Nth-Degree

No... I didn't love that. :(

I've grown up in that culture, and I find it weird, too. Once a settlement gets to a certain size (say 500 or so), you no longer know everyone. At that point, you no longer talk to everyone. Once it gets to a few thousand people, you can be anonymous. At that point, there is no incentive to even try to connect with or consider other people.

It's weird. I don't even know the name of the lady who lives next door. I doubt I could pick her in a line up of other sixty-something year old women that looked vaguely like her. I've lived here five years.

There's a balance in the middle that I find effective.

Number one: use a completely different username on every site. Make it as hard as possible to just google your username and get loads of Intel.

Number two: if you're going to engage online, be engaged in lots of places. Subscribe to several city subreddits and post on /r/all randomly. If you have a lot of posts in one city subreddit, but no others, it's logical to assume that you live in that city.

Like OP was doing, I keep online and personal lives contained from one another. Nobody in my life knows my Reddit, twitter or irc usernames. This allows me to be fairly open online. But I steer clear of anything more personal that the general vicinity of where I live and work.

You can give your real self a very basic, generic online presence. A LinkedIn account that is effectively a copy/paste of your resume satisfies recruiters and HR people that you're real. Use a side-profile photo, wearing business attire. Such photos are great for a business profile, but not attractive to people who would want your likeness for other things (impersonating you on other sites, news articles if you suddenly find yourself in the spotlight as OP did).

Delete Facebook, it's the devil. If you absolutely must use it, use it in incognito mode, and try to be as read-only as you can. Assume that privacy settings are a joke, and that everyone can read everything you put there. So, put very little.

Obviously, if you ever do share something on Reddit etc that can triangulate to your real self, delete your account and start again.

Finally, subscribe to to /u/wil 's law of Internet use, "Don't be a dick". Be splendid online and you're less likely to be the target of a doxxing in the first place.

As this image crossed US borders, it's safe to assume that the NSA has committed this picture of your penis to its database.

I take it that going to a first world country and getting a western-style education is unusual? What do you plan to do at the end of it? Go back or stay in Australia?