WHV couple from UK. Tips on travelling, getting jobs

Hi everyone!

My boyfriend and I are in the process of saving £40000 (AUD 71610.16) between us for 8 months in Australia, 3 months in New Zealand and 1 month in Indonesia. I will just focus on Aus here.

We plan on working for around 3 months in Sydney/Melbourne (wherever we can find work), getting a house share for that time and then travelling the rest of Australia.

1. We were wondering how easy it is for us to get a job where we are working together? We know we need to go out there and work but don't want it to turn into feeling like normal life at home where we spend 40 hours away from each other a week. We both have retail experience, my boyfriend has retail management experience, so that would be a good option for us. We IDEALLY want to avoid the fruit picking work, but we know it may have to be an option for us. Is retail work easy to find? We can't find too much about this online.

2. Would $71000 AUD be enough, flights and visas excluded, along with us each working full time for 3 months, to then spend a further 5 months on the road in Australia and then 3 months in NZ, or would we need to work for longer than 3 months?

3. Is it easy to get short term room rentals? We are hoping to work in either Melbourne/Sydney and for those 3 months we would like to live in a house share. Are short term rentals easy to find?

After we have worked and saved more money, we were planning on exchanging work for free accommodation for a couple of months but then after that, we are not sure what to do!! We've looked into renting a camper van with a kitchen and bathroom etc for 3 months but the prices we've seen are from $30000 AUD minimum, which would eat up a big chunk of our money.

4. Is that the cheapest way to travel and explore the whole of Australia? Or would it be best to buy/rent a car and use camping sites to shower. If anyone has done this, how/where do you go to the toilet on long road trips?! We are from the UK which is tiny in comparison, and there's service stations everywhere!

I know these kinds of questions have been asked before, but everyone's travels are different, so I would appreciate not being told to check other posts.

Thank you in advance.

A private double room in the rather fancy Sydney central YHA costs AUD $185 per night. That's about as expensive as you'll get for a hostel. (In Melbourne a similar room would cost just AUD $125 per night). If you buy supermarket food to cook your own meals in the hostel's kitchen, and travel from place to place about once a week by public transport, and do a few activities every week, I'd expect an average cost per day of AUD $200-250 for the two of you together, so AUD $50k-60k for the 8 months. That should be an upper limit, as you'll spend far less when outside the big cities, and New Zealand is also significantly cheaper, so I'd say that $71k you're aiming for is absolutely plenty.

Public transport is also the way I'd personally recommend travelling to keep costs down. Car rental would make sense for a week here or there, to get off the beaten track, but not for long term. Buying a car and then selling it on when leaving the country is a very common thing to do for backpackers, but I have no personal experience with it, as it always felt like too much hassle to me. (Greyhound is the company with the largest bus network, and they have several travel passes that make it possible to bring costs down if you use them frequently, but there are also many smaller regional bus companies that tends to be cheaper for individual legs.

Both getting a job at the same place sounds hard to me; you'd need quite a bit of luck for it, but I'm saying that without any knowledge of the current job market or ever having tried anything similar myself, so that opinion isn't worth a lot.

Getting a short term house share should be quite possible; the market is definitely used to backpackers moving about (though long stay hostels are also a thing). flatmates.com.au used to be a good place for finding something in the big cities - though traditional notice boards at hostels, bookstores and university campuses also worked well. I'm assuming this hasn't changed too much since then, but happy to be corrected by someone with more recent experience.