Transcript of AE 1288 - The Goss: Why is Hitchhiking Illegal in Australia

G'day you mob. Pete here. And this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news weather locally Down Under here in Australia or non-locally overseas in other parts of the world. And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right? If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goss.

So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time.

So if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising and that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode, guys. Smack the bird and let's get into it.

What's going on?

Hey, Pete!

Show me cat pictures.

Yeah, I'm not showing you cat pictures. That is literal!

Um, okay, so my computer's lost battery.

Uh oh!

So I'm gonna have to look up. This.

Sorry. I'm about to do it again!

Do it. [background sound]

Okay. Yes. Hitchhiking.

Yes, hitchhiking?

Hitchhiking has gone the way of the dodo in Australia, apparently.

Yeah. It's become extinct.

So there was an article here. Uh, you guys can look this up on ABC News. "Hitchhiking was once common in Australia and abroad. What changed?"

Mhm.

So it's a, "It's rare to see a hitchhiker on the side of any Australian road these days. It's also against the law in Queensland and Victoria, and illegal to hitchhike on motorways in other parts of the country. But in the mid 1970s, when historian and author Alice Garner was young, she used to do it all the time."

Yeah.

So the article effectively goes on to say that, you know, it would have been around the time of the invention of the car, obviously.

Well, would have been earlier than that, but nah, people used to hitch rides on horse and cart all the time..

But in the article, I think she was saying the hitchhiking on roads became really common. Obviously with cars, post the advent of the car. Funnily enough.

Really?! Everybody used to do it before it was invented!

And then as soon as it was invented..

Soon as it was invented, they went, Oh, we've now got a purpose for walking down the street with our thumb out.

Yes. That's it. So, um, she was saying it was very common in, like, the 1920s to, you know, 50s and 60s and onwards. Um, but it was different, in different countries, apparently, like in, I think she was saying in Canada, that women and America, women and children would often use hitchhiking as a way of getting to the beach, um, you know, or going on, on a little day trip or something. So anyway, in Australia, it was really common after World War two as a way of just getting around because cars were incredibly expensive.

Yes. Not so many people had cars.

You only had one per kind of family, right?

Or even often not one.

Really?

Use us as an example. My family, when I was growing up, my father had a job that a car came with it. So we had a car, but we didn't have a family car.

Well how much was the car worth? How much would that have cost to buy new?

Ohh.

At the time?

I, in the 1960s?

I want to compare this to the cost of the house that you guys had as well, because you'd, I imagine it would have been a significant chunk of whatever the house was worth.

Yeah, well, my parents bought the house for $1,000 in the 1950s.

Pounds.

£500.

Yeah. Okay.

$1,000.

Converted to.

In the 1950s.

Which is probably about 20 grand today. You know. That would be bugger all! Yeah.

Um. I don't know, my..

Hundreds of dollars back then?

$1,000, probably..

Really?!

For a new car.

So okay..

60s..

House price?

No, but that's ten years later.

Okay.

The car would have cost what, the house cost, ten years before.

But that would be like me, that would be like me buying a Ferrari to drive around, right? The house to affect..

My, yeah, but my, um, I don't know what my father earned, but I suspect $1,000 was probably half his annual salary.

God.

Double? Yeah. Half to his whole annual salary.

That just blows my mind, I think. I don't know..

So, very few people had new cars. A lot of second hand cars.

.. car new, one half my salary.

No.

No, no car, brand new or anything. Maybe a very small one.

So cars probably are around roughly the same price.

Yeah.

Like, all the time. But yeah, it was expensive, but it was just rare. People didn't have that sort of money.

Mhm.

We have a lot more- people keep- we're way off track here. But the um we keep hearing about how, uh, the cost of living is a crisis and people are, you know, struggling to put food on the table. And, you know, and most of that is a media beat up. There are plenty of people who are struggling financially at the moment. Um, and I suspect there were most of those same people were probably struggling five years ago before interest rates went up and house prices went up and rent went up and so on. It's just been exacerbated now. Um, but people just didn't spend money on things that they do now, you know, 50 or 60 years ago. Um, nobody wanted, you know, nobody in a lower income family had new furniture or they just didn't have a car coming back to where we were talking about. So it wasn't that families only had one car. Most families didn't have a car.

