And btw that strip of land between the street and the sidewalk is called the “city strip”. That’s the actually, true official name for it – in northern Ohio. 🙂

Say that Australian English is rated at 100, and average US English in terms of similarity to Australian English is rated at 10. NY/NE English could be rated at 20-30: still not very similar to Australian English, but the closest you could get in the US to Australian English.

Also note that NY/NE, being the closest former colonial port areas to mother England, would have been more likely than other parts of the US to have changed its English in tandem with changes in the mother country- which would later tie to Australia. Whereas, the rest of the US would have been more likely to have preserved archaic ways of speaking English which had subsequently been abandoned in mother England.

Listen to this speech by Theodore Roosevelt. TR was from an old-line NYC Dutch family. Sounds rather British to me, which supports my hypothesis that the NY/NE area had a greater tendency than the rest of the US to follow speech trends in mother England.
Which helps explain why NY/NE speech comes closest of all US speech patterns- while admittedly not very close- to Australian speech.

It says that of the various accents of English spoken in the US, the English spoken in the New York-New England area comes closest to sounding like the English spoken in Australia.

That you picked up your Americanisms from East Coast Yanks? Lots of them around, since that’s a densely-populated part of the US, and many of them have been in the media/movies, so it’s likely that you would have encountered their lingo, even in never-never.

I’m actually from rural Australia. What does this say about me then?

The area map of colors is where the most attention should be paid.