Learn Australian English in this Expression episode of Aussie English where I teach you how to use THE COAST IS CLEAR like a native speaker.

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The British and French were the greatest among many European nations to establish footholds in the Pacific and East Indies or Southeast Asia during the seventeen hundreds. The two expeditions to New Holland, the French on under Baudin, on the other a more modest affair coordinated by Flinders for the British Admiralty were launched at almost identical moments, but for different purposes. For Baudin, New Holland was part of a much broader scientific interest in the Pacific. Flinders was a more focussed brief to accurately chart the coast of New Holland.

G'day, guys and welcome to Aussie English. My objective here is to teach you guys the English spoken Down Under. So, whether you want to speak like a fair dinkum Aussie or you just want to understand what the flipping hell we're on about when we're having a yarn, you've come to the right place! So, sit back, grab a cuppa and enjoy Aussie English.

G'day, you mob! Welcome to this episode of Aussie English, the number one podcast for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English, but also wanting to level up their English in general. This is an advanced English podcast, guys, where I don't dumb anything down, I speak naturally.], I try and use a whole lot of slang, whether it's Australian or more broadly used all over the place, I use a lot of expressions and yeah, the basic goal is to help you level up your English.

So, how are you going? How's your week been? What's the goss? What's been going on? Which reminds me I have been creating these Goss episodes, right? Hopefully you've seen those on the podcast and on YouTube and in the Aussie English Academy and Premium Podcast memberships. I've been working my ass off, studying the news like a mad man, I almost feel like a reporter now that I'm reading so many articles and then discussing the news each week with my old man, my dad, giving him my two cents, he gives me his two cents and we talk about our opinions and everything in the news. I hope it's helping you, guys. These episodes take a lot of time and effort to put together usually after the fact, we obviously have fun making them and the making them's the easy part, but editing them is the hard part. Anyway, so I see that a lot of you guys are listening to them on the podcasts and I received a few emails and messages from you guys saying thank you to me for creating these episodes as they're really interesting.

But the interesting thing is the full episodes that I've put in the podcast, very few of you are actually watching these. So, I'm wondering if the form in which I am making this material is not the best way for you to digest these. Maybe it's too long, maybe long form episodes like that aren't the most useful for those of you signing up to the Premium Podcast or Academy memberships and wanting to improve your English. So, I'm trying to work out a better way of packaging these episodes. I think I might break them down into their individual stories, chop them up, and then talk about the expressions used in them. Hopefully, that'll help you, guys. But again, I would love your two cents, I would love your opinion, I'd love to hear what you reckon about the Goss episodes and how I can best change the format or how they're presented to help you improve your English. So, feel free to email me, guys, ok? Feel free to email me and send me a message and tell me what you think before we get into this episode.

Guys, don't forget, if you would like to support Aussie English by one of my courses, I have the Australian Pronunciation course, I have the Phrasal Verb, course, and I have the Spoken English course which you can buy at www.aussieenglish.com.au/courses. I also have the Premium Podcast if you would like all the transcripts and MP3s and downloads and the Goss videos, the full episodes for the podcast, and then if you would like the Premium Podcast and all of my other content in the Academy, sign up for the Academy and you'll get instant access to all of the bonus content, the course material that I make for episodes like these, the expression episodes, but also the spoken English dialogue course, the interview course, there's a whole bunch of shadowing exercises and of course there there's loads and loads of stuff, guys, go and check it out, www.aussieenglish.com.au. I really appreciate it.

And don't forget, before I get into this episode, long intro, guys. Sorry about this. I'm giving away my car, the competition is running still and that will end on the 9th of March. So, if I get the calendar up on my screen, that is in about 14 days. So, two weeks from now, remember, all you need to do to enter is purchase anything from Aussie English, support Aussie English by buying anything, a course, any of the subscriptions, send me an email by following the instructions to enter which you can find at www.aussieenglish.com.au, which is basically telling me how the car and the other part of the first prize, which is an entire year in the Academy, how that will help your life in Australia, ok?

How it will help you get set up, improve your English, get to work, whatever it is, ok? So, that competition will end in two weeks, make sure that you enter if you would like to win my car or a year in the Aussie English podcast as prize number one. If you'd like to win a year in the Academy that is prize number two and one month in the Academy is prize number three, ok? So, big intro there, guys. I really appreciate your patience. Let's get into today's episode.

So, the very first video there at the start, guys, that little snippet was from a video on YouTube from the National Library of Australia's YouTube channel, I will link that and you will be able to go and check out their channel and the rest of this video, and it was about Flinders, Matthew Flinders and Baudin, the French explorer, both of whom came to Australia in the eighteen hundreds. In fact, I think they came in the year eighteen hundred simultaneously. These guys both came from Great Britain and from France, respectively, and their goal was to map the entire coastline of Australia, or at least to map the parts that hadn't yet been mapped to create a map. So, today's the English fact will be all about the different explorers, the different countries, the different people who were involved in putting together the entire map of Australia's coastline. And the thing that might surprise you is that it wasn't Great Britain to first publish the complete map of Australia. And I'll let you find out who the country was when you go and listen to this week's Aussie fact Episode.