Well, I imagine at that period, too..

They used..

The oldest cars out there would have been, what, 30 or 40 years old? And there wouldn't have been very many of them.

No.

So there wouldn't have been a huge, thriving second hand market.

Exactly.

So your only option would probably have been to get a brand new car. Not..

Yeah, exactly. Um, and so there really wasn't, you know, people just use public transport. And so the only way you could get around. If you wanted to go somewhere that was, there wasn't public transport available, or you couldn't afford it. Um, you walked.

Yeah.

And if it was too far to walk, you hitchhiked.

Yeah. And so.

Well, I imagine in regional and rural Australia, that would have been pretty much the only way to get around if you didn't have a car.

Yeah.

There may have been a bus to the main town or something in a in a certain location, but if you're going somewhere to visit someone who lives kilometres out of town, tens of kilometres or whatever, it's like, what other option? You're not going to jog it?

No!

You know, you're not going to buy a horse when you arrive..

I mean, I remember there were times when when I was a teenager, um, when I would, um, I used to do athletics all summer, every Saturday, competing in athletics. Some of which was not local, some of which was competing for a local club. But once you got to a certain level of competition, you weren't just competing against local clubs, you're competing against all the clubs at that level in Melbourne. And so I was competing in Melbourne, so living 20km out of the city, um, about 16 or 17km anyway, uh, from where the, you know, Olympic Park, as it was at the time. It's now the Collingwood Football Club training area. Um, but when competing there every now and then, it would be. Oh, well, I'm finished for the day. Um, if I didn't have friends that I was competing with that were going my way, I could catch the train and a bus to get home. Um, or I could walk. And and often the walking was or the intention was, I'm going to walk 16km home. Um, but I'll have my thumb out. And so it was almost never, I don't think I ever walk the entire way.

Yeah.

Um, or even the same thing from, you know, catching the train. I could catch the train to two different, on two different lines. One was probably a 4 or 5 kilometre walk home. The other one was a 6 or 7 kilometre walk home. I would do that quite a bit.

That's 6 or 7- so that would be about the distance from my house here to your house, right? About eight, ten, ten to our place, because I'm thinking that would be like a two hour walk. Yeah, that's that's quite a distance.

Well, walking from Sandringham to Beaumaris was, took an hour and a half.

Two hours.

Walking from Mentone to Beaumaris was probably an hour and a bit, you know. So.

It's so funny how foreign that- like it's, it's sort of connected, right. Where the idea of Oh, I'll just, you know, oh, ah someone's calling me. Why? Spam? You know, as soon as it comes from an interstate or something, you're just like..

Yeah, particularly it's not a mobile number.

Get out of here!

I know. Um, it would be so foreign to think about having to walk for half an hour, an hour, to go to someone's house. Like, that's. I remember having to walk around Ocean Grove, where I grew up, obviously to go to other kids houses. And there may be someone's house was, you know, a 20 minute walk away and, or you'd walk to the shops or even there were times when I remember we, you know, the kids, you and I mean, you and me, my, my friends and I, as kids would walk to the bluff, you know, in Barwon Heads. And that was like six K's or walk to the lighthouse in Point Lonsdale again, about eight.

Acres.

And then back. And that would be like quite a quite an ordeal, but usually a social kind of thing of just like, fuck it, let's do it.

Yeah, I'm doing it deliberately, not as a mode of transport.

I can't imagine ever being like, ah, I'll just walk to Geelong to go see my mates, you know. That's a 20 K, 20 K walk. And you're like back in the day, those sorts of things. I guess..

We used to be much..

.. more accepted.

Yeah. We used to walk to. Yeah. Well my girlfriend that I had when I was a teenager, a girlfriend from high school, she lived about three and a half, four K's away.

Mhm.

Um, if I was riding my bike, I would ride my bike there and ride it home again. But often at night, you know, bike didn't have lights. So, you know, you didn't ride your bikes at night unless you wanted to get caught.

But 'caught'?

