[LivingItLoud]

Hey all!

My partner and I have been together for a year now, and by the time my current working holiday visa expires it will have been 17 months together. We are working to come up with all the required evidence of the relationship, however it is a bit of a struggle as we have been mostly working on separate cattle properties.

For the first six months of our relationship We were on properties that were 2 hours apart, but were still seeing each other every weekend. The next three months we worked together on a property and lived together. I was just working as his boss was injured and needed extra help until he was better. Once I was finished working with my partner I was offered a great job opportunity on a property on the opposite side of the country. It is only a six month contract and I will be returning to Queensland to be with my partner as soon as the contract is finished. We talk on the phone for nearly an hour each day and I am able to get phone records for that.

As our time spent living together was on a station, we did not have to pay for our housing, bills, or food. We had no real expenses to be able to provide proof of. Due to the nature of our work situations it makes it very difficult to live together as it can be long distances between cattle stations.

Does anyone have any thoughts or similar dealings with this situation? Will it affect our chance of being approved the visa, or is the government fairly reasonable when it comes to rural workers.

Cheers!

 

[danegirl]

Will it affect our chance of being approved the visa, or is the government fairly reasonable when it comes to rural workers.

Cheers!

Short answer: no. You will have to meet the requirements for the visa just like every other applicant.

You say that you've only lived together for 3 months - the de facto visa normally requires 12 months of living together. The only way to get around this 12 month requirement is by registering your relationship (which is possible to do in Queensland) or by getting married. If you are looking to register your relationship, do this ASAP as the longer there goes before applying, the better.

In terms of your evidence - can you get a letter from the boss of the station where you lived to confirm that you lived together there? Do you have contracts to show that you were employed at the same station? Have you transferred any money to each other - have you travelled together and shared the costs?

 

[LivingItLoud]

We had been planning to register our relationship, but ended up not doing so as we will have been together for over a year anyway. I didn't realize it had to be living together a year. Our work does not allow this. We will have to look into registering then. Is he able to register it if I am not in QLD at the moment?

I would be able to request a letter from our boss, however he really doesn't like me and tried to make my life a living hell while I worked for him. He is worried that I will encourage my partner to leave employment there so we can be together, and his boss is set out to split us up so that doesn't happen. Not sure how willing he will be to provide a letter...

We do however both have our QLD licenses addressed at the same address, and I will have a group certificate coming stating that I had been working there. I did not receive any payslips during my time of employment, nor were contracts signed.

We almost always use cash for purchases, so our bank statements do not show transfers between our accounts, however we did a two week trip together over Christmas and New Years where we would be able to show cash withdraws from the same towns along the coast in the same time frame.

Any thoughts on if any of those items would be accepted as bits of evidence?

We are also able to provide declarations from both mine and his family members who came and stayed with us at different points while we were living and working together.