You can try NA west maybe? I normally play NA east but I would think the ping from Australia would be unbearable, depending on where the server is and how many hops you need to take. in GW2 I would usually play NA East, when it was a little slow I'd jump on NA West, and back when we had serious issues even on EU servers where the lag wasn't too awful. It's harder to say from the Pacific Rim area though.
And indeed, while I can usually get decent matches on NA east PC, at certain times of the day it can be rough and the serious PC issues that many still have, and really should have been fixed before full launch (along with some others), is keeping some people away. If I couldn't login reliably or kept crashing (and I have locked up and had to exit the program a few times), or got that permanent black screen, I'd not be playing either.