(Sample post: the people and events in this story are made up for display purposes.)
I was fourteen when my family moved to Sydney. Before we left, I memorised an entire vocab book and figured I was pretty much ready. Then on my first day, the kid next to me asked, “See you this arvo?” I searched my whole mental vocab book. No “arvo” anywhere.
Turns out arvo means afternoon. Aussies love chopping words short: breakfast is brekkie, sunglasses are sunnies, and McDonald’s somehow becomes Macca’s. That week I started an “Aussie dictionary” on the last page of my notebook and added a few new entries every day.
Then there was PE. My teacher grinned and asked, “How ya going?” I answered, very seriously, “By bus.” The whole class went quiet for a second, then cracked up. I wanted the ground to swallow me. But my teacher patted my shoulder and said it was the best answer he’d heard all term. After that, a bunch of kids came up to chat and kept competing to teach me more slang.
That first weekend there was a sausage sizzle outside the community centre: one slice of bread, one sausage, a squeeze of tomato sauce. I stood in line watching everyone else order so I’d get it right. It was a totally ordinary sausage, but I remember it perfectly, because it was the first thing I ever bought on my own in English.
And then, of course, the magpies. One September morning a magpie swooped me from behind on the way to school. I sprinted the rest of the way. When I told my friends, they just shrugged: that’s spring for you. Wear a hat next time, maybe stick some googly eyes on it.
My Aussie dictionary is three pages long now. Sometimes a “no worries” slips out at home and makes my mum laugh. Looking back, all the times I didn’t understand or said the wrong thing ended up being my favourite stories to tell new friends.