Australian vowels, even the tamest and most British, sing more than our flat American ones, and achieve heights and depths we can’t muster. (I already tried a while back, not very successfully, to characterize what happens to my name here.) I’ve been trying for months to find a way of recording what happens to the words “thought, word and deed” I hear each week in the confession of sin at church. Something like thort, wööd and düeed, although there’s no ‘r’ in the first - it’s a deeper o, with the mouth making a tall narrow hollow - and the little fillip of ‘deeds’ is so quick as to be rising back before it really falls, more like the sound water makes when you pull your hand down quickly into it.) In the broader accents no diphthong goes unsung and you'll find a dipththong squatting in many a long vowel (as in ‘deed’). In some cases, finally, diphthongs are abbreviated to the component sounds Americans don’t pronounce, making it seem that high and low vowels have swapped places. So here's a question for you. What was the man after who confounded the Canadian barista on Rottnest Island by demanding an arst kyke?
There's obviously much more to be said on this subject. The diagram above somehow charts gender differences - you must click it to see the coordinates - and is explained, sort of, here. Some of the more common sounds are spit out at you as your cursor moves over them on this site.
Meanwhile the fires burn on; they claimed a first life the day before yesterday. This is another picture from The Age's website.