Im 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  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  Its not that uncommon for vowels to be raised before nasals  Take for example the pinpen merger in Southern American English and in southwestern Ireland or the nonphonemic 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 its even noticeable to my American ears  Many English people might pronounce man as  which sounds quite a bit different from   Youre the Aussie here so Im 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 thats all