By the police for riding it illegally without a light. You know how to ride a bike without a light.

Really? See, I have no idea. I've never ridden a bike without a light, so.

No. Exactly. Um, and and so even if I had the bike, I'd be walking home with the bike.

Mhm.

Um, and, but that was just what you did, you know.

Yeah.

It's uh yeah. School was kilometre and a half away. So you'd walk to school every day you know. So.

Yeah.

But yeah. So I think that hitchhiking thing was just if you wanted to go somewhere that took longer, um, then you hitched, but then it became a, you know, beyond the sort of- we're talking 40s and 50s, I think, when it was a mode of transport to for families to say go longer, you know, longer distance than he wanted. But most people are not going to pick up a family of four people. They don't have room in their vehicle. Uh, you might have back in those days, got on the back of a truck or something.

Yeah, that's illegal.

But. Yeah. Uh, it wasn't- when we were kids, we had a couple of friends who had utes.

Kel was telling me about Brazil. She's like..

We have ten kids in the back of this thing going down the beach.

That's how you end up on the news, killing everyone, right? Like that's you have an accident and there's people in the back of the ute. They're dead.

But this is before seatbelts were required, you know? And so we do that all the time! You know, go to, you know, athletic club training.

Yeah. God.

Somebody had a ute and just went, Hey, I'll drop you all home. And you just do the sort of lap of the suburb, dropping about 5 or 6 kids off, and leaping at the back of the ute.

Safety first, guys!

Yeah. Exactly. When you're 14 years old, you don't give a monkey's. You think you're immortal. But then the, uh, the context that we, you know, you sent this to me in to, to discuss was more around the whole what we call now backpackers.

Mhm.

Of, of people going on holidays with a backpack on and getting public transport and so on. Backpacking in the 70s, when I used to do it, um, was hitchhiking.

Yeah.

You'd literally be walking down the road with your backpack on and you'd, you might have an idea of where you intended to go that night, but it was more, well, I'll get as far as I can. And if that's walking 15km down the road, that's where I am, and And I work out where to sleep that night. Um, but if you got picked up, you could end up 100km down the road or further, you know. So.

Yeah. Yeah. What's funny, though, was they had a letter in this article that was apparently from a pub in Tassie where someone was writing saying, you know, we've really appreciated the hospitality of Tasmanians because we got from Devonport to Hobart in a single day in the afternoon because someone gave us a lift and that's hundreds of k's.

Yeah.

Um, but yeah, today it's funny, I guess. Yeah. So you in the 70s, right? The late 70s. Did you do backpacking and hitchhiking around New Zealand?

In New Zealand, yeah. Six, six weeks.

Six months?

Six, six weeks. Over summer.

What was that like? Were you ever scared?

No.

Weird experiences? What was it like?

Oh, it was weird experiences, but not, not frightening, weird experiences.

Yeah. They get in and they just pull the knife out.

Yeah, yeah. The other thing is, you're a 19 year old male. You're, nothing's going to scare you.

Yeah.

Um, even when it should. But, but the world was different in the 70s to from what it is now. And I think this is where we're going, is why hitchhiking doesn't happen now, but.

Yes.

Um, but, yeah, six weeks of hitchhiking around. Now, some of the hitchhiking, some of it was public transport. Where you're going. Yeah. There's some parts in the west coast of the South Island that are fairly remote, and it's 50, 60km or more 100km between towns. You're not going to walk.

Yeah.

And hitchhiking is, the assumption with hitchhiking is that you're going to get picked up.

Yeah.

But the plan B is you're just going to walk.

Yeah.

And you're not going to do that if you're. And particularly with the weather on the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand. Um, it can be cold and raining even the middle of summer. And I had one night there where it was 30 degrees during the day, which I think was the hottest they'd ever had.

Really.

In Te Anau, which is right down the south of the South Island. Well, not quite, but..

Betcha won't be any more. Bet you'll be beating that.

