All about Melbourne accommodation: where to live whilst studying on exchange

By Amelie Duroux, University of Melbourne, Australia

It can be so tricky to know the best place to live at university, especially when you are moving across the world to study abroad. I personally had no idea which accommodation to choose when I was preparing to move over to Melbourne, and ended up choosing the accommodation that the majority of the other University of Manchester students chose. The student living culture at the University of Melbourne is so different to the UK universities, because the majority of Australian students do not move away from home – they continue living at home and commute into university, sometimes with journeys which are hours long. This means that the student accommodation options comprise mainly international and exchange students as residents. There are two main types of accommodation here – the colleges and the student apartments. The colleges look like a lot of fun and the people I know who live there enjoy it a lot – they have so many socials and catered food, and are located just at the top of the university campus. I personally found them to be very expensive, costing almost triple the rent I paid in Manchester for my first year accommodation. The student apartments are around half of this cost, so still more expensive than my Manchester first year accommodation, but one of the more affordable options in Melbourne. It is just important to recognise that cost of living, especially for accommodation, is just generally higher in Melbourne than it will have been in Manchester.

I live in Little Hall, one of the three self-catered student apartment buildings: Little Hall, Lisa Bellear House and The Lofts. The majority of exchange students from Manchester moved here, and most of us signed up to live there for one semester, in case we wanted to find somewhere else for the second, but a lot of us ended up staying. The flats are really nice and modern, and there are a few rooftops with a barbeque, a music room, a cinema room, a sewing machine, a gym, a coffee machine (which is free to use) and lots of study spaces. Little Hall is the place where I made most of my friends here in Melbourne, who I met at the orientation they hold. I had lovely flatmates for the first semester but moved out to live in a flat with other friends for the second semester, still in the same building. Little Hall holds a lot of events, and the one we always go to is Little Town Hall on Monday evenings where they provide us with a free dinner. It also houses a swap shop, where old students leave their belongings which then become free to take, which saved me a lot of money when I moved here, especially on kitchenware. There are other accommodation options as alternatives to the accommodations affiliated with the university, such as UniLodge which has been a social and fun place for the people I know living there. Some people lived in Journal Student Living or various Scapes, but they found these to be less social and not great for meeting new people. The other option is finding private accommodation and doing a house share, which is often a cheaper option. This worked really well for some people, who found great housemates, in houses close to campus. Three people from Manchester decided to find a house together, and whilst at first they were living in a hostel and found finding a house quite a stressful process, after two weeks they ended up with a lovely house extremely close to campus, and pay less rent than those of us in student accommodation. The only thing to note is that if you are planning to rent out a whole house with friends, most of those in Melbourne only let students rent the house for the whole year, not just a semester, and most houses come unfurnished, so everything, from beds to a fridge, has to be bought. I hope this was helpful and gave some insight into the daunting idea of student housing!