Aussies are awesome. Sure, they’re weirdly specific about coffee, psychotically patriotic, especially when caught in other countries (the national sporting colors are green and gold, by the way), prone to getting weepy at Qantas ads, and peculiarly ignorant about the rules of baseball, but They’re a pretty cool country. And while they’re as full of weirdos, emotionally bizarre lunatics, and sleazes as any other country, Australians have an abject advantage in the dating pool: everybody automatically thinks dating an Australian is cool. Unfortunately, they’re often quickly disillusioned and drawn into an argument about cricket.
If you find yourself dating an Aussie, these are the 11 things you are just going to have to accept. Or at least try to accommodate with as much grace as possible.
1. There is not one Australian accent; there are many
Best post match interview with the Honey Badger (Nick Cummins)
One of the best post match interviews ever with Nick Cummins on sky sport nz after the win against the Highlanders.
Much as you may not be able to tell apart a Sydneysider from a Melbournite, Aussies can. (Particularly because Sydney and Melbourne have a hilarious rivalry going on, and if you’re looking to date a resident from one city, you may have to pretend the other doesn’t exist.) Hell, it’s possible for Australians to tell which suburb you’re from. Add to that the fact that a lot of them have lived and worked overseas, and it’s a toss-up whether any of them sound similar at all.
2. Aussies will probably know more about sports than you do.
Even if Australians hate it, they’ve probably picked up enough knowledge from the communal national obsession that we can hold a decent conversation about swimming, cricket, rugby, or something else where Aussies excel. They’ll probably also have weird nostalgia for athletes you have never heard of — with the exception of Ian Thorpe. You have heard of Ian Thorpe, yes?
3. Nobody believes American football is a proper sport
Baseball’s fine, but gridiron (aka American football)? Seriously, you guys have seen a game of rugby, right? Australian sport’s lucky if it has rules, let alone the paddings, coverings, or medieval quilts your lot waltz around in. Tom Brady isn’t, on a fundamental level, as great as you think, and Aussies are unlikely to be convinced otherwise without a considerable amount of brainwashing.
4. Australians are much more scared of skin cancer than you are.
The dark side of tanning
30 second ad that warns against tanning by showing how tanning can lead to melanoma.
If you say idly that you have a suspicious mole, your Australian partner will be pouncing on it and measuring the sides with a ruler before you can say “melanoma.” Chances are exceptionally high that Australians know or are related to somebody who’s had some skin cancer — and there have been so many publicity campaigns about cancer prevention and awareness that Aussies are probably mini-experts on mole diagnosis.
5. There is no such thing as “looking” Australian.
I am, you are, we are Australian
The lyrics to ‘I am Australian’ were written in 1987 by Bruce Woodley of ‘The Seekers’ and Dobe Newton of ‘The Bushwackers’ and set to music composed by Bruce Woodley. The Seekers were a group of musicians from Melbourne, Australia who came together in 1962.
Australia had one of the biggest influxes of immigrants in world history after World War II. It’s one of the reasons the food’s so good — everybody lives there. So if you’re surprised that Australians are not all six foot, blonde, tanned surfers, you’re going to look like an idiot.
6. It is likely They’ll be serious about coffee.
The current artisanal coffee craze currently taking your local cafe by storm and irritating the sh*t out of you? That originated in Melbourne, among Australian Italian immigrants. There’s a reason so many good baristas are Australian. Even if we don’t like coffee, we’ll at least know what a flat white is — but chances are reasonable that we’ll have opinions about roasts.
7. Do not insult lamingtons.
Lamingtons are the stuff of an Aussie childhood. Making regular appearances at birthday parties, morning and afternoon teas and community fundraisers across the country, Lamingtons are delicious, and you will have them at every fancy occasion, and you have no say in this.
8. Aussies have pineapple, beetroot, and fried egg on our burgers and they bloody like it.
I still have no idea why this is so disgusting to some people, but there it is: an antipodean burger, with the lot from New Zealand to Oz, involves pineapple, bacon, onion, egg, lettuce, tomato, and cheese. It’s a stupendous combination, and you should try it at least once in your life, but even if you don’t, you’re just going to have to live with it.
9. They will swear a lot.
Australia simply has a different standard about the rudeness of different swearwords. Things you wouldn’t feel comfortable saying to your grandmother regularly turn up on Australian network news or in their Parliament. They don’t have filthy mouths (well, some do), but it’s likely They’ll be a bit more relaxed about dropping four-letter words than other nationalities.
10. For some reason, they all like Eurovision — don’t question this.
Eurovision is an incredibly strange song contest and European tradition that, for some reason, has been utterly beloved by Australians for years. They all watched it late at night on SBS. Aussies love it so much they managed to get their own contestant, despite being as far away from Europe as it’s possible to be. It’s strange, and several anthropology PhDs are probably being written about it, but it’s just a thing. Accept it.
11. Nobody actually has a pet kangaroo or koala.
If they say they once had one, they’re messing with you or making fun of your drunken friends. (Koalas, incidentally, have an incredibly high rate of syphilis and would make very poor pets.) Thier wildlife stories will probably be a lot less benign — like that time a kookaburra bashed a snake to death on a terrace, or the summer a possum drowned in a pool.
12. Steve Irwin was not popular in Australia.
Irwin was basically packaged as an American export. I’m glad you liked him! I’m sure he was a very nice man! But he wasn’t the sensation in Oz that he was in the U.S., so we may not have many opinions about him if you bring him up. And no, Aussies have likely never touched a crocodile.
13. Australians will likely know more about Asian cuisine than you.
Australian Asian food is the best. You can’t get away with taking us to some sh*tty Chinese joint with gloopy, violent-orange sweet and sour sauce and think we’ll be impressed. This edict stretches to most kinds of cuisine: the immigrant community means that we’ve probably tasted it before it even reached your city in its street-food van.
14. Aussies do not care about your so-called “spiders”.
Unless they’re the size of your hand and can literally eat birds, I personally don’t even think they count. Actually, this one isn’t entirely true: many Aussies will still be scared of spiders, even if they’re tiny, because we’ve been conditioned to believe that they can all kill us. Because where we come from, hey, they basically can.
15. There is a difference between the bush and the Outback.
This is a lexical distinction that will definitely matter if you’re dating anybody from a rural area of Australia. “The bush” is any vacant area beyond the outskirts of a city or populated place, and “the Outback” is deep central Australia, the bit with red deserts and giant inexplicable rocks. Don’t mix them up or you’ll sound like a doofus.
16. Aussies do not say “shrimp.”
Paul Hogan Ad 1984
“Put another shrimp on the barby!!!” Tourism TV advert from way back in 1984.
They say “prawn.” For them, shrimp are incredibly tiny sea creatures who are either imported or used as bait. The thing you barbecue, with the wavy legs and delicious white flesh? That’s definitely a prawn.
17. They likely know how to run a barbecue, so get out of the way.
Here’s another secret, though: charcoal barbecues aren’t often Australian style. It’s likely that they actually had standing, permanent barbecues in their backyards, run by gas cylinders. Give them coal and a firelighter, and they may just look abjectly confused. Consider it the hazardous by-product of a months-long barbecue season.
