Guava

I don't know how old you are but you remind me of myself from a few years back. As someone who is originally from Montreal as well, here was my trip report on FT for an extensive trip in the South Pacific:

The South Pacific Odyssey

The report is quite long, you can skip the parts that don't interest you and read some of the pertinent parts on travel specific in Australia and NZ. I had been to Australia many times prior to that trip, for instance, I did skydiving solo on my 20th birthday in Gold Coast and some other pretty crazy stuff. However, this one is the longest and most extensive. Keep in mind you are going during the Austral Summer, which means the central desert part of Australia such as Alice Springs will be incredibly hot.

When this was written, the GLBT forum at FT doesn't exsit yet if I remember correctly. In any case, I assume you are looking for some gay specific advice which this report does not really address because it was formatted for a general audience. I know it may come across as somewhat shocking today but the word gay used to be controversial even on FT.

You are going as a single traveller, there are few things to keep in mind between the cultural difference of Australia and Quebec. Australians are generally very friendly and gay travellers should not experience any severe outward homophobia in general. Nevertheless, it is a country that is somewhat behind the time overall with respect to gays because for the longest time it has had a conservative government that enjoyed trashing gays on national media and the country actually decriminalized homosexuality not until late 80's or early 90's only. I felt that outside of big cities such as Sydney, a lot of gays are still very much in the closet. Just keep in mind gays can be found everywhere even outside of the cities but be mindful that different people have different comfort zone, there is definitely certain degree of stigma in Australia which is generally not as blatant as in Quebec.

In my opinion, flight pass is not generally a good idea because you can get some pretty good one-way deals on Qantas.com and etc. Plus, if it means you need to fly QF on the way over and pay more for it, then it is definitely not worth your while. Is there anyway you can get yourself some reward tickets on Qantas? Did you book your inter-continental flights already? Here is a tip I can share with you. There is probably an abundance of people here on FT with piles of QF points sitting in their account, waiting to be used. The reason is about 5 years ago, there was a FT magazine sale that can net them QF points from the SPG conversion and some people bought massive amount of duplicate magazines for the sake of getting QF points. Back then, they seem like good deals. Then QF suddenly devalued its program and lots of people were stuck with massive amount of points that are pretty useless. I advised people against that deal on MilesBuzz back then but people were blind by the taste of trying out BA Concorde for little money and this is what happens. There are still a lot of people with these QF points around, I know at least one. You may be able to get them to trade with you for a firesale if you offer something they find useful, just know that their cost base is low but they aren't desperate either. If this is not possible, my advice is check out the Qantas forum, ask the more experienced members there how to shop for some Round Australia cheap fares using a series of one-way bookings. My knowledge of QF and Oneworld is out of date since it's been a while since I have left Oneworld, which is very different to what you see in my trip report posted above.

Hope you had an awesome time and enjoy the South Pacific.