Right or liked?

I'm far from being a bastion of grammatical perfection, but I do try to put forth well-crafted sentences. For the past 10 years, my go to resource for all things writing has been the AP Style Guide (one space, not two after a period? If it's in the AP Style Guide it must be true). When I started work in Australia, I knew I needed help navigating the unique cultural mores of their written word. The Australian Associated Press Style Guide seemed the logical place to look.

I visited the AAP's website. No style guide listed.

I emailed them to ask about it. The reply was "we do not make our style guide available to the general public." 

WHA?!? Oh no. What to do? What to do? 

I wrote back, pleading my case as an ignorant American in a communications role with an Australian company. Could they recommend a grammar guide for me? "Yes."

Link clicked, ordered, shipped, received. Exhale.

It's a decent enough guide. Not as expansive as the AP version I treasure so, but solid and reliable. It even has a section called "Americanism - do not use".

Most of them are things you would expect. Avoid elevator (for lift), crib (for cot), color (for colour), center (for centre, and other such -er v. -re words), etc. However, one in particular surprised me. Change to the preferred Australian spelling, even when it's a proper noun. The example they gave was "Lincoln Center should be written as Lincoln Centre." I find this rule troubling, but moved on since I doubted my MarCom about aluminium (aluminum is another Americanism to avoid, don't 'cha know) would include the Lincoln Center/re.

Fast forward three weeks and I'm helping one of our brand managers write an eNewsletter. Our Intrack division designs, fabricates and installs flagpoles and sporting posts and Janelle wanted to include an article on flag protocol for Anzac Day. Perfectly sensible article choice. 

In the lead up to Anzac Day (today btw, which explains why I'm writing about writing and not at work actually writing), I'd seen it written as ANZAC and Anzac, with the former being by far the most common. As I reviewed Janelle's article, she had written ANZAC throughout and I was curious as to which was correct. Enter my new style guide. Flip, flip, flip, and ... "Anzac Day is written Anzac and not ANZAC." 

I corrected Janelle's copy to follow Anzac convention. However, I kept seeing eNewsletters, websites and other (not journalistic) writing that employed the ANZAC version. I asked Janelle about it.

Me: "I've looked it up and the correct way is Anzac, but everyone seems to write ANZAC. I want it to be correct, but I also don't want people unfamiliar with the rule to think we made an error."
Janelle: *long pause* "I think we need to go with what everyone else is doing."
Me: "Hmmm. It's a tough one, but you know your audience. Let's go with ANZAC. Hey, I've got another one for you. So, you know how you guys write your dates day/month/year and we write month/day/year?"
Janelle: "Yeah?"
Me: "Well, according to my style guide, it changes when the date is written out here. It's supposed to be month/day/year, like we do. So I would write 5/4/2013, but April 5, 2013. But I think if I do write it, people will think I'm just an ignorant American. But I want to do it correctly. What do you think."
Janelle: "Don't write April 5. People will instantly assume an American wrote it."
Me: "Doh."

I made peace with Anzac/ANZAC, but I'm really struggling with the date thing. I want to write it according to the guide, but then every time someone tries to correct it, I'll pull out the guide, launch into "according to my style guide" and correct their correction. Which will make me an annoying American.

Doh.

But why

A few odds and ends type questions about Australia(ns) that keep ping-ponging around in my brain ... 

1. Why do you call it "cotton wool"? There is no wool involved. It's a tightly spun ball of cotton ... which explains why we call it a "cotton ball".
2. Why are your power points/electrical outlets so few and far between and the cords on your electrical appliances so short? Reaching the whole house with the vacuum is quite a challenge and I routinely pull the cord out of the wall when trying to dry my hair.
3. Why the love for spray deodorant/antiperspirant? First and foremost, it doesn't work. And second, when I use it, it leaves a toxic cloud floating around the bathroom, I feel like I need to hold my breath or leave the room until the air clears.
4. Why are the showers so teeny-tiny? I barely have room to reach down and pumice my heels. Is it meant to encourage water conservation by keeping the shower as uninviting as possible? 
5. Roundabouts, the enemy of my daily commute. Why, why, why? No one seems to know what to do and they feel very wild, wild west.
6. Why are the apples so small? Do you have better control over the genetically modified fruit? Or is it a consequence of the different soil/water/sunlight from the Hood River apples I'm used to?
7. Why do you sing "a tissue a tissue" instead of "ashes ashes"?
8. Why don't you have pay at the pump for gas/petrol? I always thought pumping ones own gas/petrol had huge advantages in terms of time saved, however, all this is lost by forcing me to go inside to pay. I've got to get the baby out of his car seat, wait in line inside, pay, put the baby back in his car seat. Hugely inefficient use of time.
9. What is up with your Target? It is nothing like the store of awesomeness I knew in the US. Selection is low, prices are high and customer service does not exist.
10. Why don't your products have resealable/ziplock type bags? I actually wrote Mission Foods (hey, any tortilla is better than no tortilla) to find out why they didn't sell their tortillas with resealable ziplocks. The response was they were doing research to try and find a resealable option that maintained the quality of the product. Um, so you're telling me the quality of all your products sold in the US is compromised by their resealable ziplock?   

Just wondering.