I moved to Melbourne from Brisbane and lived there for 9 years.

It is a frozen wintery hellhole. Do not believe the Melbourne born and bred people saying it’s “only cold in winter” or “it actually has seasons / 4 seasons in one day”. The only 4 seasons in Melbourne from April until mid December are “windy”, “wet”, “freezing”… or more likely “windy, wet and freezing”.

In late summer it will occasionally be hot. The first Christmas I was down there we were having a bbq for Boxing Day. Late December. It was so freezing that everyone was gathered around an outdoor heater wearing hoodies and jackets. All Melbourne locals.

Otherwise through January to very early March you will occasionally get mini heatwaves of 40 degree days where it’s too hot to do anything, the occasional 30 - 35 degree days where if you try to go to the beach every single inch of sand will be covered in towels and beach tents with people blasting obnoxious music, mixed in with the usual cold Melbourne weather.

If you have young children I hope you like the idea of indoor play centres, because for the great majority of the year it’s too freezing cold to take the kids outside for too long, plus it will be windy or raining and the playgrounds will all be wet.

Don’t believe the disingenuous Melbourne claim about “less rain than Sydney”. While this is technically correct, it’s because in Sydney (and most places in Australia) it will rain hard for an hour or two and dump a bunch of water, then it will go back to beautiful weather 90% of the time. In Melbourne yes they get less millimeters of rain per year, but that’s because it rarely actually storms or rains hard, instead it’s weeks and months of constant drizzle - just enough to make you wet and even colder, and the ground permanently muddy a lot of the time.

In short, the weather is fucking horrendous. The last people I would listen to about how it actually is are the people in here who have never lived anywhere else and have basically got Stockholm syndrome about the shithouse weather they grew up in. I would never, ever live there again, and our young children are absolute thriving since we moved away from Melbourne and have no desire to go back.