Transcript of AE 1327 - 10 Lies Americans Believe About Australia

G'day, you mob! Pete here! Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. Today we are reacting to the video 10 Lies Americans Are Told About Australians from the channel Kinda Australian. I nailed it this time. I said it correctly. Last time I said "kinda" Australian. You can check that video up here and have a giggle.

Anyway, if you want to listen to this episode as a podcast, be sure to check out the Aussie English Podcast. It's 100% free. You can listen on the go, give it a review, give it a thumbs up if you enjoy it. Besides that, let's just get into it.

My name is Caitlin and I'm an American living in beautiful Sydney, Australia. Before moving over to Australia. There were definitely some myths about Australia that as an American I believed were true. And there are some flat out lies that I've been told by Aussies and just lies that Americans actually believe about Australia. Now, some of these are just Aussies having a little bit of fun and poking a bit of fun at Americans who really don't know anything about Australia. Some of this is definitely from the media. From cartoons that we've seen. Here are ten lies that Americans have been told about Australia. So grab a bicky, grab a cuppa, and let's jump right into this.

Man. Bonus points for using "bicky" and "cuppa" before getting into it. But before we get started, guys, what do you reckon she's going to say? Place your bets. Maybe leave a comment below. I've got a feeling she's going to mention dropbears at some point. I wonder where, in the ten lies that Americans are told, that will fall.

So we're just going to get the first one, the most obvious one, out of the way, and that is that everything in Australia is trying to kill you. As an American who's lived in Sydney for over a year now, I can say for certain that I have come across one deadly animal the entire time I've been here, and that is a redback spider over here.

It's funny she mentions that. So I was wondering if she was going to mention the Sydney funnel web spider. That is the deadliest spider in the world, and there's so much to talk about with these spiders in Australia. We have these two deadly spiders, effectively. There's probably more that are deadly, but we rarely ever encounter them, let alone get bitten by them. So they're just not a problem. The Sydney funnel web is deadly to humans through a quirk of evolution, where it's the sodium channels on their cells. You guys are about to unsubscribe and turn off. They changed with primates. And so the venom is very deadly to us. But things like dogs and cats can be bitten by funnel web spiders. And it does nothing to them. [Hahahahahahahaha. You have no power here.] So yeah, it's one of these unfortunate quirks of evolution where, by chance, the Sydney funnel web spider is insanely deadly to humans.

Another interesting thing is that redback spiders, she said that they're not particularly deadly. They're not, in a sense, like if you get treatment. The same with the funnel web spider, you're not going to die. But ironically, more people over the last 20 or 30 years, I think, have died from redback spiders. And it'll be like 1 or 2. But there was definitely one only a few years ago where a guy was bitten and he didn't get treatment and ended up tragically passing away. Whereas funnel web spiders, I don't think anyone's died from a Sydney funnel web bite since the 80s. So it's been quite a while. Everything in Australia out to kill you. It's a trope that we like to play up a little bit. You know, you can go looking for this stuff and it'll kill you if you give it the chance. You know, if you go picking up brown snakes- like, I saw the other day, someone accidentally picked up a little baby brown snake that they thought was a tree snake in their house. An eastern brown snake. It bit them, and it just shuts down your nervous system so that you can't breathe and your heart stops beating. He almost died. He went to hospital and fortunately survived. It was like, what are you doing, dude? I saw it and I was like, that's a baby eastern brown. Why are you handling that? And then it bit him and it was just like, ahh! Anyway, yes, there's a lot of stuff here that will kill you. Really, the most dangerous thing in Australia is probably driving.

