Driving in OZ
Driving in Australia is certainly different than
driving in the UK, I used to drive at least 100miles a
day midweek in England but I definitely lost my
nerve a bit coming here, I'm alright now but it's
taken 4 months to get used to driving in Brisbane!
For details regarding HGV licenses
please see our jobs page.
Driving here is an adventure, for example buses have right of way, that's fine you have to be courteous to
buses in the UK, but seriously they use the privilege.  You can be overtaking a parked bus and it will pull out,
you have to be really careful with them.

Then there's the road layouts, this took a while to learn, you can be driving down a road when suddenly the
lane you're in stops or is now a left turn lane, with no warnings! Also they are a great fan of merging lanes, and
you think no one lets you in in the UK, try it here, it's every man for himself.

The one thing I didn't realise about the UK is that drivers are extremely courteous, flashing to let you in,
acknowledging thanks by indicators when you let them in or raising a hand if you've been let in.  I've seen a
hand raised a couple of times but that's it, and seeing as we've driven over 10 thousand Kilometers since we
got here we experienced it a lot.

There are some big cars and wagon's here, we have a Rav4 which I love and ours is quite small compared to a
lot of them.

Traffic lights go from red directly to green with no 'red amber' preparation period, for a relaxed place this is a
bit of a frantic manoeuvre.

There are lots of wild life  in the road which are surprising and you have to keep cool to prevent from crashing,
such as large lizards and snakes, both of which we've seen but in the hills.

Petrol is a fantastic price, when we left the UK I think it was around 98p per litre, here on 11th October at our
local garage it was 99.9c per litre, which is around 40p!!! Bargain!  However you do have to watch the petrol
prices, they fluctuate dramatically and sometimes in one day, they also have had a tendency in the past to go up
towards the weekend, interesting?!
Janine and expat living in Brisbane's south side has pointed out that you also have to
deal with:
When we decided to buy a car we were advised to go to 'Marooka Mile' which is on the Southside of Brisbane
and contains lots of car sales rooms, we did this but we also went all over Brisbane looking for them and found
that there's garages all over, so a trip to Marooka isn't essential.  We bought our car form Sci Fleet Toyota
garage on the '3' (Gympie road).  On car's you can haggle like in the UK, but please be aware there are charges
of taxes and 3rd party insurance cover that they add on to your offer, roughly an additional $600.  We found
the best approach for this dilemma was to offer a price and say " such an amount to drive away", this then
meant that your offer included all additional charges and costs.  To give you an idea of costs we bought a 2001
Rav4 Edge in Silver with CD player, air con (essential!), power steering etc. for $21'500.00 and since then we
bought a Hyundai Excel, again with air con and a CD player but no power steering, in excellent condition in a
private sale for $6'500, however you then have to go and register the car at the transport authority and they
charge you the extras there as would have happened if you'd have bought the car from a garage.
Before arriving in Brisbane we booked our car hire on line with Avis, when completing the form online you will
see it is much cheaper to hire a car if you are an Australian Resident, remember if you have got this visa you
are entitle to that price.  This may seem an obvious fact but because we had not lived there before I felt a bit
of a fraud, but we checked and the cheaper price was right!
We booked a car with a child seat and to be collected from the airport, it was really easy to do once we were
there, although they do start offering some extra insurances to be prepared for that (we took it out as better
safe than sorry) and the car came with a street mat which was an essential item in our beginners guide to
Brisbane.
Recent average prices of petrol per litre:
Unleaded:
      

  • 08.12.06: 113.9c
  • 07.12.06: 115.9c
  • 03.12.06 - 06.12.06: 108.9c
  • 02.12.06: 114.9c      
  • 01.12.06: 115.9c
  • 28.11.06 - 30.11.06: 108.9c        
Gas:
  • 27.11.06 - 08.12.06: 53.9c
  • 14.10.06 - 27.11.06: 55.9c
Diesel:
  • 13.11.06 - 08.12.06  114.9c
  • 09.11.06 - 12.11.06: 115.5c
  • 11.10.16 - 08.11.06: 117.9c

(Prices taken from Mobil garage at Bracken
Ridge).
Copyright 2006 Karen Atkinson
Cath from the UK has sent a letter to me which she received from the Queensland
Transport department stating that if you hold a UK drivers license you no longer need to
take a theory test!!!

I can't believe I had to take it three times and now it's been stopped....gutted! (But very pleased for all of you
coming over, it wasn't as easy as it appeared to be!!!)
NEWS:  18.01.07 - Today in the post we received cheques refunding the money we
had paid to transfer our driving licenses to QLD ones,   It had taken David 2
appempts and myself 3 attemps, and we were refunded the full amounts for the
relevant number of attemps.  They come through automatically (we knew nothing
about the refunds) and are sent straight to your home address for anybody who
paid for the transfer after 1st March 2006.