Well, it’s been a bit of a quiet month so I don’t have many photo/video experiences to share with you. However, I keep a list of random interesting facts on my phone with the plan to insert them into blogs whenever I’m short on something to report. The list is always long as there haven’t been too many times I’ve been short on new experiences to include in the blog, so this is the weekend to clear some of them off my list!
First – Aussie phone numbers. You know how in North America it’s nice and simple, there’s a 3-digit area code followed by a 7-digit number and everyone reports them the same way? 555-123-4567. Well, not here! I used a lot of cognitive energy in our early months here trying to figure out how to write and say phone numbers because there wasn’t an obvious pattern. The official government style website doesn’t really help much either. So to save you the mental effort, here’s what I’ve learned:
- When calling within Australia, phone numbers have 10 digits. The first 2 numbers reflect either the state (e.g., 07 is for Queensland, 02 is for NSW) or that it’s a mobile phone (04). The other 8 digits can be anything. This part is fine, makes good sense.
- How you write or say the number in chunks, however, is variable. If your mobile number is 0460964123, you could write it as 0460 964 123 or as 04 6096 4123. While the latter seems to make more sense, separating out the 2-digit location code, the former tends to be more common (at least per my experience). And then if a business is reporting their landline number (so in Queensland it would start with a 07), they sometimes just leave the 2-digit code off, so the number 0760964123 would be written 6096 4123.
- If you’re within Australia but want to write your number in international format, you start with the country code +61 and then delete the 0 from the 2-digit location code. So the number would look like +61 7 6096 4123. Except if you follow the Australian style guide linked above, you would group the numbers differently for a mobile number, so for example +61 460 964 123.
Does your head hurt yet??
To give your brain a break, here is a lovely photo Hugh took this morning of 2 pale-headed rosellas at our bird bath (they’re actually a lot more blue than they appear here):
And here is a video of 3 different types of birds having a bath at the same time (first time I’ve ever seen more than 2 different species at once) – a blue-faced honeyeater (on the bath), a noisy miner (yellow on his face), and a little friarbird (closest to the camera):
It was fun seeing the 2 jumping into the main pond for their bath! It’s very rare that we see that. I’m sure the goldfish weren’t too happy about it, though.
A couple bin chickens (ibis) on our neighbour’s antenna:
And then this is a mystery bird that I haven’t been able to identify. Aussie friends, can you help? Olive coloured back, white breast. Assuming it’s a honeyeater or maybe a cuckoo of some sort?
OK, back to other interesting Aussie facts. Seeing as I started with phone numbers, I’ll continue with mobile phone plans (here they say “mobile” instead of “cell”). I did a quick search and I think things have improved now, but when we left Canada in 2023, it was typical to pay $40/month to have 1-2 GB data on your mobile plan . Here it’s practically impossible to find a plan with less than 15 GB per month. Hugh and I have the cheapest plan we could find and it’s $39 for 4 weeks with 15 GB data, unlimited calling and texting within Australia and piles of international minutes and texts – and the unused data rolls over each month. Right now, I have 215 GB of data to use. Now, giving all this data away might be a safe strategy for Aussie telcos because the service outside of metro areas is BRUTAL. If you can’t get a signal, you can’t use any data 🙂
Early on in our adventures here, I posted a photo of the Commonwealth Coat of Arms (federal government). I loved it because how many coats of arms have kangaroos and emus on them! What I didn’t know was the symbolism behind them. Our friends Rod and Llew told us that the kangaroo and emu symbolise a nation moving forward because neither animal can walk backwards. I of course didn’t trust that they were telling us the truth (this is the land of the infamous drop bear after all; Aussies enjoying pulling the wool over tourists’ eyes :)) so googled and they were indeed telling the truth! It even says so on the government site I linked for you.
