Transcript of AE 1057 - Top 10 Bizarre Things in Australia

G'day, you mob. We are back again, this time reacting to Tristan Kuhn's, 10 strangest things about Australia, so let's get into it and see what he has to say.

What's good y'all? Tristan here, and today, I'll be sharing with you the 10 strangest things about Australia. None of these things are bad. They're just things that I found a little bit unusual, odd, just kind of different about Australia. All right, the first one is time zones, and you see this one right here is a double whammy. So, I went from Melbourne to Adelaide, and I noticed Adelaide is in South Australia right here.

It's half an hour off from Melbourne, not a full hour, half an hour. So, the time zones here, as you can see, are not in full hour increments. So, I don't know, it's a little bit odd. Then more recently, I saw this TikTok that pointed out not all the states here have Daylight Savings Time. So, during Daylight Savings Time...

Okay. Yeah so, these are the differences, right. The East Coast is further into the future, I guess. You know, I think New Zealand is, New Zealand, the country that is like at the start of time on Earth...

I can see the future.

...They're the ones right at the very front of it and we're a few hours behind them and then it sort of spread across Australia and then wraps around the world. But yeah, the East Coast is say, you know, 8pm here, the West Coast is going to be 6pm and then in the middle for some weird reason that I should know it's only half an hour different from the East Coast.

But then the other strange thing is that only a few states use Daylight Savings Time, which is where we wind the clocks forward an hour so that we get more daylight at the end of the day...

Don't you see what's happening? All the people are going to have to change their clocks back. We have to warn them.

...Okay, it's a bit weird to think about, but yeah, I'm pretty sure Queensland decided, yeah, we're not doing that. New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania, and Victoria, though all use daylight savings and I think it comes into effect on about the 4th of October until the 4th of April each year.

This is a map of the time zones of Australia. So, I'm in Queensland, I go 30 minutes south...

So, looking into why the time is so weird in Australia, it looks like that time is regulated by individual state governments, some of which observe daylight savings time, DST. Australia's external territories observe different time zones as well. Standard Time was introduced in the 1890s when all the Australian colonies adopted it. So, I guess that's partly it.

We were all different colonies originally, and we decided on our own times that we wanted to use because it would make no sense for the entire country to have the same time. Because that would mean that when it's like 6am across the entire country, you know, there's going to be places that are dark for another six hours and places that are light only until five o'clock in the afternoon.

And then, you know, in the places where it was dark, in the morning, it's going to be light until midnight, so that's why they've had to divide them up. But it's somewhat arbitrary and the governments have decided what it is.

Oh, now I get it.

...Where I am right now, it's now 9pm. Meanwhile, it's 8:30 in South Australia. I go up to the Northern Territory it's 7:30. I hop over to Western Australia and it's an hour and a half difference, but just one time zone over like, I don't know what's going on. It makes no sense.

I don't think most of us even notice this when we're travelling. If you've got a smartphone these days, they're just going to change automatically, so don't worry about it.

Number two is beetroot on burgers...

Beetroot, beetroot. Australians would never say beetroot. We would say beetroot, beetroot.

Beetroot and using beetroot... Beetroot.

Beetroot. So, that is this red vegetable that has been pickled that you will quite often see on hamburgers or beef burgers. They'll usually be with beef, you're not going to see this with chicken burgers, fish burgers- Fish burgers? It's uncommon with those, but it is something you're going to see all over the place.

I remember growing up and any time we used to go to the farm that my grandparents owned, we would all go there for the weekend to shear the sheep. Quite often there would be beetroot served up with roast lamb or some beef for lunch, and you would put it into a sandwich.

Oh, gross.

So, yeah, I don't know. Go, figure, it's just- Let's have a look. Maybe we can find out online. Okay, so Australians are crazy about beetroot, underappreciated by the rest of the world the simple beetroot is loved by Australians. But why? And since when did beets on burgers become the Australian way? As strange as it might sound, burgers, let alone beetroot on burgers, is a relatively new addition to the Australian diet.

Burgers came as a by-product of the blossoming relationship with American troops post World War One in the 1930s. Then, not until the 1940s was it believed that Beetroot made its appearance on burgers as a part of a prank on US troops. Well, that's interesting. So, we did it for LOLs.

That's not funny.

Since then, the sign of a great hamburger is a beetroot-stained wrapper or better yet, purple juice dripping down your hand. During the 1950s and 60s, beetroot became a staple part of the Australian diet before McDonald's cemented its place between a topper burger patty by bringing out the all Australian burger in the 70s.