Overall, this isn't something that the average everyday Aussie is going to run into over here. No one's fighting a croc on their way to school, or running from a brown snake on their way to work. You're probably not going to find a funnel web spider hiding in a woolly somewhere ready to bite you. So Americans have this overblown concept that you're constantly going to be running into deadly and dangerous animals. I don't get, though, why Americans have this concept about Australia with our creepy crawlies, our little critters, and being terrified of those. When, back home in the US, you guys have things like black bears, grizzly bears, rattlesnakes, cougars. These things on a regular basis are killing people, mauling people, interacting with human beings. How is that fine and dandy? And then you get to Australia and you're kind of like, the spiders are what freaks me out. It's like you guys have bears in your backyards and you'll be like, whoa, this is amazing. I saw a video the other day of someone in their house, and I don't know if it was a black bear or a grizzly bear had somehow gotten into their house with cubs and was coming up the stairs, and the guy was just videoing it like, hey, bear, hey! And you're just like, how are you not freaking out? [You just snuck in our house early in the morning. Here comes mom.].

If you're like me and you live in a pretty populated area, pretty close to a city which the vast majority of Aussies do, you're probably not going to be running into deadly snakes and spiders on a regular basis. Will you see them? Most likely, yeah, especially if you're somebody who wants to get out and travel a little bit. Go on bushwalks, check out the beaches and whatnot. You might eventually run into a shark or a snake. Or if you decide to go up to Darwin, be careful, because there are crocs pretty much everywhere near water up there.

That's true. We just learned these things. When you go to the North, Western Australia, Queensland, Darwin and the Northern Territory and everything, it's like, just stay out of the water, just stay the hell out of the water. You know, there's jellyfish, box jellyfish, Irukandji, that is like so tiny and yet insanely deadly. This is a little jellyfish. It's absolutely tiny, and it can put you in hospital for days if not kill you. There's. Yeah, crocodiles again. I've seen videos where like at a camping ground, they go to the water and they'll chuck in a buffalo head, and you would just have this massive croc come out of the water that was waiting there that you just never even thought was there, because it was so calm. [This is the best way to see if it's safe to cross a billabong here in Australia. Let's see what you got.]. Australians know usually just not to do dumb shit when you go north.

The next myth is that it is so expensive to live in Australia. Now, if you're going to look at Australia and every single other country in the world, yeah, Australia is pretty expensive. But compared to America, it's actually a little bit cheaper to live in Australia than it is in the States.

Well, I haven't lived in the States, so I guess I'm sort of, you know, I'm biased, I don't know. But from all of the data that I think I've seen more recently, especially with the cost of living here and our wage growth, which has been non-existent. When compared to the US, our disposable income has just totally plummeted, while the US's and the OECD has just kept going up and up and up post Covid. So I feel like this potentially isn't right where Australia is relatively very expensive. If you brought an American wage over, or savings in American dollars, and you're renting in Australia and you're just living your standard life, you know, doing things and you don't have kids and all that sort of stuff, you're probably thinking, yeah, it's not too bad compared to the US. But if you're you've got a home loan, if you have children, it's just it's gone through the roof more recently and become insane again.

If you're from America, you know, tell me what you think. Is life way more difficult there more recently from a cost of living standpoint? But Australia is just getting ridiculous, in terms of the cost of things. Go to Woolworths. I think the prices at Woollies and Coles, our standard supermarkets, have increased by like 17 to 20% over the last 2 or 3 years. It's been ridiculous.

Even though Aussies do have to pay a Medicare levy, or even if you choose to get private health insurance, it's so much cheaper and it covers so much more. If you get sick within the ten year period in the States, you're going to have to pay quite a hefty bill for the vast majority of Americans.

That is a very fair point that she makes. If you want to talk about things like education and healthcare, because a lot of that is government funded, it is going to be significantly cheaper in Australia than in the US, where, you know, student loans can be in the hundreds of thousands of American dollars, where you're paying it off like a mortgage for the rest of your life. I know that healthcare insurance is insane, as you'll probably be aware, if you've seen that CEO killing thing that went around more recently and all the rage around that. Just the amount of money those companies are making from charging people insurance money, and they're not paying out on those insurance claims.