Yeah. Probably. Not by much, though. Mm. Um, and it was 30 degrees during the day, and I'd been out walking around and I was camping little, you know, you know, backpack, a tent. Um, and I had a hammock, a little string hammock. Um, and I strung that up between two trees next to the tent, and I was just lying around that and went, it's better sleeping outside than it is inside tonight. So. Fell asleep 3:00 in the morning. It was snowing on me. So in the early January this was so, um. Yeah, that was a bit of a circus. Um, so there were times where I would actually catch buses, or one time I caught a train. Trains are more expensive, but it was because I deliberately wanted to get from one city to another city, because I wanted to go to an athletics, um, event, not to compete, but just to watch. Um, which in itself had some interesting things about hitchhiking home from a pub at 1:00 in the morning when you didn't really know where you were in a town that you'd only been in for about six hours, because after the athletics meeting, I had a couple of friends who were competing, um, and uh, and they said, Ah, we're all going to the pub. Do you want to come?

Yeah.

Well, okay!

Fuck it.

Fuck it. Yeah. What do I care? Um, so I went to the pub. They all buggered off by 11:00, you know, because they were competing and therefore they had hotel rooms and things. And I was staying in this little backpackers thing on the other side of town. I ended up pitching. Yeah, 1:00 in the morning. You don't get too many lifts in a little town in New Zealand when you're walking along. Um, but yeah. Anyway, that was that was an interesting event because, um, not only did I have a good time at the athletics meeting, went to the pub and sitting there with two Olympic gold medallists having a chat.

Jesus.

But um, but anyway, the the hitchhiking thing was it was just easy. And mostly you were getting picked up by other people who are on holidays, you know, so I reckon 50% of the time that I got picked up hitching around New Zealand, it was by Australians not they knew I was Australian, but Australians,

Well, they're probably the biggest demographic, yeah..

.. demographic of people. And, and back in those days cars were expensive in New Zealand, so hiring a car was expensive. So people tend to do it in a group of people, you know, Hey, we've got four friends and, you know, hire this dinky little car and drive around and they go, Oh, we'll fit you in! You know, just as long as you're willing to sit with your backpack on your lap.

Yeah.

Squeezed in with three people in the back seat of a small car. Um, but yeah. So that was really the experience. It was. It was good fun. Yeah.

Yeah. So did you ever feel unsafe? Was it like, was hitchhiking ever something that..

Not unsafe. Not unsafe in the sense of threat from other people. But there are times where it was unsafe in a sense of I don't know whether I'm going to get to somewhere where I can sleep tonight.

Yeah. Okay. So you may just be turfed on the side of the road.

Because you might. There you go. All right. We're turning left here now. Want to go straight ahead? Or you start off walking from a campground and go. The next one's going to take me two days to walk there. If I don't get picked up, I'm going to be on the side of the road. Side of the road? Yeah. Finding somewhere to sleep. Um, I've only done that once. Slept on a beach. Um, that one must.

Be such a weird experience doing that. Like that wasn't. It was the blink of an eye. You know, in the past where we would often, you know, as hunter gatherers, be moving around and not know where the next meal or food or water or whatever was coming from shelter was going to come from. But today, that seems like such a foreign idea, like, for you to not be out and about.

We're not equipped now either, physically as in the ability to just walk all day, every day.

Yeah.

Um, we don't have the hunting skills, nor is the the prey available to us.

Most of us could last quite a while without food.

Oh, yeah. Exactly. But, you know. But it's that it was more the, you know, in those sense of, you know, it wasn't afraid, but it was concern, I suppose, about where am I going to get to sleep tonight? But that only happened once and it was just sleep on the beach. Safer than sleeping beside the road.

Yeah, true, I guess. Yeah. And so in the late 80s and 90s. Dad, what changed in Australia that made, um, hitchhiking a little more, uh, dangerous? Are you going to mention his name?

Well, you know who I'm talking about. I don't think Ivan Milat was really was really the thing that changed people's behaviour. I think it had changed well and truly before then.

Okay. Because that was brought up in the article, it was a bit..

Oh, yeah, I'm sure it was. And not necessarily that it was. It changed people's generic behaviour of hitching. I think what it changed was and, you know, for background, Ivan Milat is an Australian criminal who would.

Serial killer.

Serial killer who was picking up young women hitchhiking.

And males.

And males.

Backpackers.

