I m sorry I was an asshole about it The point is that the vowels in man and noun are raised in AusE according to Felicity Cox 2005 and the phonetic transcription for that IDEA example I gave you transcribes man as and indeed it sounds like that to my ears although that speaker did seem a bit broad It s not that uncommon for vowels to be raised before nasals Take for example the pin pen merger in Southern American English and in southwestern Ireland or the non phonemic tensing that takes place in accents that have undergone the Northern cities vowel shift The only reason I brought this up is because I imagine it is very noticeable to English ears it s even noticeable to my American ears Many English people might pronounce man as which sounds quite a bit different from You re the Aussie here so I m sure you can verify this by simply contrasting your man with your bad in this case both would have a long vowel so try to listen for the quality of the vowels or your noun with your loud This is just another little thing that distinguishes Aussie English from English English that s all