IMO Melbourne is the BEST place to live in Australia. Beats the...

IMO Melbourne is the BEST place to live in Australia. Beats the Gold Coast Coast and Brisbane by a mile. I would NEVER move back to the Gold Coast.

You have everything you need in and around Melbourne. The parks are beautiful. You have a choice of very good eating establishments. (For example the Flower Drum (Chinese) is very good). The weather is a sore spot with many people, but I like the change of seasons and if you like to do gardening, things grow much better than in Queensland except for those stinking palms!!

Public transportation in the City is simple and much, much better than Sydney. However, the flow of traffiic in some areas is really bad.

The beaches are close as are the mountains. You can also go cross country skiing at Lake Mountain or downhill at the other ski areas.

Prices are much higher than in Brisbane especially for housing.

Melbourne has many nice places to live and certain parts of St Kilda are very nice. Many parts are not with the street walkers and all the needles on the streets.

Depending on how much you want to pay for rent, there are some nice apartments on St Kilda Road. If you have a family you might want to consider some of the S.E. suburbs. Prices for houses are much more reasonable than in the City, but acreage has been getting very expensive.

Berwick is nice and certain areas around there are nice too. If you want acreage, Harkaway, Endevour Hills, and certain parts of Narre Warren are nice. However, the train takes about 60 minutes to get to downtown and the traffic in the afternoon rush if you travel by car after work is TERRIBLE.

I would avoid any of the areas in the western part of the city, Dandenong, and Frankston. Too much of a problem with drugs and crime.

The Mornington Peninsula also very, very nice but again you have the additional time to travel.

Patterson Lakes has a small marina and a some houses on small narrow canals - sort of like parts of the Gold Coast around Paradise Waters. I think housing prices there have really gone up quite a bit in the past two years. The train service on that line is much better than to Berwick and Narre Warren.

So the area around Melbourne has many different choices. The one thing that struck me when I moved down here was that the stock of houses was much older than in the Gold Coast area, the lot sizes were much smaller as were the houses, and the prices were multiples of the houses in the Gold Coast area.