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SCG United Kingdom
There are an estimated 200,000 - 300,000 Australians in the United Kingdom at any one time, perhaps more. Approximately one third of all Australians living outside Australia live in the UK. So it's hardly surprising that the bulk of e-mails, faxes and phone calls we receive come from Australians in the the UK. In principle, we are always pleased to hear from an overseas Australian. BUT PLEASE, before you send us a question of any nature or phone us with a query, take the time to carefully read our general policy on responding to queries set out below. Bear in mind that we are an entirely volunteer-run organisation, with limited resources. If you do decide to send us a query or a request for advice, it may be some time before we are able to respond. We receive many e-mails every day.
Note that from time to time we hold various SCG events in London. Consult our Events Page for further details. To make sure you receive timely information about our UK events, sign up to free our e-mail bulletin list. Your personal information will be treated strictly in accordance with the Privacy Statement on our site.
Contacts in the United Kingdom
The Southern Cross Group has several Committee Members in London, but more volunteers are needed in London and elsewhere in the UK in view of the critical mass of expatriates there.
Our primary co-ordinator in the UK for telephone contact and fax messages is Lorraine Buckland. Lorraine has been in the UK since 1962.
Lorraine Buckland
Co-ordinator - UK
Southern Cross Group
PO Box 61
Exhibition Road
London SW 7 2DA
UNITED KINGDOM
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7584 7268 (24 hour answering machine)
Fax: + 44 (0)20 7581 9894
If you are in the UK and require help with preparing an application for Australian citizenship under the Australian Citizenship Act 2007, then contact Eric Brown in Bromley in Kent, tel +44 (0)20 8467 5574, eric@southern-cross-group.org.
If you would like to contact the SCG in the UK by e-mail on any other
matter, please write to Anne
MacGregor who coordinates responses to all e-mail communications received
by the SCG in the UK. Don't forget to consult our
general policy on responding to queries before you put finger to keyboard
or call. Please only send your query/message to Anne in the first instance
- do not send the same message separately to other SCG volunteers or our general
SCG e-mail address - this results in a doubling up and needless duplication
of our precious volunteer resources.
We also have an SCG Committee member in Hertfordshire:
John Nugent
Southern Cross Group
C/o Gisby Harrison
Goffs Oak House, 617 Goffs Lane
Goffs Oak
Hertfordshire EN7 5HG
UNITED KINGDOM
Telephone : +44 (0) 1707 878300 (business hours)
Telephone : +44 (0) 1992 534419 (after hours)
Mobile: +44 (0) 7855 867135
We receive many queries every day from Australians around the world. The flood of e-mails is now of such a volume that our volunteer committee is stretched to its limits. While we want to hear your thoughts and views, before you send us a message, please read the following. This will allow us to use our limited resources as effectively as possible, so that we can spend less time answering e-mails and more time developing policy submissions and doing other work of importance to the whole Australian expatriate community.
Requests to be put on the SCG E-Bulletin List
If you simply wish to be put on the SCG's free e-mail bulletin list, please sign yourself up directly rather than writing to us. This will ensure that you automatically receive updates on the progress of our various issues as events occur. Our e-mail list is powered by Constant Contact Microsoft software and you can unsubscribe yourself at any time. We do not share your personal contact details with any other individual or organisation.
Requests for Advice on Citizenship, Immigration and Other Matters - Please Make a Donation
Quite a few questions people address to us by e-mail are already comprehensively answered on our website. Please use the search facility at the top of this page to search our whole website BEFORE you e-mail us. You should also check relevant government websites for information before you write to us.
We are receiving an increasing number of complicated queries from people wanting specific advice on their personal citizenship or immigration situation. Some of these queries can take one of our volunteers several hours to answer properly. Requests of this nature should really be addressed to a qualified immigration lawyer in the relevant jurisdiction, rather than to the SCG. While we aim to provide support to members of the Australian diaspora within the confines of our limited volunteer resources, we are not a free immigration and citizenship advice bureau. And it is disheartening to spend a great deal of time preparing responses to these queries when often the recipients even forget to thank us.
We do have a number of lawyers on our volunteer SCG Committee, qualified in various jurisdictions. Some of them have expertise in immigration and citizenship matters. If you send us a query which we judge will take more than 15 minutes to answer, we will e-mail you back and ask you to make a donation of a suggested amount to the Southern Cross Group before we provide you with an answer. You can make your donation using the Amazon Honor System. Your donation will help us pay for website hosting and the many other expenses we face in running the SCG. This is a small way that you can say thank you for the support we provide you with.
All e-mails for the Southern Cross Group in the UK should be directed in the first instance to Jacqui Mowbray. Please do not send the same message separately to other SCG e-mail addresses on this page or to our general e-mail address. Send your message/query to one SCG e-mail address only. Multiple messages posing the same query to different SCG volunteers can result in a frustrating waste of our limited volunteer resources, as more than one of our volunteers invests time to answer the same query, believing that they are the only volunteer to receive that particular query.