I think I saw a story years back where someone lost two fingers. They cut off the tips of their fingers in a saw accident or something, and they had to choose which finger to have reattached because it was going to cost something like 64,000 American dollars. Right? More than I imagine the average wages in the US to just attach that. Whereas in Australia that would probably be free.

And besides that, food costs more. I just did a video recently on the grocery cost, and it's actually more for groceries over in the States than it is here in Australia.

Wow. Okay.

A lot of people in my comments have pointed out that part of the reason this myth exists is because a lot of Americans come over to Australia and they just go to the touristy section. So of course restaurants are going to cost more. The grocery stores in the CBD areas are going to cost more.

I would love to see an American with a mortgage in Australia compared to a mortgage back in the US. And for a comparison there, that'd be interesting, especially living in Sydney. Am I right, guys?

So there's this perceived notion that it's so much more expensive to live in Australia, but really it's actually a little bit cheaper.

It's so going to be dependent on the things though, like our fuel prices are going to be insanely expensive compared to the US. Our gas prices and electricity prices are some of the most expensive in the world, despite us having huge gas resources here, but we export it all.

There's loads of things that here are probably going to be more expensive, and then over there are potentially going to be, you know, less expensive and vice versa. But.

So I'll be frank, you guys, I've had mostly women over in America ask this or point this out. And that's the notion that Aussies, particularly a lot of Aussie men, are either the typical surfer bro types, the whole blonde hair, blue-eyed, beach body types, or they're basically Mick Dundee. [Michael J. Crocodile Dundee.] That's definitely the stereotype. I know so many Aussies who are nothing like that at all. I recently married an Aussie who is nothing like that at all.

I think the more accurate stereotype would be a guy in a singlet with shorts, in thongs, with a mullet, holding a beer and just saying, you know, G'day cunt. That would probably be a more accurate stereotype than a broad shouldered, blue-eyed surfer or Mick Dundee type of, you know, That's not a knife. [That's a knife.].

The fourth one comes so much from American commercials, and that is Australians drink Fosters beer because the slogan is Fosters, Australian for beer. [♬ And around the world ♬].

Where do you even buy that here? It's, it's one of these myths. I don't know. I don't even know the background. I should look this up, but I'm pretty sure the, the brand was probably started in Australia, became popular back in the day, but I think it got sold out, right? To, to a US company or whatever, and then got exported overseas as like the Aussie bit.

And it's the same with the Outback restaurants or whatever it is, the Australian Outback restaurants that are all over the world, but you just don't find them here and they do. Is it the Bloomin Onion, that's like this deep fried onion that's an Australian staple. And you would be hard pressed to encounter anyone who's ever eaten one of those in Australia unless they were overseas, in the US. Or even in Brazil. I think my wife in Brazil was like, Yeah, their black bread is really good. And I'm like, Black bread, what the hell? And she's like, Yeah, the Australian outback restaurants. That's something I have never even heard of. It's just a total weird, non-existent stereotype that's been marketed to foreigners.

The other interesting thing here is I would have thought that she would have said that alcohol was insanely expensive in Australia, because the taxes that we have on that and cigarettes and all of these other, you know, things are just getting more and more and more every single year.

If you're coming to Australia, don't go to a pub and ask for a Foster's. If you're not sure, hell, ask the bartender. They can probably give you some great recommendations as to what to drink, but please don't waste your money. Don't waste your time on Foster's beer here.

It's one of those things that's become more common in Australia, I feel is with the people that I'm surrounded with. We quite often like a variety of things when we go out drinking, like if I'm going to have beers and I go to a pub, quite often, I'll just be like, what have you got on tap that's unique? Interesting? What's different? I want to try some different things. So quite often you don't have people who are just going to be 'I just like my one VB brand of beer and that's all I have. Everything else sucks'. [Get that up here.] Usually I think people like rotating around and trying all sorts of different stuff, which is why we have so many different little breweries and unique kind of wines and whiskies and spirits and all sorts of stuff. That's all over the place because we like trying lots of different types of things.