So, there you go, even McDonald's had beetroot burgers. But it looks like it's been in Australia for the better part of 80 years. Pretty cool.

So, I don't know what's up with this. So, first of all, this could be a regional thing because I've only seen this here in Queensland, but I've seen it a lot here in Queensland. If you get a burger...

It's not regional. It's everywhere.

...It's a fairly common thing to get it with beetroot or beetroot, just like comes on it. I have never heard of beetroot being on a burger.

It's just so funny hearing beetroot, beetroot, beetroot, beetroot. You would always hear that as beetroot in Australia, beetroot, beetroot. Any Aussies that differ with me comment below, let me know. Do you say beetroot?

Strange thing about Australia is that they don't always bring your cheque to the table. So, when you're at a restaurant...

Bill, no one says cheque. It's a bill. It's your bill. That's the bill for the meal at a restaurant. A cheque is what you would write out on a piece of paper and hand someone, right. We don't even use these anymore. Yeah, we don't call it a cheque. Americans call it a cheque.

The only reason I can imagine Australians calling it a cheque is because they've been watching too much Friends or Seinfeld, and they've heard the "cheque please". Look, plenty of restaurants do this. This is a total, I don't want to say lie, but it is not the truth.

Okay. So, there are definitely places if you go to your average cafe, if you go to your average mum and pop, just store that also has takeaway food or even serves meals at the table, they're not going to bring the bill over to the table...

Here's your bill.

...They're going to expect you to come up and get it or come up and pay for it after your meal and say which table you are on. However, if you go to a more expensive restaurant in Australia, you are much more likely to be brought the bill at the end of your meal. Because it is part of the service, right. It is expected.

It is the same with people coming over and asking if they can fill up your drinks, if you need anything else, the waiting staff are going to be attending much more to your needs and they will bring the bill over. Quite often they will bring the little machine over, too, so that you can pay right then and there.

You don't have to get up from your seat unless you want to go to the toilet or leave. Okay, so it does happen in Australia. I used to work in a restaurant for several years in Melbourne, and we definitely did bring the bill to the table.

It's a very common thing, whenever you're done with your meal, instead of the waiter bringing the cheque to you, whenever you're done, you just get up and you go to like a little like check out...

One thing that he should have brought up here that I'm surprised he didn't bring up is the fact that we don't tip in Australia, we don't have tipping culture. I mean, you can tip. It is possible. You can always give people money if you'd like. But it isn't that common, and it's not assumed, it's not expected.

No tip.

So, when I was working at a restaurant in Melbourne for years, we would often get tipped, but it wasn't assumed and I wasn't, you know, sour with anyone who didn't tip me. It was just something that if you wish, you could do it and we would share it amongst all the staff.

Whereas in America, obviously, tipping is built into their dining experience because the minimum wage over there is so low that often waiters are paid one or two or three dollars an hour and the bulk of their income comes from tips. In Australia, you can't pay people that little.

So, you have to pay them, I think I was getting paid $25 an hour when I was working at a restaurant, and the tips sometimes brought it up to about $35 an hour. I've heard stories about people making hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars an hour in the US from tips, depending on the places they work, you know. Check out Hooters, I'm sure you'll see what I mean.

Hooters! Woooo!

...Place and you pay there. This is how it's been at the restaurant that I worked at. This is how it's been at all the restaurants I've been to here. Granted, I haven't been to a whole lot. I do know that at like, really nice fancy restaurants, yes, they'll bring the cheque to you at the table. But overall, like it's a pretty common thing here in Australia to have to go up to pay for your meal.

Number four, and if you followed this channel for a while, like, you know, I have talked in so many videos, all the differences about like pumping gas here in Australia, it's like completely different than you do it in America. Well, here we go. Here is another difference in pumping gas that I've yet to mention in any of my other videos...

He's talking about getting petrol at the service station, and I think what he's going to say is that people don't do it for you, or you can't pay for the petrol at the pump.

...And that is here in Australia they don't have the little like lever thing to like pump gas automatically. So, in the states, you can just stick the nozzle into your car, pull it and then there's this little lever that you switch down and it holds the handle up, so it constantly pumps gas.

Oh, that took a little plot twist. So, that's 100% true, at least in my experience. Everywhere I go- And at the moment, I have a diesel car, so I'm obviously using diesel. There is no little whatever it's called, like a switch or a clip that you can clip and then just take your hand off the pump and it'll keep going until it finishes and then unclip.