Speaking of government, for the first 2 fiscal years we lived here, the federal government had multi-billion dollar surpluses. I’m not sure I’ve heard of “surplus” and “government” in the same sentence in decades. But not to worry, we are back to massive deficits for at least the next 5 years, pushing the national debt to $1.2 trillion by 2029. That’s approaching Canadian levels but with a way smaller population to pay it back. Apparently kangaroos and emus can actually walk backwards 🙂
Another interesting difference in government is the election debates. In Canada, I’ve only ever seen the leaders debate. Here the leaders debate, but there are separate debates for key government ministers, like Finance and Energy. I liked that, it was nice to hear from more than just the leaders to get a better feel for the various people making decisions on your behalf.
Speaking of being in a pickle 🙂 , it was our annual Yeppoon Pickleball Festival in July! Hugh and I played in the first weekend, the Queensland Pickleball Tour (QPT), and were absolutely awful. When people asked how we did, we said we made lots of friends because our opponents were always happy to play us 🙂 Fortunately, we pulled it together the next weekend and managed to get a bronze medal in the Retro 40+ Classic:
We also played doubles with our friends Lyn and Rob from Melbourne, but we were better at posing than playing in those games too 🙂
The festival committee, chaired by our friend Robyn, pulled off another amazing 10 days of fun and competition. Such an incredible group of volunteers! And I loved this banner they had made:
Truer words were never spoke – we have made so many friends through pickleball and we’ve introduced so many friends to pickleball!
More interesting Aussie facts. Did you know wifi was invented here? It’s no wonder, given how terrible the mobile coverage is – necessity is indeed the mother of invention 🙂
Despite being solidly on the metric system here (even golf courses count metres, not yards), TVs are sold in inches!
I have not seen a single fire table here! When I’ve asked at various outdoor furniture stores, they look at me like I have 2 heads. They have outdoor heaters, they have outdoor fire pits, but no fire tables. On these cool winter evenings, I would really love to have our old fire table! I remember when we first arrived here in May 2023 and saw one of the stores in town was selling piles of electric blankets – we laughed and laughed, how funny that Aussies think this weather warrants an electric blanket! Well, ummm, we now get it – have had an extra blanket on the bed most nights this past month because it’s gone down as low as 10-12C many nights and we now find that to be very cold! So you can imagine that it’s not realistic to sit outside without a fire table!
Speaking of shops, malls here close at 5:30pm! And most shops outside of malls close even earlier, like 4pm. I guess people with jobs don’t need to shop?? Well, they do stay open until 9pm on Thursdays, so I guess everyone with a job goes shopping on Thu nights.
Speaking of shopping, there are no names for coins here. In North America, we have the nickel, dime, quarter, loonie, and twoonie (I don’t think I’ve ever written twoonie before so I don’t know if it should be spelled twonie?). Here the coins come in $0.05, $0.10, $0.20, $0.50, $1.00, and $2.00.The $1 and $2 coins are gold in colour and they’re called “goldies”, but there is no name for any of the other ones! Hugh calls the $0.50 coins doubloons because they’re enormous and weigh a ton. The bills come in $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100. Because Hugh does 99% of the shopping (ok, ok, fine, 99.9%), I still don’t recognise most coins, except the doubloons, you can’t miss them. And the $5 and $10 bill colours are the opposite of Canada – fives are purple here and tens are blue. They are also different sizes.
Did you know that Rod Laver and Jason Day both have connections to Rockhampton? Rod Laver was born in Rockhampton and was known as the Rockhampton Rocket (our friend Rod is also called Rocket Rod, hmmm…). Jason Day wasn’t born in Rocky, but he credits his time here as kickstarting his golf career. We met a gentleman here about a year ago who claimed there was another famous person with ties to Rocky – Pierre Trudeau! The man claimed that when in Australia, Pierre would come up here to go fishing and this gentleman was the guide who would take him out. I haven’t been able to find any independent verification of this, so it could be another drop bear trick being played on unsuspecting Canadians, but it’s a strange story to make up, so who knows!
