Yasmin moved from Mogadishu via Nairobi in 2019 and started at La Trobe the same year on a humanitarian visa. She did her undergrad in public health, lives with her mum and two younger brothers in a Bundoora townhouse, and writes for MELBZ between shifts at a community legal centre in Preston.
She covers the Northern corridor — Reservoir, Preston, Thomastown, Epping, Bundoora — with a focus on students and on families who are still finding their footing in Australia. Her pieces explain the small things that nobody puts in a Welcome to Melbourne pack: which bulk-billing GPs in Reservoir take new patients on a Medicare card under three months old, the actual route walking to La Trobe after the bus stops at midnight, the difference between the East African grocer on High Street and the one on Sydney Road.
She’s blunt about what’s hard (winter, the rental market, the bureaucracy around overseas qualifications) and direct about what works.
Articles by Yasmin Osman are based on her own experience and her work with newly arrived families in the northern suburbs. MELBZ does not accept payment from migration agents or universities.