So, let's get into the Aussie joke, guys. So, the expression was to do with the coast. And that is why I decided to talk about mapping the coastline in the Aussie English fact episode today. But I thought I would try and find a joke about the coastline or the ocean or the sea or something, right? So, here's the joke. And instead of being, ah, 'what do you get if you do this?' the answer is this, this kind of a joke, you know, a question/answer, joke, this is more a few sentences and you'll see it, you'll see it. Hopefully you get it.

A distress call comes in to Robbo at the Australian Coast Guard.

Mayday, mayday! We're 12 ks out on a capsized boat! Please come and save us!

'No, can't do', Robbo said. 'We've got our hands full searching for regular sized boats'.

Alright, I'll explain the joke and then I'll say it again for you guys, ok? So, the joke here is a pun on the word cap-sized, ok? If something is cap-sized, that is 'cap' with a hyphen, and then the word 'sized', it is the size of a cap, right? Could be a bottle cap, it could be a cap that you put on your head, but if something is cap-sized, it is cap-sized, it is the size of a cap. And we can use that kind of compound adjective to describe many things. We could say a hand-sized painting or a dog-shaped thing, a black-coloured rock, right? We can use compound adjectives all the time. Cap-sized, the size of a cap.

But if you have the verb 'to capsize', so that something has capsized, if we use it in the past, this is of a boat to have been tipped over by the waves, so if a boat capsizes, it gets tipped over by the waves and it is unable to be used from then on, right? It is upside down. You can see the hull above the the water, above the waves. That is when a boat has capsized.

So, the joke here is that the person calling in 'mayday, mayday', which is interesting here, 'mayday' here is from the French, 'm'aidez', which means 'help me', right? It's someone asking you to help me. 'Mayday, mayday', but 'mayday' is used in nautical terms in order to ask for help in English. 'Mayday, mayday'.

So, the person here is asking for help because they're 12 Ks out to sea, they're twelve kilometres out to sea and their boat has capsized. It's tipped over and they say, 'please come and save us', and then Robbo, the Coast Guard says 'no, can't do'. We can't do that, right? The joke is here that he says 'we've got our hands full searching for regular sized boats', as in normal sized boats, as if he's taken capsized, when they've said capsize, he's assuming that the boat is so small, it's the size of a cap, right? That's the joke. So, Robbo thinks that this person is on an incredibly tiny boat. Let me do the joke one more time and we'll keep going.

A distress call comes in to Robbo at the Australian Coast Guard.

'Mayday, mayday! We're 12 ks out on a capsized boat! Please come and save us!'.

'No, can't do' Robbo said, 'we've got our hands full searching for regular sized boats'.

Alright, guys, so let's keep going. So, today's expression is 'the coast is clear'. 'The coast is clear'. Now, let's go through and to find the different words in this expression first before we go through their expression, its meaning and its origin, and it has an interesting origin.

A 'coast' or 'the coast' of, say, Australia. A coast is the part of land adjoining or near the sea. So, I live in a town called Ocean Grove, and about 500 metres away from here are some sand dunes and on the other side of those sand dunes, the beach and then the ocean, and so where the land meets the ocean, that is the coastline, ok? The coastline. The line of the coast, the coastline. So, you'll often have things like the east coast of Australia or the west coast of Australia or maybe the coastline of, say, Australia, which is 25000 kilometres in length, ok?

The other interesting word in this expression is the word 'clear'. 'The coast is clear'. 'The coast is clear'. So, 'clear' can mean easy to perceive or understand or interpret, right? You might hear someone say, 'is that clear?' and you might say, 'yes, it's very clear. It's crystal clear', right? Meaning it's incredibly clear. It's very easy to understand. So, someone's orders or maybe you go outside and the sky is clear, right? So, it can mean of a substance transparent or unclouded, right? So that you can see through that thing, it is clear, it is transparent. So, you could have a diamond that is clear, it's not cloudy or you could have a sky that's clear, again, not cloudy, right? The sky is clear of clouds. But here the word 'clear' means free of any obstructions or unwanted objects.

So, if your road is clear, it means there's no other cars on the road. There's no animals on the road, there's no rocks on the road, there's no tree that's fallen down on the road, it's clear, right? There's nothing in the way. So, if the coast is clear, that is to say, literally, that would be that there is nothing on the coast, right? There's nothing on the coast. We'll go through the definition of the expression first and then I'll discuss the origin.

