State Sponsorship Submitted

Today my State Sponsorship Application for the Australia Capital Territory has been submitted by my migration agent. This process will take about 3 months to be complete. I won't discuss the details of what needed to be submitted, but if you are interested in State Sponsorship, and living in Canberra, you can get more details here:


Canberra Skilled Migration Sponsorship

I am really hopeful that this will come through for us so we can be advanced in the priority processing to level 5. I don't think we can cope with waiting until 2012 for our application to be complete.

Commitment to Canberra

As part of the State Sponsorship application process we are required to write a 'Commitment to Canberra' statement which shows how serious we are about making a new life in Canberra, and what entices us to the area. To be honest, until I found out about State Sponsorship I haden't even considered Canberra and knew very little about what was there. I knew it was somewhere between Sydney and Melbourne, but that was about it.

As I researched Canberra online, I found it to be quite a charming little town. Here are portions of my commitment statement that show some of the things we look forward to:

Canberra has a rich and diverse culture, that we are excited to explore. With 21,000 years of aboriginal history and thousands of aboriginal sites within driving distance, we can immerse ourselves in this important aspect of Australian history. The vast range of museums and galleries within Canberra are a fascinating starting point for developing an appreciation and understanding of our new adoptive country. As an avid book reader & collector, I am also excited at having the National Library's vast collection of reference material at my fingertips.

Canberra has the benefit of being a smaller city, whilst still retaining some of the features we enjoy of big city life, such as excellent dining and entertainment opportunities. As self proclaimed 'foodies', we have spent countless hours online researching dining opportunities, and found plenty of restaurants that focus on using local fresh ingredients which we are excited to try. With hundreds of restaurants and cafes, ranging from eager to explore local markets, sampling the abundance of local foods that we have read about. I wasAustralian to Greek to Vietnamese, we will have no problem keeping ourselves entertained. We are also surprised to find that Canberra has a long history of wine making, with many wineries in the area. We travel to California's Napa valley on regular occasions, and look forward to spending time learning more about the Canberra wine region.

When we move to Canberra we will be bringing our 2 dogs with us. We enjoy spending time with them outdoors, exploring new places. We love that there are expansive areas of bush and parks within the city. Looking at the Territory and Municipal Services website we found many areas that are dog friendly and allow on-leash and off-leash dog walking. Compared to Melbourne, there are many more options for us in Canberra and our dogs will have a much better lifestyle. As animal lovers, we also volunteer with an Animal Rescue group in San Francisco, and hope to continue this work in Canberra. We have discovered several Animal Rescue organizations such as ACT Rescue & Foster, Canberra Pooch Rescue and Companion Animal Rescue which look like great places to volunteer.