It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that my desire for an Australian visa became the canvas on which all else – relationships, heartbreaks, new jobs, new homes – has been painted.
But suffice to say that over the past seven and a half years of living in Sydney, my journey towards permanent residency has become as much a part of my identity as my passion for reading, my love for early mornings, and my daily ritual of sunrise ocean swims.
I moved to Australia from the UK for a boy I met on a boat aged 29, on a working holiday visa. I had always assumed I’d stay about a year before returning to London, but while the romance didn’t work out, I fell head over heels in love with Sydney and it quickly became my new forever home.
To say the years that have passed have been plagued with visa dramas would be a gross under-exaggeration. I’ve twice received an email instructing me to leave the country: the first time was after I was forced to leave my job because of a relentless boss (who was also sponsoring my visa); the second time was after my long-term boyfriend and I broke up while we were still waiting for the approval of our partner visa.
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Nothing can quite prepare you for being told to leave a country that you have loved and lived in. But not knowing if or how I would be legally allowed back to a place that felt like home is sadly a familiar feeling for anyone who has faced visa quandaries.
After the second time I was instructed to leave Australia, heartbroken at the breakdown of my relationship and being given no option but to leave the place I had called home for five years at that point, I returned on a student visa, before finding someone to sponsor me as a writer, which gave me another two years in Australia.
And then the holy grail – in 2021, copywriter was added to the list of jobs eligible for permanent residency. Up until that point there simply was no route to permanent residency for me – so the relief I felt was vast.
One of the first steps involved in scoring maximum points for my application was to prove I was able to speak and write English by taking a test. The test cost a whopping $410, and involved being fingerprinted, ID’d and escorted to the toilet should you need to relieve yourself at any point during the four-hour assessment. There are four different parts – speaking, listening, reading and writing – and I had to score near-perfect results in order to prove I have a “superior” grasp of the language I’ve been speaking, listening, reading and writing for 37 years.
A few days after taking the test I got my results back, and in reading and writing, I was scored “proficient”, the level below “superior”. No explanation, no obligation to justify why they scored me the way they did. Just a knowing – no doubt – that I would need to pay another $410 in the hope that next time they might score me higher, so that I could at long last lodge an expression of interest that will bring me one step closer to staying in the place I have called home longer than anywhere else in my adult life.
I was dumbfounded. I called my lawyer immediately, and asked whether we would have grounds to appeal, but she explained that due to the time and cost of doing so, I would be better off re-sitting the test, though she recommended that the second time I did it I should book with a different school.
My Italian boyfriend suggested we find an English teacher to coach us in how to answer the questions the correct way; and so, we booked in for a $400 four-hour lesson one Friday evening. My friends back home were wildly amused.
Thankfully, I scored “superior” in my second test, and was awarded the maximum amount of points I could get.
In many ways we’re among the lucky ones. My boyfriend also aced his results, though several of his Italian friends have taken more than 10 tests, only to miss the mark by a point or two, thanks to the frankly ridiculous questions that are in no way indicative of a person’s level of fluency.
But it does beg the question of the validity, veracity and fairness of the English tests, which – given that a number of people who speak completely fluent English are forced to shell out a fortune and take multiple tests – might seem to be a hugely profitable money-making scheme.
I sometimes wonder if I’ll one day look back and howl with laughter as I reminisce about failing the English test I thought I aced. For now, I’m still smarting and down $1,000.
Lucy Pearson is a freelance writer, book blogger and host of the Bondi Literary Salon
