... and not an important one but:

Do they use US spelling in Oz or not? I've seen 'Harbor' and 'Center' and just wondered ... ?

No. Definetly not generally anyway.

Once though I had Oz spellcheck on, and it still spelt the word(forgotten which) the American way, and I knew it wasn't. So look out with spell check.
Oh, that was a word with 'z'. I think 'organisation'.

Yeah, MS Word has "z" instead of "s" sometimes... bloody yanks ;-) but hey Bill Gates is not an Aussie, what can we do!

;-)

fafa

I have changed the default langage in Word to 'English UK' so I don't get those annoying squiggley lines under my 's/z' words.
ACE

I puzzled over this when I arrived - so I asked some 'locals'.

The most popular answer seemed to be that they used to use English spelling way-back (30-ish years or so) . Then the eductaion departments tried to loosen the English leasons with a kind of 'spell it as it sounds' attitude - which led to an increased amount of US spelling. Lately some schools are encouraging a 'back to basics' traditional approach which means words are now being formally spelt using the UK spelling!

So the answer is 'both'.

Cheers.
AndyH
Brisbane.

OZ definitely uses the English spelling way and not the American. Trust me I am an Aussie living in America


Cheers

There are a few other weird things to get used to - the date for example usually gets written as October 27, not October 27th, and they tend to use shortened versions of words a lot more, so you can refer to firies or ambos, whereas in the UK nicknames like that aren't really used in written English.

Good point!

Ooops, you've probably been reading some of my posts (remnants of a US education )

UK spelling as far as I can tell, but oddly they use some US words/phrases, here such as 'muffler' (= car exhaust/silencer).

I keep meaning to go buy the Macquarie Dictionary (Oz equivalent of the UK's Oxford) so I can start getting it right!

Cheers
Anya.