Thanks for visiting my website – a platform created by a migrant for migrants. 

I would like to start by telling you a little bit about myself and our journey as migrants in Australia. My wife and I had only just married a year prior to migrating on a Permanent Resident Visa. We were at the peak of our careers back home and were very well settled. However, being a sailor, I wanted to settle ashore before starting a family, and so I floated the idea of migrating to Australia with my wife. I had been to Australia several times on cargo ships and was quite enamoured by the country and the lifestyle of its residents. 

It seemed like a great place to start a family.

And, it is. In every single way.

We have been living here for over eight action-packed years, and have loved every single moment of it. In the interim we have been blessed with two beautiful kids – we call them the first joeys in the family, we’ve become Australian citizens, and we are living the dream life I had always imagined.

The journey Down Under did not start quite that well, however, and neither was it smooth sailing for the first few years after our arrival into the country.

For starters we were completely unprepared for seeking employment; we’d imagined that with our management level qualifications and years of relevant experience we would waltz into our dream job.

We were wrong… oh, so very wrong!

It appeared to me that all the challenges are thrown at migrants at once, and that to immediately upon arrival. We had to self-learn almost everything on the run: from opening a bank account, enrolling for Medicare, preparing an ‘Australian-style’ resume, seeking rental properties, applying for a driver’s licence, obtaining a Tax File Number (TFN) and a range of other skills.

It was a steep learning curve, and the going, at least initially, was quite challenging. 

In hindsight, if I had the relevant tools, and or access to the right resources, and if the relevant information was made available to me at the very beginning, my settlement journey would have been much shorter and a whole lot easier.

Sadly, I did not find any such one-stop shop.

(It would be remiss of me not to mention the tremendous support we got from fellow migrants and other community members, most of whom helped us navigate through the myriad of activities and provide advice when we needed. Australia is a country of migrants, after all, and we all take care of each other generally speaking.)

The concept of Migrant Ninja was born during those initial days of my struggles when I realised that there were several agencies who were extremely supportive and eager to ship migrants to Australia, but there was hardly anyone available to provide a newly arrived migrant with a road map once they landed.

This website, therefore, is my effort to help all future migrants settle with ease and to provide them access to a wealth of information that we lacked at the start of our journey in Australia.