So, if the coast is clear, it means that there is no danger of being seen or caught usually doing something you shouldn't be doing. So, the area is free of someone who might see you or catch you doing something. It's safe to proceed with your planned action and it's often used when you're trying to get away with something. You might be breaking a rule or a law and you want to know, is the coast clear? Can anyone see me? Might I get caught if I do this, right? Is the coast clear?

So, the origin of this expression was really interesting. Apparently it originates from the 15 hundreds. So, over 500 years ago and it likely comes from Spanish where the expression, and forgive my Spanish pronunciation here, 'no hay moros en la costa', which is Spanish for 'there are no moors along the coast. And the word 'Moors', M-O-O-R-S, was used back in the fifteen hundreds to refer to Arabs, North African Berbers and Muslim Europeans who had invaded and overrun Spain at the time. So, the dangers of landing on the coast with Moors upon it was very real, right? So, sailors might have asked, 'is the coast clear?' in Spanish, meaning 'are there no people on the coast?', so there are no people who are going to see me on that coastline. 'Are there no other ships? Are there no Moors on the coastline? Is the coast clear?'.

So, let's go through some examples of how I would use the expression 'the coast is clear' in natural English, in everyday English. So, example number one: you have got a brother and you and your brother have been misbehaving and your mum has had enough of that, right? She's had it up to her eyeballs, she's sick and tired of you running around causing trouble, and so she sends both of you to your rooms for an hour as punishment. And this is something my mum used to do when I misbehaved with my sister. She'd say 'Pete! Go to your room!', but the joke was on her because I actually liked going to my room and playing with my toys.

So, you and your brother, right? You'd be misbehaving, your mum sent you to your room, you sulk off to your room, you sit down for a while, you get fed up with the punishment, though, you open the door and you see if your mother's watching. So, you notice that she's gone off into the kitchen. She's pottering around, maybe she's cooking something up, she's cooking some grub up for you and your brother later on. And you tell your brother who's sitting in his room opposite yours that the coast is clear and you can both sneak out of your rooms, right? So, the coast is clear. 'Hey, mate. Hey, brother! Whatever your name is, John, Bill, Bob, the coast is clear! Our mum's not watching, so we can sneak out. There's no danger of us being caught, coast is clear. Let's go play outside!'

Example number two: imagine that you're a cat burglar who's broken into a museum to steal the world's largest diamond or ruby or emerald or gem, and the interesting thing here is guys, people like cat burglars, these people who break into things like museums to steal diamonds, I was watching a doco the other day, they loved doing that, stealing things that are very small of high value because it means not having to pick up and carry a lot of money because cash is heavy. This guy who was a bank thief, was talking about this and how you are surprised that money can be so heavy. Anyway, let's keep going.

So, it's late at night, you're a cat burglar, you've gotten past the security in a museum, which includes cameras, alarms, maybe laser beams if you're in the movie Mission Impossible. No, I don't think anyone actually uses those today. They probably just use infra-red cameras. You make it over to the diamond case, you put your little rubber suckers on the glass and you cut a big hole around the the suckers and then pull the glass out, put it on the ground gingerly and then reach in, snatch the diamond up, stuff it in your bag and make your escape.

If suddenly you hear voices in the next room whilst you're trying to make your escape, you might sneak somewhere and try and hide until the coast is clear. So, you want to sneak out of the museum and escape with your loot, run with your booty, with your treasure that you've stolen, but you don't want to get caught, so you wait until the coast is clear and then you make your getaway. And hopefully if you never get caught, you get away with the crime scot free, right? You never have to pay for it.

Alright, example number three: you're in jail for a crime that you didn't commit and you're fed up and you want to break out, so you get your wife to bake a cake, a special cake, which inside she has planted a chisel. She brings it in, she wishes you happy birthday, you blow out the candles, you have a piece each, and then you bring the rest of your cake back to your cell and pull the chisel out, clean her up and start chiselling away at the bars in order to get through them and break out of your cell. But unfortunately, you were in such haste you forgot to check if the coast was clear, and instead of making a smooth getaway, you get busted by the guards who arrest you immediately, slap the handcuffs on you and put your back in your jail cell, right? Naughty boy. So, now you're kicking yourself for not checking that the coast was clear.

So there you go, guys! Hopefully now you understand the expression 'the coast is clear', it is used when there is no danger of being observed or caught, the area is free of anyone who might see you or catch you doing something. Often something wrong or where there's consequences like you're breaking a rule, ok? And you'll often hear this as a question of 'is the coast clear? Am I safe to proceed with this plan? Will I get caught? Will someone see me?'.

So, as usual, let's go through a little listen and repeat exercise, guys. And then I want to talk to you about the coastline paradox before we finish up.

The coast.

The coast is.

The coast is clear.

I said the coast was clear.

You said the coast was clear.