You have to physically hold onto the pump and hold the lever in, and it'll keep going until it completely fills up.

Life's tough.

But yeah, I've seen that in America, or at least on American TV shows where people will just (lever click) and then go to the toilet and come back or something like that, you know, which I don't know. I don't know why we don't have that.

Then you can go inside, go to the bathroom, go buy something, I don't know, go back into your car if it's cold. Here in Australia, you have to like hold the handle down the entire time...

Perhaps that's the reason, because in Australia, there's nowhere that's going to be cold enough that it would be really uncomfortable or unsafe to be outside the car. You could probably argue that there are places where it'd be way too hot and maybe it'd be better to be in the car, although I'm not sure.

Are you allowed to have the car on and be putting petrol in it? I don't think you can. So, yeah, who knows? I don't know. If you guys know why Australia doesn't have that little device let me know in the comments below.

Number five, this is an awesome thing about Australia. Like, I love it, but like, I've been here for nine months, and I'm still not used to this. All right. And that is that cars here are so nice to pedestrians. I don't even know how to explain this, like literally there'll be a crosswalk, I'll just be walking up to the crosswalk like on my phone.

Like, I don't know, like not even about to cross the street and I look for cars. And I look up and there'll be cars stopped for me because they like, I'm just close to the crosswalk and they know that I'm about to go. Even if...

It is something that's relatively common, I think you're probably going to see this more obviously in suburbia where cars are driving more slowly anyway, but it does happen all the time. And it'll even happen for you in the car, you know, when you're driving around sometimes people will have right of way, and even though they have right of way, they'll stop and let you do what you need to do first.

The weird thing is that I noticed it to be this way when I went to America as a kid, we went to, I think we're in San Francisco and San Diego, on the East Coast- West Coast there in California. And I noticed this all the time where our family would be trying to cross the street and people would just stop in the middle of the road to let you cross, even if it wasn't at a zebra crossing or whatever, pedestrian crossing.

So, that was something that I kind of got shocked about going to the US So, it's interesting that he experiences the same thing here in Australia.

...There's not a crosswalk, but you're just like looking across the street, like cars will often stop for you. And it's not like an America where, you know, like you're on the crosswalk and the car is like constantly, slowly moving closer to you. Like trying to, like get you to hurry up so that they can go when you're done.

Here in Australia you won't even start the crosswalk, you'll just be close to it and the car will stop like three to five metres away from the crosswalk, like they'll give you so much space. I honestly don't know why the cars are so nice here, but the only reason why I say it's like strange is because like, I've been here for so long and I'm still not used to it.

I'll still be walking like about to cross the road and the cars will stop and I'm like, I look at them and I'm like, wait, why are you stopping? And then I'm like, oh, oh, they're stopping for me. Like, I'm just, I'm still not used to it.

And we're just assuming everyone's looking at their phone and not paying attention. So, we're just going to let them go past like zombies.

Yeah, speaking of driving here, that is my next strange thing about Australia, and that is that it takes so freaking long to get your licence here in Australia. It takes four years, four years of driving before you're like fully licenced here in Australia. Let me reel that back a little...

I think he would say this, probably if you don't have a foreign licence to begin with, if you've just come to Australia and you have no previous driving experience, then yeah, it takes quite some time to get fully licenced. But what happens is you'll get your learner's permit, so you'll pass a computer test where you have to go to- What do we got here in Victoria?

Vic Roads, it'll be different for each state, but there's a place that deals with all of the, I don't know what would you call it, road things, cars, all that sort of stuff. I'm having a minor brain fart. You go to Vic Roads for your learner's, you have to pass this computer test.

After you do that, you get a little licence that's a learner's licence, so you have to have someone else in the car with you that is fully licenced whilst you are driving. You have to rack up a certain amount of time and experience behind the wheel and then once you're ready, I think it's probably six months at a minimum.

So, you need to either be 18 years old to go for your probationary licence or if you're older than 18 and you've gotten your L plates, I think it's just a minimum of six months...

What a pain in the arse.

...That you have to be on your L's. You can't just get your L's one day and the next day, go in and go for your full licence or your probationary licence. The probationary licence is, again, I think, a computer test and then a driving test that's 15 minutes or so. And, you know, they're going to do all the standard stuff, parking, turning, reversing, whatever it is.

But then after you pass that you have to stay on your probationary licence for, I think three years. And it varies state to state, some states will have certain restrictions on you for the first year and then after that they become relaxed and you're like everyone else, and then after that, you're on your full licence. So, I think for me, it would have taken, yeah, four years.

