100 Points

Life gets more complicated, the more you live it. Packing up from South Africa really drove this home to me. We’d accumulated junk, some of it was boxed for the move back from Canada and was not unboxed by the time we moved to Australia. A windsurfer, last used in 1989, went to Canada in 1991, returned to South Africa in 1998 and remained, still unused, in our storeroom in 2007. The big clear out started months before the move, boxes of stuff were set aside for redistribution around Mooiplaas. Accounts had to be closed, changes of address sent. The papers in the office needed pruning – the shredder, overheated, would stop working after about 45 minutes. Scan important papers, keep only the certificates, shred everything else. Destroy, at long last, those tax forms from 1982.

As the plane took off from East London airport, I felt as though we were leaving a web behind, the slate was now clean. Surely we could live a simpler life down under?

“Australia has managed to get bureaucracy down to a fine art,” Les McBride, our recruiting agent, told us after arriving in Melbourne. “You’ll need your original medical degree certificates, passport and visa, original certificate of intern training, a photograph and certificate of good standing from the South African and British Columbian Boards for your meeting tomorrow with the Victorian Board of Medicine”. Oops: the intern training certificate was in the container – I’d carefully packed the others in our suitcases – and the container would only be arriving a few weeks after we’d settled in. Fortunately the registrar was not too pedantic; he probably had a certified copy in my file and did not need to see the original. Twenty minutes after the interview, I had my Victorian registration certificate: I can practice medicine in this state.

We only spent the first night in Melbourne, and left almost immediately after that interview for Sale, two-and-a-half hours by car towards the south-east. We’d visited here in December last year, the countryside was parched from a massive drought and there were huge fires in the mountains; the one afternoon the sun was but an orange orb in the sky, obscured by the smoke and ash. Now, the countryside was lush and green, a result of the flooding previous month’s floods.

Peter Craighead, the hospital CEO, had managed to secure a house for us to rent at the last minute, and together with some of the other staff at the hospital, moved some beds, linen, crockery and cutlery, washing machine and television. Originally from New Zealand, he understood the urgency of my need to watch the World Cup better than the local Aussies, who are currently under the frenzy of the Australian Football League finals and just aren’t interested in rugby at all. The house is brand new, the garden non-existent with a lawn that’s sprouting like stray hairs on an old man’s head.

The Melbourne hotel and car rental almost completely depleted our funds, as we’d not received any income from the month in Canada. One of my first duties on arrival in Sale was to sign the contract and get a $10 000 cheque out of Peter for relocation expenses.

Then comes the time to weave another web. I started at Telstra; we’d figured out that a home phone, cell phones and internet access was essential.

“We need ID,” the lady behind the counter told me. I had that covered – I had my passport, but no, that is not enough. “You need 100 points,” she said, “a passport gets you 60”. There are a whole lot of other documents that can get you points – Aussie drivers licence, credit card with a photograph on it (has anyone anywhere got one of these?), birth certificate, rates and taxes accounts are just a few of them. I returned with 2 passports, my entry visa, my SA drivers licence, my International drivers licence, my employment contract, my rental agreement, but no; not good enough.

I gave up on her. Next stop, the bank.

“You need 100 points,” the bank lady said. After a quick look at my passport and visa, she said that that was enough: recent arrivals only needed those documents to open an account. So I opened and account and deposited the money.

I tried another Telstra dealer.

“100 points. That’s easy”, she said. Click, click, click, she entered my passport, credit card and drivers licence onto the computer, and gave me 2 cell phone contracts, a date for the installation of the home phone and internet connection.

We need cars. After much research and bargaining, we decide on the Kia Grand Carnival for the family (a 3.7 litre V6 gas guzzler) and a Toyota Yaris for me (1.3 litre, just has to smell the petrol). We need financing – need I say it again, but they needed the documentation for the 100 points. To get the cars registered, I need a client number from VicRoads and VicRoads needs 100 points from me.

Even the video store wants 100 points – passport and rental agreement.

I had to go back to Melbourne a few days after arriving in Sale: I had to return the rental car, the immigration people wanted to let me, with another thousand people, stay in the comfort of their waiting room for a few hours before putting an official visa in my passport, and I had to attend a Medicare briefing in order to get Prescriber and Provider numbers. The prescriber number allows patients to get subsidised medicines from their pharmacy, and the provider numbers allow me to charge medicare for seeing their patients. The numbers take about 2 weeks, so I would work in the hospital without seeing private patients in the rooms until those numbers arrive. I caught the train back to Sale that evening from the Southern Cross Station, the same station where just 24 hours later, little 3 year old ‘Pumpkin’ would be abandoned by her father a few days after he murdered her mother in New Zealand.

Train travel is just so relaxing, it takes about the same amount of time as a car. As it pulled into the Sale station, I could feel myself tensing up, thinking about 100 points and my rapidly complicating life.