The Police Check!

When applying for Australian citizenship, there's a few things you're going to need to do, and you're better off getting them taken care of as soon as humanly possible. One of these things is a police check from your hometown municipality. Obviously, Australia doesn't want any hardened criminals arriving on her shores (anymore), so take it from me - this is what needs to be done!


What you want to do is to contact the police department in your home city (San Francisco Police Department in my case) and ask to speak to the Identification Bureau. Basically, in order to do a police check on you, they'll need some information sent to them:


1. Your date of birth,
2. Your race,
3. Your gender,
4. Your Social Security Number,
5. Your Driver's License Number, and 
6. A self-addressed, stamped envelope so they can send you the document.


They also require you to send all this information to them accompanied by a notarized letter. Luckily, there are many people in Australia who can notarize things for you:


1. A chiropractor,
2. A medical practitioner,
3. A patent attorney,
4. A psychologist,
5. A dentist,
6. A nurse,
7. A pharmacist,
8. A trade marks attorney,
9. A legal practitioner,
10. An optometrist,
11. A physiotherapist,
12. A police officer,
13. A justice of the peace,
14. A veterinary surgeon, or
15. A postal clerk.


So the choice is yours! HOWEVER - they notarize documents, not letters. Trust me, write a letter and go to one of these people to notarize it; you'll leave empty-handed. So here's what you do: Download a STATUTORY DECLARATION template from the Intertubes, and fill in where necessary. THEN you take the document one of the above people, and get it done. While you're at it, get a photocopy of your driver's license and passport, and have those copies notarized as well - it's always better to provide a little more information than required, as opposed to not enough.


ONE MORE THING. When I spoke to the friendly Identification Bureau lady, she gave me a very high QT: Don't send by post. This will take weeks (!) to process and get through. Instead, this nice lady told me, send via FedEx with a self-addressed and paid FedEx envelope. The department gets to FedExed parcels much, much faster than with regular post, and they can have the police check documents delivered to you much, much quicker (like within a week).


SO NOW YOU KNOW. AND KNOWING IS HALF THE BATTLE.

Oz-ward Bound

Well! Long story short - I'm originally from San Francisco, CA in the United States. Three years ago Christmas whilst on holiday in Reykjavik, Iceland, I met my current girlfriend C at Christmas dinner in the Hótel Borg. The catch was she was an Australian living in the UK. A veritable shitload of travel was necessary in order to maintain our blossoming relationship, and as the months flew past, we realized that things as they stood needed to change at some point. 


That point arrived after the brutal winter London suffered during the span of time between Christmas and New Year's in 2008. The winter was absolutely brutal; dirty urban snow, blistering cold winds, icy pavements, and general misery was suffered by all. C, who was born and brought up in sunny Perth, Western Australia and had lived in Melbourne, Victoria for the seven years before her move to England, and had been putting up with the weather in Dear Old Blighty for the previous three and a half years, finally snapped. Within a space of weeks, she resigned from her job, evicted the tenant who was living in her Melbourne house, and moved back Down Under to the mystical land of Oz. 


I'd been to Australia once before - for three weeks during March and April earlier in 2010, meeting her friends and family in Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, and Pacific Palms up north in NSW. A wonderful time was had. 


But now has come the point where, as some ruder punters might say, for me to shit or get off the pot. So I packed up some bags, shipped some boxes, got on a plane, and flew to Melbourne to live with my honey for three months on a tourist visa - to find out a bit more about myself, my relationship with C, and whether or not this relationship was worth uprooting myself from lovely San Francisco and transplanting myself all the way across the world.


This blog will be all about that voyage of discovery. And it will also, I hope, serve as an unconventional aide for those who might also be considering this trip sometime in the future! I will be detailing every aspect of this journey, whether they be governmental offices, websites, application forms, people to talk to in order to learn various ins and outs of trying to become an Australian citizen, etc etc etc.


Let's have fun, shall we? Ciao.