Moving to Perth from overseas has a particular shape. The container with your furniture is somewhere on the Indian Ocean. Your qualifications are being “assessed”. Your phone still lights up with messages from home, all of them arriving at the wrong time of day. And somewhere under the admin (the tax file number, the Medicare card, the driver’s licence conversion) sits the bigger, quieter task: you don’t really know anyone here yet.

This is a playbook for that part. Not the visa part, not the removalist part. The people part. It’s written mostly for the two groups who keep arriving in numbers: Brits and South Africans. The good news for both is the same. You have not moved somewhere unusual. You’ve moved to the one Australian city where your move is almost a tradition.

You joined a very large club

Start with the scale of the thing. Western Australia has been the fastest-growing state in the country, growing 2.2 per cent in a year and passing three million residents, and in 2023–24 Greater Perth added nearly 73,000 people, the fastest growth of any Australian capital. Most of that growth came from overseas. Nationally, net overseas migration added 306,000 people in 2024–25, and WA has taken a healthy share of it.

Now the part that matters for you specifically. At the 2021 Census, 169,938 people in Greater Perth were born in England: roughly one resident in twelve, around double the national rate. South Africa is a similar story at a smaller scale: 38,793 Perth residents were born in South Africa, about 1.8 per cent of the city against 0.7 per cent of Australia as a whole. The demand runs deep enough that South African Airways came back to Perth in 2024 after a four-year absence and, within a year, had lifted the Johannesburg route to five flights a week. Perth is the only Australian city it flies to.

None of this makes the first three months easy. It does mean the paths are well worn. Tens of thousands of people have done exactly this move before you, recently, and they left infrastructure behind.

Month one: find out where the accents already are

Perth’s arrivals don’t spread evenly. They cluster, and the clusters are useful to know even if you don’t live in one.

For Brits, the centre of gravity is the northern coastal corridor. Expats themselves call Wanneroo and Joondalup WA’s “Little Britain”, and the census backs the nickname: in Butler, 16.8 per cent of residents were born in England at the 2021 count (one person in six), and nearby Currambine reached nearly one in five at the 2016 Census. Suburbs like Kinross are known for young families arriving from the UK, Ireland and South Africa. South African arrivals cluster a little more to the south and east as well: in Canning Vale, 3.5 per cent of residents were born in South Africa, roughly double the city’s already-high rate.

The clusters come with landmarks. On Winton Road in Joondalup, Best of British (run by an English couple since 2005, and billing itself as the largest British and Irish food shop in Australia) sits a few doors from South African Essentials, which has stocked biltong, Mrs Ball’s chutney and Springbok jerseys for more than twenty years. One road, two homesick nations. These shops matter beyond the groceries. They’re where you overhear which schools people rate, which mortgage brokers understand foreign income, and which cricket club needs players. Go in your first month, even if you only buy a chocolate bar you recognise.

Month two: borrow a ready-made community

The second month is when the admin thins out and the quiet arrives. This is the moment to borrow other people’s infrastructure rather than building your own from scratch.

The online communities are genuinely good here. The Poms in Perth Facebook group, started by Russel Burder as a group of drinking mates, grew into a 27,000-member hub of shared knowledge, with spin-off groups for meet-ups and new mums. South Africans have Proudly South African in Perth, which maintains running lists of every South African shop and restaurant in the city alongside settling-in checklists. Ask one specific question in either (“we’ve just landed in Baldivis with two kids under five, where do people actually meet each other?”) and watch what comes back.

Then move it offline, on a schedule. The easiest standing appointment in Perth is parkrun: a free, timed 5km walk or run every Saturday morning, with around 37 events across Perth from Whitfords Nodes to Rockingham. Nobody cares about your pace, plenty of people linger for coffee afterwards, and, in a detail both Brits and South Africans tend to enjoy, it’s the same event that runs at home, so it already feels familiar. The same logic applies to whatever you did before you moved. Cricket clubs, football clubs, netball, church, choirs: Perth has all of them, and joining one transplants a habit rather than inventing one.

If you have children, the school gate will do half this work for you. Say yes to the birthday parties. The parents standing next to you at pickup are the most under-rated friendship pipeline in any new city.

Month three: step past the bubble

Here is the trap, and almost everyone who makes this move can name it: it’s possible to live in Perth for years inside a soft bubble of people from home. Same accents, same references, same complaints about the supermarkets. The bubble is not a failure. It’s a decompression chamber, and in months one and two it’s exactly what you need. But if you’re still exclusively inside it at month twelve, Perth stays a backdrop instead of becoming home.

So use month three to do the deliberate thing: start meeting people one at a time, including people who’ve never heard of your hometown. The method is not complicated. When you meet someone you like (at parkrun, at the school gate, through work), suggest a coffee that week. One person, one café, one hour. It feels slightly forward the first few times. It works anyway, and it works better than another large barbecue where you talk to nobody for longer than four minutes. A city becomes yours through individual people, learned one at a time: the colleague who explains which beaches have shade, the neighbour who lends you a trailer, the friend who has opinions about quokkas.

This is the season of life Flat White was built for, and Perth is where it launches first. You put in your availability, get matched with one person for one coffee at a local café, and go: no group events, no swiping, no six weeks of chat before anyone commits to a time. For someone three months into a new country, it does the one thing the bubble can’t: it hands you an hour with a person you’d never otherwise have met.

The move is the hard part. This is the good part.

You’ve already done the difficult thing. You sold the house, sat the medicals, said the goodbyes, flew the eleven or seventeen hours. Against all that, the first three months of social life in Perth are almost mechanical: find the clusters, borrow the communities, show up weekly at something, and then, once you’ve caught your breath, start collecting people one coffee at a time. A few hundred thousand Brits and South Africans got here before you and would mostly tell you the same thing. The city is friendly. It just needs you to go first.

Meet one person. Over coffee. On purpose.
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