Unemployed and Homeless

The task of finding an apartment has proven to be utterly impossible and extremely discouraging. We have run into an endless list of obstacles, so I will explain some of the main ones. The first problem we have is no one wants to lease and apartment to two unemployed American girls with very little money in their bank accounts, an obvious solution to this problem would be for us to get jobs before getting an apartment, but not surprisingly no one wants to hire a homeless person. In Australia the way apartments are rented is you find a property you like on a real estate web site, then there will be an open inspection time listed for you to come look at the property. The inspections only last for 15 - 20 mins, which is a problem when there are multiple inspections at the same time, or one right after the w other. What this all means is that Lindsay and I are literally running from one inspection to another in a city we don't know our way around at all. The next problem we have run into is that there are usually at least 15 other people at any given inspection. We figure any of these people with jobs are more likely to have an apartment rented to them than us. In Australia to actually get an apartment leased to you you have to put in an application. The application asks things like "where do you work", "what's your address", "how long did you rent at your previous property", Our applications look very weak when all of these sections are left blank. Also Laura Snow, who is moving here in a couple of weeks, isn't physically here to fill out an application, so we are trying to get all of her information from her, but it's difficult with the 14 hr time difference. The last obstacle we have run into is trying to find a furnished place, in Australia un-furnished apartments don't come with any appliances which means no refrigerators etc. We could deal with sleeping on mats if there are no beds, but we can't go buy all our kitchen appliances.
I have also ventured out beyond the traditional real estate websites to find an apartment and have been looking on gumtree (the Australian equivalent of craigslist). I found a couple of apartments that sounded too good to be true; fully furnished, 2 bedroom, in the CBD, with Internet included. Sadly they were too good to be true; I received basically the same email from all of them. They were renting their apartments because they were going to West Africa to do Missionary work, I couldn't look at the apartment because they were already out of the country, but if I sent them the money they would then send me the Key. I may be young and inexperienced, but I am definitely not that naive.
We are trying to remain optimistic, but it is honestly a pretty stressful situation. We haven't even had time to explore the city because we have spent every single day going to inspections.Hopefully our luck will change soon.
Cheers,
Laura