There are of course two types of people wanting to work in Australia. The ones who are immigrating to start a new life down under and the others who are just on a One Year Holiday Visa. The ones I'm mainly going to deal with here are the ones on OYWHV. Each has its own types of work and ways of going about getting work.

The One Year Holiday Visa has a stipulation in it that you can only work for 3 months for any one company. So this sort of limits you to what jobs you can apply for.

I found the temp agency's the best source of work when I was in Australia. Over the year, the first work I got was a few days laying new sod on a garden then for a local paper in Bondi delivering papers on a Wednesday morning to local business. Then through a temp agency got some work in the mail room of a bank and finally got a job in a painting and decoration company.

What I learnt from this was that you need to be flexible in your approach to work and type of work you will do. Don't go to Australia thinking that you will get the type of work you were employed in before you went. The reality is that on a OYWHV you will be always classed as temp staff. So it's not much use applying for full time jobs because

1. You won't be there that long
2. You don't have the rights to work full time.

Ok so you might be really lucky getting a temp job where the company might want to keep you on and sponsor you but that doesn't happen all that much. For a company to do this, you really need to have the skills they want and the qualifications to back them up too.

So being on a OYWHV you will be dealing mostly with temp jobs. A great idea I think is maybe take a bar tenders course and up some time as bar staff before you leave home. From what I seen there was always jobs for Bar Staff.

Also if you intend travelling round Australia, fruit picking is a job you might conceder. Ok from what I heard it isn't the easiest of jobs. Early starts and long hours but also a lot of fun to be had.