What to Ship, What to Buy

Some answers to your questions.

1. Excess luggage charges will be high per kilo so only 2 cases and buy here to suit the climate.
2. No furniture
3.Buy here, especially if something goes wrong and they cannot be repaired.
4. Yes
5.Buy all those here.
6.Check prices here against prices in USA.
7. Take laptop.

Buy a new cellphone in Australia.
Apart from a US phone likely being locked to a given service provider, the charger might not accept Australia's mains voltage and a US phone is going to be a pain if it goes wrong as you are unlikely to be able to claim warranty in Oz.

Oh, don't pack suitcases, pack soft bags.
Suitcases take your weight limit up because they're heavy but soft duffel bags are very light so you can get more useful stuff and stay within the weight limits.

Don't ship DVDs, get conversion software and store the lot on hard drives. As with the photos, duplicate the drive so it's harder to lose the data.
I understand it's perfectly legal to make a copy of a DVD for your own use as long as you own the original.

2 hard drives weigh a lot less than a pile of DVDs

Buy a new TV in Oz. Apart from the pain of shipping and the likely incompatibility of the set to Australian standards, its chances of getting to Australia undamaged is less than 100%.

Thank you all. Seems to be a consensus here. Of course, our daughter will make her own decisions, but this should help greatly. See ya Down Under, mates.