From a post by wanderer in another section:

on tele
immi people
bikkies or choc bars, chokkie bar

What? OK, I can sort of figure it out, though bikkies took a while.

But am I going to wander around not understanding anything?

No. For a while you will probably need to do a lot of guessing and ask a lot of questions, but you'll get used to the slang. Are you going to be here permanently? Because if you aren't, I bet you'll go back and no one will understand all your 'aussie' words.

You can begin your education here - http://members.ozemail.com.au/~enigm...lia/slang.html and one thing you have worked out already is that we are efficient with words or lets say speakeasy in that why say a whole word when only a half of one will do - you just have to be flexible with guessing the last half.
tele = televisiom
immi = immigration
Chokkies = chocolate bar
bikkie (biscuit) = cookie and Kanga = kangaroo!
six pack = six stubbies or cans of usually beer
as they may not be in the slang.

You could be wondering for a while, but then Sydney siders may be more PC (politically corect)
And if you have to get a coldie from the fridge, the refrigerator is usually where cold beer is.

I gather stubbies a can of beer? The size of a beer bottle?

Nope otg (nother form of abbrev.)
Stubbie is usually 375ml bottle or half full size beer bottle unless you are in NT where a Darwin Stubbie is 2L and a bit hard to be carting a six pack about - http://www.amazingaustralia.com.au/c...estaurants.htm - Darwin and other stuff - a different part of Australia and everyone should visit.
There are mini stubbies of 250ml., for whatever reason I have no idea.

Cans are also 375ml but they were in earlier days made also in normal beer bottle size - 750ml and a slab is a box of 24 cans.

Interestingly enough, in Switzerland I have bought what were either 440 or 500 ml cans of Fosters (a once very popular Oz beer marketed overseas but now less popular and more so at home amongst boutique drinkers).

Actually, a single to be correct is Stubby and my stubbie is just my example of easy language in dropping the "s" off the plural to make the singular.

It is probably no surprise to some that I had a dream last night of being interviewed for my passport and I was nearly failed through bad english!

Fosters was very popular in the US for a while, a long time ago. It was those huge bottles, I think.

I think it will help that I don't expect to understand things.

otg?

otg? = Onthego (the poster)
You can put me as Wan if you like and we would use Flo for Floridian!

Oh yeah, one thing that you probably use frequently and thus could need some tweaking for here is your mobile or cell phone or whatever you guys call them.
US, Canada, Japan, and to some extent South Korea have different frequencies in use for GSM phones here, a GSM type being the ones with a SIM card and if you do not know what a SIM card is, then highly likely you will not have a GSM phone.
If you have one, then it will need to be a tri or quad band one, and that means it'll have the frequencies in use here.
You would need to talk to your telco to see if it can be netwirk unlocked so you could then just get a SIM starter pack here in Australia.

If doing that, there is a piggyback carrier (What the hell my ESP is saying ) and so whereas here we have three/four main telecom networks they sell network capacity/connectivity onto resellers who seem to be able to offer some pretty good deals - called a piggyback carrier because they hang onto a main carrier, ie. being given a piggyback - anyway, good cheap piggyback carrier goes by name of www.revolution.com.au and they use Vodaphone main carrier whose coverage is not quite as good as Optus or Telstra but more than adequate for what you will probably need and they are cheap, cheap, cheap.

If you have scored zilch on above re your existing phone, then no big deal as you can get plenty of prepaid phone deals here for under $100.

www.telestial.com is a good site to bone up on technology and if your company is looking after everthing for you, maybe just mention it and they will have someone in the office here have one organised for you.

If you're doing that yourself, then Optus or Telstra could have reasonable deals which have you locked to their network, and after six months you can get an unlock for free or for minimal charge and select another carrier if you want to.

So I"m otg. I never would have gotten that.

We have just recently started getting phones that can be 'unlocked' but I understand they reallly aren't 'unlocked' and you have to get them 'fixed'. A friend got her tri-band jimmied in Thailand to take Thai sim cards, so we'll see how it goes when she gets back.

I thought I'd just buy a new phone there, a cheap one.

Not understanding anything will be part of the adventure. Think of it as going to a country that speaks a foreign language that you studied for years, but have never really been able to speak like a native.