How to make money in Australia in a fun way

We all come to a point at our journey when the bank account start to look awfully empty and you have to choose the 50 cent noodles outside your hostel for the fifth time that week. It’s simply time to refill your savings and that doesn’t have to mean that you have to go back home. It was early at my travels this time that I decided that I wasn’t going back to Sweden this time to start save again.

I left a snowy Stockholm the 19th of January to go to Bangkok and from there on see where I ended up. I didn’t have a huge budget so the original plan was to stay as long as I could and then go back home to save again. But I think it was at a beach in Thailand in the sunset with that mandatory sunset beer that I decided that why not go to Australia and work there instead of that terrible cold place I just left. So five months later when I actually was broke it wasn’t a big deal to fly over from Denpasar, Bali to Brisbane.

I came here with a friend and during our stay in Indonesia we had asked around to find out which place that would be the best to find a job in. A lot of people told us that Gold Coast would be a fun choice so we went there and I can ensure you that it’s a lot of fun.

But to be broke in a place like that isn’t the perfect combination, we had to get a job. Three weeks went by and we both tried to work for different places that didn’t really give us a god deal so we just decided that we should search for work all over Australia instead. It’s a lot of work websites that can help you to get a job but we got our through Facebook and one of all groups that you can join to meet employers and other backpackers.

At that point we wrote to everyone that posted that they had work available and then we got an answer from a guy that had a pub in Tomingley a ten hour drive from Gold Coast. We had nothing to lose so we bought a car from some backpackers in Brisbane and three days later we were at the pub.

So here we are in a town with 40 citizens, a gas station, a motel, a lot of cows and even more sheep. It was kind of strange to go for hectic Asia to big city life in Gold Coast and then end up in the middle of nowhere in Tomingley.It is a different experience and this is the deal we got from our boss:
* Free food
* Free accommodation
* 500 dollar per week
* Bonus if we do a good week
* A lot of good friends

As you understand we aren’t the gas stations biggest customers and I don’t have any intention of buying a sheep so at the moment I can save every dollar I make. The work we do at the pub isn’t really hard work. We open at 10 and close when everyone is out of the pub at night (24 hour licence yes it exists!). To work we had to take both our RSA (Responsible service of alcohol) a mandatory course to be behind a bar I Australia and RCG (Responsible Gambling Training) a mandatory course if you work with poker machines.

From what I know you can do the RSA online. I did that but the RCG has to be done in a classroom but it only takes one day to do both of them. So other from pouring beer to farmers, miners and truckies I don’t have to do much more and that’s if you ask me a quite good life at the moment and definitely a better deal than buying a ticket to Sweden to start all over again with the savings.