Learn Australian english in this Aussie English episode of Traveling With Pete I take you guys to Barwon Heads and teach you a bunch of English terms and expressions.

Traveling With Pete Ep03: Barwon Heads

So, here we are, guys, in Barwon Heads, and I’m about to take a right turn to drive down the main drag in Barwon Heads and give you guys a look at yet another surf town down the coast here. Barwon Heads is next to Ocean Grove. So, you will have just seen if you watched the video (series*) up until now, obviously, and you saw the time-lapse of me driving her you’ll get to see how I got here. And so, these towns are kind of dotted one after the other all over the place down the coast here.

What are these little guys doing? Come on dudes! Cross the road. Come on! What are you doing?

Anyway, this is Barwon Heads. And, as you’ll see the clouds have come over again. So, it’s a little grey. Hopefully it’s still not too bad to check out. But, yeah, this is another town that I used to come and visit all the time and still do with quite a few friends, and if you enjoy cycling, especially cycling like the Tour De France and other things like that you may know, you may have heard of the famous Australian cyclist Cadel Evans. And Cadel Evans is actually from Barwon Heads. So, I’m not sure if he grew up here, but he definitely lived here at least until recently. I haven’t followed him that heavily, but I know that he was training down here and that people would go on rides with him as he was training for the Tour de France.

And so, yeah, another cool thing, I guess, about Barwon Heads and a lot of these other towns down here is the bridge that we just crossed. That’s a beautiful bridge that you guys can come and check out, the Barwon Heads bridge, which crosses the Barwon Heads river.

And there is an amazing TV show that I absolutely fell in love with as a kid called SeaChange, SeaChange. And, a seachange is a term we use for when someone from the city who is a little bogged down in their career, they’re not enjoying themselves as much as they used to, you know, they’re looking for a change. And a seachange is when they move, they change locations from the city or from somewhere that isn’t obviously the sea, to a coastal town or somewhere near the ocean. So, that’s the whole, I guess, meaning behind “a seachange”. It’s making a change and coming to the sea, coming to the ocean, making a big move. Anyway, this TV show SeaChange is a really cool TV show that will give some insight into the life of Australians, if you can get your hands on it, if you can find it, if you can buy it. I definitely recommend it.

And it’ll give you a bit of an insider’s perspective of Australian humour as well. So, you’ll get to see a lot of jokes in there that are very very Aussie in their humour style. And I definitely want to cover Australian humour in the future for you guys because I have heard that it is a little difficult to get at times, and people take us a little bit too seriously and get offended too easily, I think. Most people don’t realise that Australians can come off as mean or rude whilst sort of smiling and laughing, and, I guess, without getting too much into it it’s not that we are mean or rude people it’s just that the jokes that we make tend to be a little bit ruder and a little bit more familiar than people are used to from a lot of these other cultures.

Anyway. So, we might go and explore. I might turn right here, because I haven’t actually gone straight ahead here. I have to turn right off this road. I haven’t actually been down here before, and I just thought why don’t we just go have a cheeky look and see where the road takes us. What are we going to see? Hopefully we can get down to the ocean, because the ocean is directly in front of me but I know that there is a golf course here. So, I’m not sure if it goes the whole way through or if we get stopped at the golf course. And so, you would have seen too as we in Ocean Grove and I was showing you around Ocean Grove main beach we are just west of The Bluff at the moment.

So, (I) might just do a uey here. This is the golf course. So, I haven’t actually been down here before, but, yeah, if you like golf come down here. Anyway, we’re west of The Bluff. So, I might do a uey, go back. And if you remember “a uey” is a U-turn, to do a uey, (I) just did a uey. We’ll go back down this road, turn right, and then head down to The Bluff, and I’ll give you a view, I’ll give you a look, I’ll give you a squiz at The Bluff and the view of Ocean Grove and Point Lonsdale from there. So, it’s pretty nice. Anyway, see you there in a minute guys.

A coastline shaped by tide and time. This mountain was once a sand dune. Up to 6,000 years ago the sea-level was lower than it is today. Base Strait was a dry sandy plane. Strong dry winds blew sand across this plane to form a large dune. This dune has been cemented together by natural processes to form the rock beneath your feet. Below this rock lies a bed of basalt spewed out by nearby volcanoes over a million years ago. At low tide you can see this black basalt on the exposed reefs at the base of the bluff. These cliffs are natural sculptures. The Bluff is being moulded into its present shape by the strong winds and waves which have pounded its cliffs for thousands of years. Extreme weather continues to sculpt these cliffs. Please respect these natural forces. Crumbling rocks are a normal feature of this dynamic landscape. Make sure the erosion of the area remains natural and keep yourself safe. Please be sure to stick to the special paths.

