We examine the relevance of ‘small’ spoken corpora such as PAC-Australia for the study of Australian English varieties from a sociophonetic point of view. Acoustic analyses on real-time data were carried out using Praat and then normalized with Lobanov’s speaker normalization method. The first findings show that a vocalic chain shift may be underway in our female informants from NSW compared to female informants from Victoria. Secondly, we expose some recent results on Standard Aboriginal English drawn from research on lexical stress patterns that confront some PAC-Australia data with some AusTalk data and with dictionary-based data (Przewozny & Martin 2023). Finally, we discuss the ongoing PAC survey across Queensland which is meant to contribute to comparative research on vocalic change within Australia and in other varieties of English and to current research in dialectology across Australia (Docherty, Gonzalez & Mitchell, 2015).