Speaking of unsuspecting Canadians, we got a quote to have the ceiling in the central areas of our house painted (we took out the ducted air con in the ceiling and replaced it with a couple room-specific split systems, so needed to patch up the old ducts in the ceiling). $4,500!!! Needless to say, this is what we’re doing instead:
This afternoon our friends Rob and Lyn took us out in their 4 wheel drive to drive up the beach north from Bangalee to Corio Bay, somewhere around where the purple lookout icon is on this map:
It was beautiful! The tide was coming in so we didn’t hang out too long. We walked through ankle deep water to get to this little sandbar:
We were on it for a matter of minutes and had deeper water to get through to return to the beach – and the sandbar disappeared very shortly thereafter! Fast rising tide here. But the views were amazing:
And lots of terns, just like back in Stoney Creek on Lake Ontario:
There is only one access for vehicles to get on and off this beach track, down at Bangalee. When we arrived, a little SUV was stuck in the sand and we had to wait to get down the access until someone towed him back. What on earth were they thinking trying to drive on the sand in a little RAV-4?! When we came back, another vehicle was stuck in the sand pit at the bottom of the ramp from the road – he apparently was following two other vehicles and was going slow and so sunk into the pit, despite being in a bigger vehicle. But he apparently just had regular road tires on, which wasn’t a good idea. He was eventually able to reverse up the ramp a bit and gun it down. But then the guy ahead of us waiting to leave the beach, who seemed to know what he was doing, put it in low gear and tried to drive slowly through the pit – and he got stuck:
Fortunately Melbourne Rob knew what he was doing and we had an exciting roller coaster ride through the deep sand, easily getting back onto bitumen (that’s what they call asphalt here).
In other ocean-related news, Hugh and I joined Kevin, Joanne, and another friend Tony for the ladies’ skipper race a few weeks ago. We had a pretty good wind heading south toward Emu Park:
Jo did a fabulous job at the helm!
And Kevin was hard at work too:
Speaking of being hard at work, when Hugh goes to the Men’s Shed to do some turning, he always manages to time it so that he’ll be there for “smoko”:
“Smoko” is what they call a coffee break 🙂 I’d never been to the men’s shed before but we parked there for one of our pickleball matches (with 400 people in for that weekend’s pickleball tournament, our club relied on many kind neighbours to help us with parking) and what a view they have! This is taken from their parking lot:
A few other Aussie vocab items for you:
“schmick” = slick, as in that presentation was really schmick
“donga” = bunky, as far as I can piece together anyway
“first in, best dressed” = first come, first served
“tick box” = check box
“squillions” = gazillions
I’m not quite sure about the word “mandarin” here. It may be spelled with an ‘e’ on the end, so mandarine, but when I google that, it says it’s more commonly spelled without the ‘e’ in Australia. However, it’s pronounced as if there is an ‘e’, so mandarine rhyming with tangerine. In other uncertain spelling news, I’ve seen curb written as kerb and dispatch written as despatch.
I’m not sure if the series Les Norton will ever appear on Netflix in North America, but if it does, watch it. It’s hilarious but Hugh and I only watched it a couple months ago. We feel quite certain that we couldn’t have watched it in our first year here – between the accents and the vocabulary, we would have had no clue what was going on. If any of you North Americans are able to watch it, please report back on how understandable it is to you.
OK I think I’ve whittled down my list of fun Aussie tidbits for you, so I’ll save the others for some other post. I’ll wrap up with a few more photos. How cool is this parking garage in central Yeppoon:
I just love the Indigenous art styles here!
I signed up to take a Samsung photography course back in December and still haven’t taken the time to start it. I really need to figure out how to take good photos of the moon here. Being in the southern hemisphere, the crescent moon sits as a smile here but my attempts at photographing it just get all blurred. Hopefully one day I’ll figure it out. Coming back from Rosslyn Bay one night during a full moon, I took this beautiful video of the moonlight on the water with the soothing sound of waves lapping on the shore:
I could have stood there all night!
Oh, a fun thing arrived in the mail on Friday. Normally this would be considered a dull part of normal life:
We were randomly selected to take part in the census on Tuesday. It’s totally silly, but it’s things like this that make me feel like I’m an Australian 🙂
That and growing lemons the size of grapefruit in our front yard:
Hugh turned this one into a delicious lemon cheesecake.
Have a fabulous August, everyone! Next blog will report on an upcoming adventure in a direction we haven’t yet traveled in the Land Down Under, stay tuned…