six months free health-care.
• Check your bank cards don’t expire while you are out of the country.  The friendly people at my bank fixed that dilemma in a jiffy, simply updating the expiration dates on my cards so that they’re valid for the whole time I’m away.  Yay for credit limits!
• Update your status on your local Voting Roll.  In Australia it is compulsory for everyone over the age of 18 to vote.  This means that if you’re overseas at the time of an election and you can’t make it to the organized Consulate Polling Booth (the UK has one in London) and you haven’t already organized for a postal vote, you may be fined.  Ah, democracy.
• Check with your bank to see if they have a partnered bank in the country you are moving to.  This will make it a lot easier to open a new account overseas.  If they don’t have an associated bank, make sure you take a letter from your current bank with you; if, like mine, they refuse to do introductory letters, take a recent bank statement with you instead.  Barclays is about to find out I bought a pair of shoes on eBay last week.
• If you’re going to be renting overseas, take with you a personal letter of recommendation.  Normally the estate agents would simply call your nominated referee, but with time differences and expensive international calls they suggest bringing a letter instead.
• Organize travel insurance for the time that you’re going to be in transit from your current residence to your new residence.  For some insane reason most of the insurance companies in Australia don’t offer ‘one-way’ travel insurance, they require a return date to your country of residence.  It took a few phone calls, but I found a travel insurance company that does do one-way cover: World Nomads.
• Figure out how much of your ’stuff’ you need to take with you.  Speaking from recent, mind-boggling experience, international freight and removalist companies charge a criminal sum for sending a few boxes to another country.  After thirty or so quotes of absolutely astronomical figures I settled on limiting myself to two cartons of clothes, shoes and DVDs and a box of books absolutely crucial for my MSc thesis.  For some unknown reason it would have cost me the same amount to ship a car from Brisbane to Perth as it is costing for me to send three cartons to the United Kingdom.  Go figure.
• Take as many personally identifiable documents with you as you can.  These will come in handy time and time again - going through immigration (they’ll want to see proof that you can provide for yourself financially and that you intend to leave when your visa expires), renting (they’ll want financial documents and your passport), opening a bank account (the good old 100 points of identification applies here, they’ll want your passport, your visa details, your bank account details, credit card details, credit ratings, and so on), paying council tax (passport and visa), and so on.  Oh, and copy all of the documents you take with you and leave them with someone you trust back home - just in case.
• Buy a plane ticket.
• Tell your friends you’re leaving the country.  And your vet.  And the lady who works at the check-outs at Coles.  And the doctor’s receptionist.  And your next door neighbour.  And your old university department.  And even perhaps the tax-man.
• Think carefully about sending yourself a package of food-stuffs you can’t get in the new country.  Milo, caramel tim-tams, Natural Confectionery, Burger Rings and apple green tea will be on its way to Edinburgh soon.
• Make a list (and take photos if necessary) of everything you’re leaving behind for insurance purposes.  Because I don’t own very much, this won’t take me very long: a Levi’s denim jacket, a ceramic chicken and a world globe just about do it.
• Notify your embassy in the new country that you are intending to stay in your destination for the time you’ll be there - Smartraveller.org.au is the Australian medium for doing this.  Although unlikely, it allows them to plan to evacuate from or send aid to your region should some emergency arise - such as seen in recent years with the war in Lebanon, the Boxing Day Tsunami, and even the recent earthquake in China.
• And, finally, if you’re Amy: get your hair cut before you go, because who knows when you’ll find another hairdresser who cuts your hair properly, and scan all of the recipes in the cookbooks you like because you can’t afford to ship the books themselves overseas.