- After serving in the Marines, Presten Boydstun moved to Western Australia to work on a cattle ranch.
- It was a blissful adventure, although he had some difficulty understanding Australian slang.
- Boydstun has a working list of 50 unknown phrases, including “hoon,” “fanging,” and “Ken Oath.”
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Presten Boydstun joined the Marine Corps at the age of 18 and served in San Diego for four years before honorably departing in July, after which he experienced a bout of wanderlust.
“I had a hard time when some of my friends died,” Boydstun, who has over 286,000 followers on TikTok, told Insider. “I got kind of sad and went down the path of depression, which was pretty difficult for me.”
A veterinarian friend, whom Boydstun describes as a “second father,” runs cattle ranches in Western Australia and offered him a job as a stockman. He took the plunge on September 1st and has been documenting his blissful adventures on TikTok ever since.
“It just brought out my inner happiness,” Boydstun told Insider, “and I just really wanted to put that out into the world.”
Boydstun lives in an idyllic rural town (he declined to reveal his exact location) with about 14,000 residents, and that’s a 10-minute drive from the sea. However, there was a bit of culture shock in getting used to Australian slang, which he talked about in an Oct. 17 TikTok video with 2.3 million views.
In fact, there were so many foreign words that he started compiling them into a list. To date, he has about 50. For example, an “esky” is a cooler and a “brolly” is an umbrella (both are the names of local brands); “ute” is a pickup truck (short for utility), “bottle-o” is a liquor store, “lappy” is a laptop, “hoon” is a reckless driver, “fanging” means fast, and “rooted” means tired.
Additionally, Boydstun said that “Ken Oath” means “hell yeah,” while “not here to F Spiders” means “not here to mess around.”
“It was difficult to learn,” he told TikTok viewers.
Mainly there are many abbreviations: for example, “preggo” stands for pregnant and “avo” for avocado. “You can say it in three words, and I usually have 10 words in a sentence,” Boydstun told Insider.
Boydstun says locals are occasionally confused when they hear his American accent, but he has started incorporating the greeting “Oi.” Australian fans on TikTok loved his assimilation process.
“As an Australian, I really didn’t realize how many ‘sayings’ we have until they were listed in a huge list like this,” one commenter wrote. “The best advice I have for North Americans new to Australia is: You can tell what we mean by the way we say it, not by what we actually say,” added one others added.
There have also been other adjustments, Boydstun said, including driving on the opposite side of the street and adapting to local cuisine. So far he has tried the famous “Tim Tam Slam” and the famous Vegemite spread – he swears by the latter. “It’s weird at first, but then it changes your life,” he said.
Boydstun is currently on a one-year holiday visa, but plans to apply for a more permanent work visa so he can stay longer after the visa expires (he hopes to be mostly fluent in Australian slang by then).
“I’m just a happy damn guy,” he said. “I’m so happy and blessed to be out here.”
Source : www.insider.com