There are a handful of interesting quirks that we — as Australians — possess. Sometimes they can be hard to grasp, especially for those who have just arrived Down Under.
1. "'Bring a plate' was not what I expected. We had to contribute a plate of food to the picnic, so bring a full plate of food — not bring an empty plate."
2. "When I got my first prescription, I went to pay and was told, 'Oh, you don’t pay here'. What she meant was for me to pay at the front counter, but I took it to mean Australia subsidised this medicine and that I didn’t need to pay at all, so I ended up walking out of the chemist without paying. Later, I talked about it to my wife, who told me I was a criminal, and I went back the next day to clear it up."
3. "Vegemite is not Nutella."
4. "I remember I'd only been here two months when someone asked me, 'How'd ya pull up on Sunday?' I said I got the tram there. I also spent a few weeks calling schooners 'shoe-ners.'"
5. "When I moved from QLD to NSW at 17, I called Coogee 'koo-gie' for the first 12 months."
6. "Brought in muffins to work. Got asked what I was wearing and what the muffins were for. Apparently they had said 'mufti', which means casually clothed, and I showed up in my normal suit with a plate of muffins."
7. "Went to the office admin lady and asked if she could give me a stiffy. I'm from South Africa, and over there we used to call 5.25-inch floppy disks and the harder 3.5-inch disks, you guessed it, stiffies. Apparently, not in Australia. She took it well."
8. "My dad was constantly approached in shops and asked, 'Y'righ'?' He finally managed to translate that into 'Are you alright?' and would answer that he was 'quite well, thank you!' even though he had not slept well the night before. And ask were they alright? It was a revelation to him when I was asked, 'Y'righ?' and I replied, 'Just browsing, thanks.'"
9. "My boss asked me how was I travelling. I was working from home and said that I wasn't travelling anywhere and was working from home. Then he laughed and said, 'I meant how are you going?' I was about to say I wasn't going anywhere and remembered in the nick of time what he meant!"
10. "I was asked to donate a gold coin for some charity thing at work. I asked if there were smaller donation options available."
11. "To my housemate: Where's the router? (I pronounced it 'roo-ter'.) Housemate: I'm the rooter, mate!"
12. "When I moved to Australia, I asked my first roommate what 'Australian cuisine' was and where I could go to get some — thinking about how when you go to a new country, you try the dishes that are made famous from there, like Italy, China, India, etc. He sent me to Bunnings."
13. "Our first Christmas here, my wife asked the taxi driver what part of New Zealand he was from. He was a third-generation Aussie. I thought he was going to kick us out of the taxi!"
14. "My mother-in-law said she made a 'roast chook' for my first supper here. I had no idea what animal I was about to eat."
15. "Not me, but I worked with a recent immigrant who didn’t realise the tricky tightrope of friendly Aussie banter when he called me a 'good cunt' in an office setting. Thankfully for him, HR was nonexistent and no one got upset."
16. "Those little dual tomato sauce packs that you squeeze together one-handed. It's an awesome idea, but we don't have them in England, so I tried to peel the top off in front of my workmates. They watched for far too long before intervening."
17. "My husband and I thought that fairy bread and frog in the pond were some kind of sick joke. Google and the serious faces of Australians said otherwise!"
18. "I innocently told a Melbournian that I like Sydney. The wrath that followed caught me completely by surprise."
19. "I asked a friend how there could be so many VIP lounges in the city (Sydney), when surely there weren’t that many VIPs. I had no idea they were pokie dens."
20. "A coworker was talking about their babies. It took me weeks to figure out that those babies were her dogs. The conversations were interesting while I was ignorant."
21. And finally, "Not me, but my cousin thought every shop assistant was hitting on him, simply because they were doing their usual meet and greet for customers."
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.