So, here we are at Barwon Heads Bluff guys. I’m just walking up a little scenic path. (You can) probably hear some of these cute little birds in the background. And I’m walking up the path here to get to the top of The Bluff to be able to show you guys the view. And one of the really cool things about Barwon Heads Bluff, especially at low tide, which it is at the moment, is that you can see at least one of the many shipwrecks around the bluff. So, there are a whole heap of shipwrecks that were, well, ships that were wrecked in this area along the coast here during the 1800s and 1900s. So, any time these ships were sort of too old for use they were decommissioned, lined up along the coast here, taken somewhere and then sunk. You’ll see behind me some of Barwon Heads. But, yeah, I’ll give you guys, (I’ll) definitely give you guys a look at this shipwreck out here in a sec. Assuming we can see it that is. So, we’re up here. You can see the coast behind me. (You can) probably see some of these people down below. I think we’re probably about 50 or so metres up on the top of the cliff that you guys would have seen from Ocean Grove beach in the background further to the west. So, this is Barwon Heads Bluff. (It’s an) absolutely beautiful part of Barwon Heads that you guys should definitely come and check out. Today it’s obviously really quite. (It’s) nice, it’s sort of warm. It’s not too warm, it’s not too hot. So, it’s pretty peaceful and the wind isn’t too crazy. So, you can obviously here me speaking without there being too much of an issue with wind. So, it’s actually a really nice day.

And one of the cool things too, I think, to mention to you guys is that in some of these places you’ll actually see loads and loads of shells up in the sand dunes, particularly here, that are part of the actual sand. They’re actually coming out of the sand there I assume. This may not be the best example, but a lot of those, when you see them along the coast here, are actually where aboriginals used to create fires and eat a lot of the shellfish and just throw it away. So, all the shells would build up over time. And so, there are locations around the place where you’ll see big stacks of seashells that aren’t necessarily fossilised and in part of the rocks. (They’re) actually on top of cliffs and it should be or should have been a result of the aboriginals eating in the past in that area.

And so, anyway. As you can see down here that’s Point Lonsdale where we were much earlier. And then, Ocean Grove is actually over here, Ocean Grove beach where we were. Barwon Heads is behind me probably over there if you can see my hand. And then you’ve got the beautiful coastline down here with all of the rock pools and seaweed, all sorts of other things down there that you can go and check out and have a swim in during summer. The only thing that you kind of have to be careful of down there are, I think, blue-ringed octopus is the only issue that you have to worry about, but they’re not very common, you’re not going to run into them to be honest. Just don’t go putting your hands underneath any of the rock crevices where you can’t see anything, ‘cause that’s probably where they’ll be hiding.

So, yeah, this is Barwon Heads. The Barwon Heads Bluff. And I might also add down behind me is 13^th Beach, and this is one of the more popular surfing spots along Barwon Heads. 13^th Beach up here, and you can see the swell probably out behind me there where a lot of the waves come in. And I’ve just noticed, again, you’re probably not going to be able to see this this well, but out behind me there’s a shipwreck and its boilers, where the water used to be kept, are sticking up out of the water because it’s low tide. So, you can actually see some of these shipwrecks at low tide, and you can go scuba diving on them. I used to have friends when I was younger who would come out here and go scuba diving out here. You’d just swim off the rocks here, go for a few hundred metres and then have a nice scuba dive on some of these shipwrecks. So, yeah, Barwon Heads Bluff.

So, I think we might call it a day there, guys. I hope you guys have liked this sort of little mini tour of Ocean Grove, Point Lonsdale and Barwon Heads. I’m really hoping to get more into this kind of travel stuff where I get to sort of take you guys around, show you a bit of Australia, teach you some English at the same time, and hopefully also, in the future, this episode probably wasn’t the best example, but also in the future tell you a lot more about the history of these locations, some of the things you can see here, and yeah, just give you as much information as possible whilst trying to be entertaining. So, let me know what you think in a comment below guys. Make sure you also subscribe and check out the Facebook page, but tell me what you think and if you’ve got any suggestions for how I can improve these videos I’m always all ears open. I’m willing to hear what you guys have to say, what you think, and how I can make these resources better for you. So, I guess that’s it guys. I’ll see you soon and I hope you’re having an awesome weekend like I am. See you later!