A 22-year-old American veteran moved onto a cattle ranch in rural Australia to live a slower life. The only catch? Understanding the locals.

Geoff Weiss
Updated ·3 min read
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  • Presten Boydstun moved to Western Australia to work on a cattle ranch after being in the Marines.

  • It's been a bliss-filled adventure, though he's had some difficulty understanding Australian slang.

  • Boydstun has a working list of 50 unfamiliar phrases, including "hoon," "fanging," and "ken oath."

Presten Boydstun joined the Marine Corps at age 18 and served four years in San Diego before leaving honorably in July, going on to experience a bout of wanderlust.

"I had a tough time with some of my buddies passing away," Boydstun, who has more than 286,000 followers on TikTok, told Insider. "I got kind of sad and went down this path of depression, which was pretty difficult for me."

Boydstun said a veterinarian family friend, whom he described as a "second dad," operated cattle farms in Western Australia and offered him a job working with livestock. He said he took the plunge on September 1, and he's been chronicling his bliss-filled adventures on TikTok ever since.

"It's just made my inner happiness kind of come out," Boydstun told Insider, "and I just really wanted to put that out in the world."

Boydstun said he was living in an idyllic rural city 10 minutes from the ocean with roughly 14,000 residents (he declined to disclose his exact location). But he said there'd been some culture shock in acclimating to Australian slang, which he recounted in an October 17 TikTok video with 2.3 million views.

In fact, there have been so many foreign phrases he started compiling them in a list. He has roughly 50 to date. An "esky" is a cooler, for instance, 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.

Boydstun also said "ken oath" meant "heck yeah," while "not here to F spiders" translated to "not here to mess around."

"It's been difficult learning this," he told TikTok viewers.

Mainly, there are a lot of abbreviations: For example, "preggo" is for pregnant, and "avo" is for avocado. "They can say it in three words, and normally I have 10 words in a sentence," Boydstun told Insider.

Boydstun said locals were occasionally thrown off when they heard his American accent but he had started to incorporate the greeting "oi." Australian fans on TikTok have been tickled by his assimilation process.

"As an Aussie I really didn't realise how many 'sayings' we have till you point them out in a huge list like that," one commenter wrote. "Best advice I've got for north americans new to Australia is, you can determine what we mean by the way we say it, not what we actually say," another added.

Boydstun said there had been other adjustments, too, including driving on the opposite side of the road and adapting to the local cuisine. Thus far, he's tried the "Tim Tam slam" as well as the food spread Vegemite — the latter of which he swears by. "It's weird at first, but then it changes your life," he said.

Boydstun said he was on a yearlong holiday visa but planned to apply for a more permanent work visa so he could stay longer once it expired. He said he hoped to be mostly fluent in Australian slang by then.

"I'm just a happy freaking guy," he said. "I'm so happy and blessed to be out here."

Read the original article on Insider