He said the coast was clear.

We said the coast was clear.

They said the coast was clear.

It's said the coast was clear.

Good job, guys. Good job! Now breaking down a little bit of the pronunciation there. 'The coast is clear', 'the coast is clear'. How do you hear that T sound at the end of the word 'coast'? Do I say it like a T sound or do I say it more like a D sound? Right? Have a listen again. 'The coast is clear'. 'The coast is clear'. I actually say it like a bit of a D sound And this is because I am vocalising, I am vibrating my throat, anticipating the next vowel sounds so often at the end of words where you've got a T followed by a vowel sound, that is the I sound at the start of the word 'is' often you'll have consonants like T turn into D where they are voiced. So, instead of 'the coast is clear' you'll hear 'the coast is clear', 'the coast is clear', ok? So, pay attention to that sort of stuff, other than that, in this sentence, I wonder if you heard 'I said the coast was clear', I wonder if you heard the D at the end of the word 'said'. Is it pronounced really clearly? Or is it used as a stop consonant that is unreleased before the TH?

'I said the coast was clear', 'you said the coast was clear', it's unreleased, right? We don't pronounce it because there's two consonants, one at the end of the words 'said', one at the start of the word 'the', the TH sound, 'the',and so because of that, the first sound D is actually not released. We go to make the sound...'said' and we don't say D and we go straight into the TH, 'said the', 'said the'.

And there's a slight pause. 'I said the coast was clear', 'I said the coast was clear'. Lastly, the word 'was', you're not going to hear that as a fully enunciated 'was' vowel sound. You'll hear it instead like a schwa. So, it's reduced because yeah, we're speaking quickly. 'I said the coast was clear', 'was' instead of 'was', 'was', 'was'. So, I'm saying it quickly, 'you said the coast was clear', 'was', 'he said the coast was clear'.

Good work! So go back over that, have a listen to that sort of stuff if you want to work on your pronunciation. And also, don't forget, if you want the Australian Pronunciation course, that is a great place to learn all of the different sounds in Australian English. Just go to www.aussieenglish.com.au/courses and you'll be able to pick that up.

Alright, before we finish up, I wanted to talk about the coastline paradox. So, this was something that I've known about for a while, but I stumbled upon it when I was researching how the Australian coastline was mapped. So, a coastline doesn't have a well-defined length. They're difficult to measure due to their irregular shapes, right? You know, you've got bays, you've got cliffs, you've got all different shapes. It's not just a straight line or even a smooth curving line most of the time around coasts. So, when measuring irregular shapes, most researchers use a straight line from one point to the next and if that straight line is longer, the final measurement of the coast will be shorter because it doesn't account for certain physical characteristics indentations which add length of the coastline. So, in contrast, the shorter the straight line that's used, the longer the final measurement. So, this phenomenon is perhaps best illustrated with the measurement of British Columbia, the province in Canada, because of its many inlets jutting out and coastal features that it has, this coastline alone technically makes up 10 per cent of the entire coastline of Canada, almost 16000 miles in length, right?

So, the coastline paradox also serves to explain why two major sources of global information, which are the World Resources Institute and the World Factbook, have such varied measurements of coastlines for different countries like Canada and Australia. So, the measurements of the length of a coastline behave like a fractal being different depending on the different scale intervals, the distance between points on the coastline at which measurements are taken used to measure it, right? So, you don't want to just use 100 kilometres, 100 kilometres whilst measuring a coastline one after the other. You want to use different intervals to be able to account for those different shapes. So, the smaller the scale, the better, right?

If you measure Australia using intervals of 500 kilometres, the coastline is 12,000 kilometres long, if you do it with much shorter intervals, the coastline is more than double that at 25,000 kilometres long. So, this magnifying effect is greater for convoluted coastlines than for very smooth coastlines. But treating coastlines as fractals, however, they can be measured more accurately.

And so, lastly, I thought I would mention the eight longest coastlines in the world and the results might surprise you. So, Australia is number eight with 25000 kilometres in coastline length, Japan is number seven, the Philippines is number six, Russia is number five, Greenland is number four, Indonesia is number three, Norway is number two and Canada is number one with more than a whopping 200,000 kilometres of coastline.

So, there you go, guys. Hopefully you learn a little bit in this episode and I will see you in the Aussie English Fact episode about the history of mapping Australia's coastline. Thanks for joining me. See you soon!

G'day, mate! Thanks for listening to the Aussie English Podcast. If you'd like to boost your English whilst also supporting the podcast and allowing me to continue to bring you awesome content, please consider joining the Aussie English Academy at www.aussieenglish.com.au. You'll get unlimited access to the Premium Podcast as well as all of my advanced English courses and you'll also be able to join three weekly speaking calls with a real English teacher. Thanks so much, mate. And I'll see you, soon.