Australian English

In my book, Waltzing Australia, I include a fairly lengthy glossary of terms used in Australia. I also at one point discuss the Aussie tendency to make things charmingly diminutive (such as the saltwater crocodile becoming a saltie), which is covered in this video, but I also relate terms that came to Australia from South Africa, as well as Cockney rhyming slang. So there is a lot of information in the book (in addition to grand adventures)—but it doesn’t let you know what the words sound like. A language channel that I regularly watch just solved that problem for me. Here’s a video that relates the sounds of spoken Australian English.

Gibb River Road

One might think that after three trips to Australia, one of them six months long, I might be running out of things to see. Far from it. There is a fourth trip to report—and still things on my list that have not been checked off. However, before I launch into trip 4, I thought I’d just share a few interesting things I’ve run across online, mostly videos (since I was simply taking photos, which don’t necessarily convey all the drama and adventure).

There are so many wonderful things to see. I just saw a documentary on Australian parrots, so I thought I should focus on birds. Then I read an article about evidence that life on earth may have first emerged in Australia’s Pilbara region, but long research papers don’t lend themselves to blog posts.

So I settled on a video of a couple tackling the Gibb River Road, the road that made up a substantial part of the first part of Trip 3. It is not by any means everything I saw, but then the couple had to cut their trip short due to problems with their vehicle. If nothing else, the video underscores why it’s a good idea to not tackle this unless you really know what you’re doing. But it also underscores how remarkable the remote northwest of Australia is.