Wanderlust leads Brit to Brisbane

Adrian Wallace decided to live and work in land where “women glow and men plunder”. He is now an Aussie citizen

When Adrian Wallace, 38, completed his arts degree at university, he was quick to build himself a career as a software developer, despite it being outside the realm of his studies. But something was missing. He needed adventure. “Eventually I realised that sitting around in the UK wasn't making me happy so I pulled a sickie from work, grabbed a train in to London, walked into the Australian Consulate and got a working holiday visa,” he says. “Just over a month later I was on a plane with no idea what lay ahead of me having left behind family, a now ex-girlfriend, house, shared mortgage and a friendly, safe and well paid job with good career prospects.”
Adrian opted to start a new life in Brisbane, landing on a wet, grey and generally uninspiring day in August 1998. He was initially motivated to move to Brisbane because he didn’t want to “fall into city life” or get “trapped by urban big city problems”. The city has grown a lot since then though. “Brisbane, it seemed to me, was small enough that I could escape the city easy, but big enough that I could find work,” he says. “Luckily for me my pre-flight research included talking to a few locals in an Internet chat room, a young and immature technology in those days. I was met at the airport by one of the girls I'd been chatting to and offered a space on her neighbour’s floor for a couple of days until I found my feet.” His first day was spent wandering aimlessly around Brisbane in the rain, nursing a healthy dose of jetlag.

Finding a job
Within a few days Adrian found a room in a unit in Spring Hill just north of Brisbane’s central business district (CBD), sharing with a couple. Rent was cheap and the location great. He visited a few employment agencies and within a week found a job with a small local firm. “After 3 months my employer wanted to keep me on so arranged for me to have a sponsored temporary residence visa - everything was good,” Adrian says. “I was earning good money working 4 days a week and having plenty of time to explore at weekends.”
After a year the firm had moved in a direction that didn't suit Adrian and so he looked around for something new. IT in 1999 was pretty strong and he found work in no time at all, with his new employer again sponsoring a temporary residence visa. “I changed employers once more in 2000, again with the employer sponsoring my temporary visa,” he says. “At the end of 2000 I finally sold my old house in UK, a 1.5 bedroom character cottage in Newbury, and bought a 4 bedroom house with a pool in The Gap on the leafy hilly north western edge of Brisbane for the same money. My boss agreed to assist with sponsoring permanent residency and with IT skills being on the MODL list it was a straightforward process despite their being a lot of paperwork and bureaucracy; I had some difficulty persuading the relevant authorities that I was a genuine IT professional since I didn't have an IT degree, but a CV full of employers including IBM, Intel and a range of small IT consultancies together with some professional certifications eventually made my point.”

Getting to work
Adrian loves his new life. He typically gets up at 7am and is usually at work by 7:45am. He leaves work at 4pm every day and is at home with his family by 4:15pm.
He doesn’t work in the CBD and since buses tend to run just in and out of the city catching the bus to work isn’t convenient for him. How does he get to work then? On a motorcycle! He says it is cheap to run, fun, quick and easy to find parking. “Others in our office mainly drive although there are some who catch the train,” he says. “Transport in Brisbane can be a challenge. The city has grown very fast in the last 10 years and the infrastructure does struggle. Some roads are choked in peak times with busiest times being 7:30-8:30 inbound and 16:00-17:30 outbound.
“From where I live the drive time into the CBD would be 45 minutes in morning peak and about 20 minutes any other time of day. Parking in the CBD can be outrageously expensive, but if you get in early enough most car parks have early bird rates for all day parking. Buses are cheap, improving all the time and although are often overcrowded they are at least now all air-conditioned and comfortable enough. The days of buses being like mobile saunas seem to be behind us.”

Happy ever after
Adrian ended up marrying the girl who he'd met at the airport when he first landed in Brisbane in 1998 (he did so in 2002) and in 2004 they had their first child. Becoming a father prompted him to “make things even more permanent” and he is now an Australian Citizen.