Number five is that Outback Steakhouse is basically Aussie food. It's not what so ever.

Nailed it. Okay, so it's called Outback Steakhouse, is it? Yeah. This is, from what I understand, that you would go there and just be like, where's the Australian food? Where is it?

Do Aussies love steak and barbecues? Yes, absolutely. I know so many Aussies who love steak, who love meat, who love to barbecue, who love to grill, as we also call it over in the States. But to be honest, things like the Bloomin Onion really isn't a super traditional popular dish over here in Australia. You're not going to find meat pies on any Outback Steakhouse menu.

That's the weirdest thing, right? There would be so many things you could put on the Outback Steakhouse menu that would be Aussie. You know, if you had a snot block, a vanilla slice, pavlova, lamingtons, meat pies of all various types, sausage rolls, dim sims. There's so many of these things that would be kind of uniquely Australian that you could include. So it's so weird that they took the Australian outback thing and they were like, but we'll come up with a completely different menu. I don't know why I'm doing an Aussie accent that doesn't have any Australian food whatsoever on it.

So no, Outback Steakhouse is not Aussie cuisine whatsoever.

What would you recommend if you guys had to be in charge of the Aussie Outback Steakhouse cuisine menu thing? What would you be putting on there? What would be your savoury meals? What would be your sweets, your desserts and what drinks would you have on there? Let me know.

In fact, Outback Steakhouse was founded in Florida. It's very, very gimmicky and to be honest, really has nothing to do with Australia other than the fact that they have steak on their..

Cultural appropriation, guys. Cultural appropriation, made by Americans, for Americans, using the Australian name. It's just. I'm deeply offended.

Number six is that Aussies live in the outback. The vast, vast majority of Aussies actually live along the coast.

I saw a map the other day that I think had like the cities along the coast in red dots, right? So it was like Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide and they had little red dots around them and they were like 98% of Australians live in the red and the rest of the continent was white. So that's something to think about. But yeah, I think it's 99.5% of people would live probably within 50km of the south and east coast of Australia.

Over 90% of Australia's land is considered uninhabitable, and the vast majority of that land is considered the outback.

Yeah.

The Outback is dry and barren and inhospitable. It's not a place where you can grow food. Water is pretty scarce, so over 85% of Australia's population lives along the coast, and typically that's within a 1 to 2 hour drive of a beach, of a huge body of water. You're really not going to find that many Aussies that live in the outback. You might..

Man, the outback is so dry because we have no big rivers going through there. We have no large lakes in there that are permanently full of water. It's so dry that we have all of these animals that have evolved over the millions of years that they've been in Australia to be able to survive there. And one of my favourites, I did my PhD on rats. Right. Australian rats. [Neeeerrrrd!] And I was studying the Pseudomys species group. For anyone who gives a shit about rats. Notomys, which is the hopping mouse genus, has Notomys Alexis, the spinifex hopping mouse.

And this thing has kidneys that are so efficient, the most efficient mammalian kidneys in the world that it doesn't have to drink. It's so efficient at pulling water out of its food and maintaining it in its body that it doesn't have to drink water. That's, it's just insane that that thing has had to evolve like that because the outback in Australia is so dry. And these things are as cute as a button. I'll tell you what, you can get them as pets. Do you know that?

This next myth is that it is hot all year round in Australia. And I was guilty of this. I really did believe that Australia was a typically, constantly hot, humid climate.

It's funny she mentions this. It's February. It's like what? February the 18th? It's snowed a few days ago. It snowed. It got down to, I think 12°C here. We're still in summer. Things are going up and down. Thanks a lot, climate change. But yeah, in the South it gets very, very cold, especially in places like Tasmania. And if you're high up in the mountains in south east Australia too, it's going to get to, I think some of the coldest temperatures are -14 in Australia. I think that's I think that's the record.

