For Kirk or Travis: accents or idiosynchracies in speech?

I was going through the Speech Accent Archive and I noticed that of the Australian accents that were phonetically transcribed, they differed slightly in their transcription. Unfortunately, I don't really understand the transcription, so I was wondering if these differences are accental differences or just quirks in individuals speeches. For example, person from Brisbane v Perth:

Brisbane: http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=detail&speakerid=88

Perth: http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=detail&speakerid=143

Adelaide's person hasn't had their speech transcribed. I was thinking about recording my voice and having it transcribed and comparing it to the Adelaide person's sample. Is it possible that you two (or others) be able to transcribe Adelaide person's sample and my sample and then compare, please?

Adelaide: http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_language.php?function=detail&speakerid=131

Well, I cannot say that much about such, as I am quite unfamiliar with the specifics of Australian English dialects. However, what I can say about the transcriptions is while some differences in them, such as one person writing [s] and another writing [z_0] for the same thing in one plce, are just due to differences in transcription conventions between whoever were transcribing the two, beyond that there does appear to be some significant differences between the speech of the two people. I cannot say, though, whether many of these differences are just a matter of idiolect or overall dialect, especially based on just these two examples and a very limited knowledge at best of Australian English.

I'm pretty much the same as Travis on this one. Some of the differences may be due to convention but also there is normal variation between how even the same person says the same word at different times which may affect transcriptions. Since I'm no expert on Australian accents I really couldn't say. Some of the vowels sounded different between the two speakers but I'm not sure what that indicates in terms of real-life speech. While those archives are interesting, they unfortunately don't capture spontaneous everyday conversation (which is obviously harder to record). People's "reading voices" are usually if not always quite different in some ways than their normal everyday speech (and most people aren't consciously aware of the differences). So while I think those recordings are interesting I take them with a grain of salt because they don't always point to phonological phenomena that occur in everyday spontaneous speech.