Oh, no more, probably. Five years, maybe because I would have gotten my Ls at 16, my L plates, at 18 I would have gone from my probationary licence and then I would have been on my P's for three years after that. And so, at 21, I would have been fully licenced.

But once you're on your P plates, you don't need anyone else in the car anyway. So, apart from a few little restrictions of maybe how fast you can drive or how many people can be in the car, it's pretty much like being fully licenced.

...A little bit. It does vary from state to state, so there are slightly different rules, like in Tasmania, I think you can get it quicker. But overall, like in the big, the most populated states, it takes a long time to get your licence here.

So, first, there are like these different like plates you put on your car. So, the first plate you get is your L plates, like your learner's plate. That's equal to like our driving permit in the states. So, that's like...

Something interesting that he hasn't mentioned is drinking age, smoking age. Yeah. So, we get our licences at 18 here, I think by and large, across the entire country. In America, I think some places you can get your licence, you're, I don't know what it would be, the equivalent of your probationary is where you can drive on your own at like 15 or 16.

Are you serious?

Which is crazy. But then you can't buy cigarettes or alcohol until you're 21, I think across the country, whereas in Australia you can do that at 18.

...Points you can get on your driver's licence. So, I don't know. It depends like how fast you're going, like how bad the ticket is, what you do wrong. But if you get like two tickets, you can get your licence taken away or suspended for a while. It's like, it's the way I'll speak here. I like it.

I think it's sick. I think it's really cool. That's all good here. But there is one word, one word that y'all use that I think is so weird, it's so bizarre. It's not only me that thinks it's weird, but it's like every single like English speaker that's not from Australia thinks this is weird. And that is thongs. These are not...

So, he's talking about a G-string versus thongs. Look for whatever reason we call, what would you call them? Flip flops, sandals. We call them thongs in Australia. It's perfectly normal, and we're not going to get confused thinking you're talking about a G-string, or at least the majority of us. A G-string is the underwear that people like Borat will wear over their shoulders.

No, but women generally wear in order to tan most of their lower extremities. Okay. So, it's effectively underwear, but your butt is pretty much eating all of the underwear, and it's a very small string that goes- Yeah. Have a look online, you'll see. I'll put a G-string up here, you can have a look.

...Thongs. All right. This is a thong. Those are thongs...

I love how he has to show an example of a thong on a guy. Dudes don't wear thongs, man. I mean, unless, you know, maybe you're a homosexual who's dancing at a nightclub or something. But I would never see anyone wearing that out in public, and I can't imagine anyone wearing that under their pants, either. Jesus Christ.

I don't want to hear anyone say that they just bought some new thongs or tell me to put my thongs on. That word is just not supposed to be used like that. So, all your other lingo, absolutely love it. Like that one I just cannot get behind, I'm sorry. That is something that is strange about Australia.

Number eight, and kind of like the thongs, I wasn't going to mention anything weird about the animals because like no shit. It's a different country. It's a different environment, like the animals here are going to be different.

I wasn't going to say anything about like, you know, like the snakes, the spiders, the kangaroos, koalas, like jellyfish. Like, no, I wasn't going to talk about the animals. However, there is one animal, one genre of animals that has totally surprised me since I've been here in Australia and I find a couple of them incredibly strange.

All right, guys, what animal is it going to be? I want you to go down in the comments and tell me what animal you reckon it's going to be before I hit play on this again. And I guess, let me think, let me think, I'm going to go with platypus. I'm going to go with platypus. Okay, let's see what he has to say.

And that is y'all's birds...

Okay.

...There are two birds in particular that I'd like to talk about. Before I talk about them, I want to say, first of all, the birds here are probably my- One of my biggest animal surprises about Australia. I was not expecting to find like cockatoos like just flying around here in Australia, like those are like birds that we have as pets in America. Anyways, the two birds that can knock it over, the first...

I love how you can hear the lorikeets in the background.

...Is this bird. I believe it's called the...

So, that tells me instantly, I think that he's living in Townsville. These are creepy as birds at night, you'll hear them do this. (Curlew call)

...Curlew. These things are so creepy, they are so scary, they are like something out of a haunted movie. They usually come out at night, come out of like dark alleys and corners, and they just stand on the road and they look so creepy. And as soon as you think you might be getting used to them, you're like, oh, like, it's just a bird, you know, just standing there in the corner.