Australia is actually the same size as the mainland US. And you have to remember just how varied the climate is in the States. It's really varied over here as well. You'll find snow, you'll find hail, you'll find rainy places, you'll find dry places. You'll find mountains. You'll find beaches, you'll find desert. You'll find rainforests. There is a huge array of climates over here.

Yeah. It's crazy. I remember living in Ocean Grove down the street here a few years back, probably a decade ago, and we had a heat wave that where every single day was above 44°C for I think it was like eight days in a row. I remember it being 51 degrees in my car one day and just being like, what the fuck? It was just ridiculous. Then, by contrast, this year I don't think we've had a single day over 40 down here in Victoria. So yeah, it is very variable.

Number eight is that Australia is considered a nanny state. So..

Ask Joe Rogan, guys! Ask Joe Rogan. He hates this place. [I mean, Australia is becoming a police state, a genuine police state. And I don't think there's a way out of that for them. I'm really, really, really concerned about Australia..].

And with the lockdowns and whatnot. A lot of Americans saw Australia at its absolute worst, which is when people were locked down in their homes. They couldn't go more than five K's Away. They couldn't visit relatives or friends or family outside of that five K radius. And another one that I hear all the time is, oh, Australia took away the guns. Guns are banned in Australia, so it's such a nanny state over there. To be honest, there's more freedom over here in Australia than there is in the States.

One of the freedoms I like is my kids going to school and not having to worry about them being shot. That's a pretty good plus, I reckon down here.

Having the right to bear arms doesn't necessarily make you more free. Because there are stricter rules in force during Covid doesn't necessarily mean that you are more free in general either.

You had lockdowns in the US as well, and one of the funny things was, I remember everyone up in arms here in Australia about the lockdowns and freaking out like they're going to need vaccine passports. You're not going to have free movement around the country. Dan Andrews, how could you let this happen? And then, where are we now, guys? Where are these passports? Where are the vaccine mandates? Where are all these things that you were freaking out about, saying the government is going to take control and they're going to, you know, be injecting your kids with pure mercury?

That doesn't mean that you live in a nanny state. Let's be fair, America is a pretty nanny state as well, if you're going to start comparing it that way. Like America is actually one of the most invasive countries when it comes to freedoms and rights, even abroad. As an American abroad, I have to pay taxes and I have to declare to every single bank that I ever go to outside of the US that I'm an American citizen, not just for regular, generic record keeping purposes, but because America actually goes to all of these banks and request records for any American that is abroad.

So if you're not American and you've opened a bank account recently and wondered why you had to check a box, maybe that said, you're not American. That's why America actually has its hands in all these corporate banks around the world.

Yeah, it's just nuts. Even with YouTube, right? The ad revenue I get, I had to get in fact, it's here, right? I have like a statement here from the ATO, the Australian Tax Office saying that I am an Australian resident for tax purposes. I had to show this to Google and YouTube so that they wouldn't keep holding on to 30% of my ad revenue from YouTube because they were worried I was an American trying to get around taxes. Just nuts.

Thank you, FATCA. So no, I lived in Australia for a year now, and Australia is more free than it is in the States.

It's one of those things. Like, it's give and take. I understand the point of view that Australians government does seem to be very controlling. You know, like it taxes the shit out of all of us. It does it with alcohol. It's the plain packaging on cigarettes and the amount of tax on that. It does tend to try and sort of coerce the population into behaving a certain way, doing certain things and everything.

But it's a trade off. At the same time. We live in an incredibly healthy lives. We have clean air to breathe, safe schools to go to. So you just have to decide, you know, at the end of the day, do you, is it, is it a sacrifice worth making?

I definitely wouldn't call it a nanny state. And when you look at the state of a lot of other countries in the world, it's kind of ridiculous to consider Australia a nanny state. Moving on to something a little bit more light hearted, and that is that you will see kangaroos and koalas everywhere in Australia. I've been here for a year and I haven't seen a single koala, which is actually kind of sad and upsetting because I do really want to see a koala in the wild at some point.

