The English phoneme /b/, described phonemically as a voiced bilabial stop or plosive, is typically characterised phonetically as having short lag voice onset time (VOT) when it occurs in post-pausal word initial position; i.e. phonetically it is voiceless unaspirated, [p]. While there is evidence of some inter and intra-speaker variability to this in other varieties (Docherty, Watt, Llamas, Hall, & Nycz, 2011) and in Australian English (Jones & Meakins, 2013), with some speakers tending towards producing lead or negative VOT – that is, voicing during the closure phase of the stop – we don’t have a wealth of data available on how this patterns in speakers of Australian English. Examinations of speakers at the “margins” of society – speakers from minoritized ethnic groups, bilingual speakers of minoritized languages can provide insights beyond the larger group-based classifications of languages (e.g., that English is a 2 category VOT system with short lag voiced stops and long lag voiceless stops (Cho, Whalen, & Docherty, 2019)) and provide rich insights into complex speaker sociophonologies (Scobbie, 2006). In this paper, I present data from a corpus of 11,337 word-initial stops produced by native speakers of Australian English with Lebanese (N = 30) and Anglo-Celtic (N = 20) ethnic heritage. Each speaker produced 20 words with /b/ in onset position of citation form words. I present this focused acoustic phonetic analysis in the context of the larger analysis of VOT in the samples (Clothier, In progress). Speakers vary in the VOT patterns for /b/, ranging from a consistent short-lag system (phonetically voiceless, [p]), a consistent lead system (phonetically voiced [b]), and an intermediate mixed system which combines tokens with short-lag – [p] – and tokens with lead VOT – [b]. Social patterning of these variants is discussed, to demonstrate that, when it comes to /b/, the acoustic phonetic properties of the speech signal really depend on the rich social life of who you’re talking to.