It's not trying to hurt me. As soon as you think that they will let out the most ear-piercing screech, I'm going to give you three seconds to turn your headphones down and ready, three, two, one. All right, listen to this. (Real Curlew call) What the fuck is that? That is not human. That is something, like that is straight from hell.

Interesting story for you guys. When I met my wife, we met online actually through YouTube, funnily enough. But she was originally living in Townsville, and I remember talking to her on the phone or via Skype, and we would always have these birds in the background making this noise...

Please, can you keep it down, please?

...You know, making it very hard for us to talk to one another.

I don't know what it is, but those birds are just downright creepy. The second bird not nearly as eerie or creepy as the first, but that is a bin chicken. What is that? I know, if you're not from Australia, that's probably exactly what you're thinking. These guys are actually very tame and normal. I think they're actually called ibis, but they're known as bin chickens here, which...

Interesting thing about bin chickens is that it's a regional thing because ibis only behave this way in certain locations around Australia. I talked about this on a podcast recently. I'll link it up here. But the bin chicken- The story behind it is really interesting, but the bin chicken is a Sydney thing.

They're mostly around Sydney, I think there are some places in southeast Queensland where you'll see this behaviour from ibis, where they raid bins for food. But in the rest of Australia, where you'll often see white ibis as well, including down here, they do not behave that way.

You will never see them up and pulling food out of bins. They actually learnt that behaviour strangely enough in Victoria and then took it up north, I think in the 1960s onwards. So, yeah, go check that podcast episode out so that you can hear that story.

...Then it's like what they call like a trash can. So, it's like you could- In American...

I love how he has to translate what a bin is, it's a trash can.

...English, it's called like a trash chicken or like a trash can chicken, something like that. This is a little video I took of one of them while I was outside of McDonald's just earlier today. There's nothing really bad about...

There's two guys hugging on the- Jeez.

...But they just look so strange. Next up, number nine and here we got no garbage disposals. I really don't know why this is, but yeah, it's just not really a super common thing to have...

So, garbage disposal from what I understand of American TV and film is where you have like a, what would you call it, like a sink? I don't even know the word, again brain fart. Jesus. But the hole in the bottom of a sink somewhere and then inside of that, there's like blades that spin around to just disintegrate all of your rubbish.

I think most of the time, it's food that they put into this, and then it just goes into a bin. Australia, we don't really have that, we just put stuff in the bin, to be honest. Yeah, I guess that's what the bins for, trash cans for.

...A garbage disposal in your sink in Australia. Once again, it's not all houses, but I have seen a couple of houses where it's like this. And then my tenth and final strange thing about Australia isn't really all too strange, but I find it super cool about Australia. And that is that 30% of Australians were actually born overseas. This is an absolutely astronomical huge amount of citizens to be born overseas.

Like the US prides itself in being like an immigrant nation, we have a ton of immigrants in the US, but even then, we only have 13.5% of our population that was born overseas. I found this actually fascinating about Australia, I think it's one of the coolest little fun facts about Australia that I've learned.

So, this is one of those interesting things, too. I recently did an episode, I'll link it up here, where I was talking about racism in Australia. And whilst racism exists in Australia, it's interesting that Australians tend to have this bad rap as being this incredibly racist country and yet we have such high levels of migration.

It's one of those things where you're like, well, if it was such a bad place to be because there was so much racism, why are there so many people coming to Australia and setting up a life here? Right. It's an interesting question.

So, let's have a look. What proportion of Aussies were born overseas? Because I think it might even be higher than 30%. Oh, okay. 29.8% as of 2019-2020. So, there you go, I guess he's on the dot. That's the stat that he's using. 30% of people were born overseas, so there you go. I wonder, too. Country with highest proportion of migrants. I wonder if Australia is at the top here.

Okay. So, interestingly, I always thought Australia had one of the highest per capita migration rates. But look at that Qatar is right on the top with 270,000 people per million people. Australia is 15th, which isn't bad all things considered. It's behind Canada. We got Luxembourg and Ireland and Spain, even Sierra Leone, Aruba. Wow. But it's in front of New Zealand.

It's in front of Sweden. I wonder where the US is. America, do we have that there? The United States is 34th and the United Kingdom is 42nd. So, yeah, it looks like Australia's 15th on the list, and we currently take in 32,000 people per one million. I guess that was in 2005, though.

Okay, so that was quite a while ago. Maybe things have changed since then. Anyway, guys, that's it for today. If you want to keep learning about Australia and Australian English, go check out this video. See you next time.