If you want to see one of these in the wild, it's pretty disappointing you're going to see a lot of butt, right. And it's going to be about 20, 30m up in a tree. So if you want to see one up close and personal and like at eye level where you can get a good look at him or her, go to a zoo, go to a zoo. Otherwise, if you're down here in Victoria, you can go along the Great Ocean Road I think is at Aireys Inlet. And there's this little road that goes up a hill there with full of gum trees, and it's just chock a block full of koalas and you can see them. But again, they're like ten, 20, 30m up in the tree sleeping.

But Australian wildlife, it is everywhere. If you live close to forests, bushland, everything like that. If you live in suburbia, like really, you'll probably see birds and insects and that's about it. But if you live near forests and bushland, you've got properties near that, then you're going to see it all the time. All the time.

But as far as kangaroos go, you're mostly going to see them as roadkill, to be honest. You're going to find a lot of kangaroos that are dead along the side of the road. That's probably going to be the first kangaroo you experience over here in Australia, which is a bit of a bummer. It's a bit of a letdown to see that, but it's the truth. Kangaroos are kind of similar to deer over in the States. They're kind of pests and chances are the first time you see them, it'll probably be roadkill.

It's, well, pests. It's not. There's a lot of farmland, and so they end up eating all of the grass that is on this land that has been deforested and populating the place. They're very good at breeding, so there are shitloads of them, and they don't know how to cross roads properly, especially at night, and they just get cleaned up by trucks.

One thing you may notice is that if you're driving along the road and you see dead kangaroos on the side of the road, quite often they have spray paint on them. This isn't because Australians just love tagging dead animals on the side of the road. It's because you have Wildlife Carers going around in the mornings usually, and checking roadkill to see if there are joeys or babies that that can still be saved. And they mark them with spray paint to show people that this has been checked and you don't need to check them.

And there aren't a ton of kangaroos everywhere. I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen kangaroo and still have fingers left over.

Wow.

They don't come over to Australia expecting to see kangaroos and koalas everywhere outside of the cities. It's a lot tougher to find them than you think.

Go to Canberra. You live in Canberra, you're going to see kangaroos every fucking day. Every day. They're all over the place there. It's just, it's ridiculous. You'll see them in the CBD as well. Because the CBD is so small and there's farmland just everywhere and there's just so many kangaroos. There's echidnas, kangaroos, kookaburras. I remember when we lived there, they were just all over. Every day you would see one of these things. You would find kangaroos just outside your house, sleeping on the lawn like a drunk, a drunk man hungover, right. It was just amazing.

And the last one, let's just get this one out there, because it made me laugh that somebody had actually asked me this when I moved over here. Toilets in Australia do not flush backwards.

Fucking Simpsons man. They got, they got a lot to answer for. [We need you to check your sinks and toilets and tell us which way the water is going. And please stand clear.].

I can't believe that's something that people are still asking even though it's been years and years since The Simpsons came out with that episode about Australia. But no, the toilets in Australia do not flush backwards. In fact, it entirely depends on the mechanisms that are within your toilet, so they can flush either way. In the states, they can flush either way here.

I thought the water usually just goes down the toilet, right? Doesn't it circle at the top in both directions and go down? I guess the point she's making for anyone who doesn't know, the Simpsons made this joke about is it like in the northern hemisphere, the water goes clockwise around the toilet, right? It would just, it would go the direction that it would be shot out of the part that's holding the water, right, the top of the toilet. I don't even know the word for it. So it's, it's weird. There is a stereotype of it flushes backwards in Australia, but it's just like, so dumb. Well.

That is definitely something that The Simpsons made up and is not true.

All right guys, hopefully you've enjoyed that video. Check out this one next. Tooroo!