Yeah, basically taking them off into the bush and killing them.

Raping and killing them, you know.

And, and so the, I think it, it made people aware that the idea of going on a holiday where you were going, your only mode of transport was going to be walking and picking up lifts from strangers was a was a way of doing things. I don't think it necessarily changed people's behaviour of, Hey, you know, I'm out at the pub at night, I've got a ten K walk at home, I'll just hitch home at 1:00 in the morning.

Yeah.

Um, but I think it. So the Ivan Milat factor was part of it.

When you, I guess to, you know, insert the this went on for half a decade or so didn't it, before they caught him. And so there was actually you forget reading about it in history. You think, oh he just did it one day, killed seven people and then got caught. But it's like there was a long period of time where it was just backpackers disappearing.

Yes.

And never been found.

We found out that most of them were this..

But I think, they didn't even really- like they got enough to convict him and everything, but I don't think they ever really got to the complete bottom of any of it. I'm not sure if they got all the bodies.

Not that I'm aware of.

It's such an interesting story. If you go down into it, because he had a whole bunch of brothers and sisters and they found a bunch of backpackers equipment and gear at his brother's house. And so they they still don't know if his brother was involved with it. He's been on interviews saying, Oh, no, I never had anything to do with it. Ivan just had this spare gear that I just wanted to take off in. And you're just like, there's so much more going on.

But I know the whole, that whole. Well, apart from the horror of it, it was was a bit weird.

But I imagine at that point two cars were becoming more and more prevalent around the place, and so it would have been stranger to see people without them needing a ride, right? I imagine that was gradual over..

Public transport became more available and relatively cheaper. Obviously not an absolute term, relatively cheaper. But I think the other thing was that people were less likely to pick up hitchhikers.

Yeah.

Because of the fear of something going wrong.

It's interesting, isn't it? Because I think there were. You wonder if you were to tally it all up, you know, were there more crimes that were committed against people picking up hitchhikers.

Or by the hitchhikers?

Or no, or by the people doing it to the hitchhikers, right. Like so were there more criminals getting who were hitchhiking, getting in cars and then robbing people or murdering people or vice versa, like Ivan Milat picking people up and then being like, let's just go for a trip..

Who knows what the proportion is. But but I think I was certainly more aware. Well, I by the time I was driving, I was a lot less likely to be hitchhiking, obviously. Um, but I was more aware of not picking up hitchhikers myself.

Yeah.

Than not hitchhiking myself.

Yeah. So..

And so I go out and hitchhike..

No, I actually no, I wouldn't, because I already had a car. But if I, if it had been an option, I probably would have gone, oh that'll still be okay. But driving I can remember a time and I can't remember exactly when it was, but I can remember a time where I went passing people who were hitchhiking going a few years ago. I would have stopped and picked them up.

Mhm.

Not now.

See, I've done it. I think I've done it once and I ended up sort of becoming pretty good friends with the guy. Um, this was I think I got him out of Barwon Heads. He was going out of Barwon Heads, walking towards Geelong, and I'm like, Fuck, this is this is probably like, you know, multiple hours walking, you know, it's 20km or so. And he was just a funny character. He was kind of like, um, Bernard Fanning, right? From um, powdered, Powderfinger. He reminds me of him. He was a guitar player. He just had a guitar. And he was just a really rough, kind of funny dude who was living in Barwon Heads and, you know, um, moving around the place, but transient. Um, but today. Yeah. If it from memory any of the hitchhikers that I've seen, they typically look like dudes who you just would not want to pick up.

No.

They look like guys who have probably just gotten out of prison and don't have a car license.

Yeah.

You know, and they're that sort of like, I'm just not risking it. I'm sorry. Like, maybe if I was, uh, 6.5ft. Um. You know.

Jack Reacher.

Yeah. That's it. You can get in..

Who, ironically, hitchhikes.

Yeah, exactly. I'll give anyone a lift, but um..

That was just a reference to a fictional character, but,

Mhm.

Um. Yeah, I can remember the last person, the last hitchhiker I picked up, and it was. We were living in the Dandenong, so that's at least 30 years ago.

Do you remember where you buried him?

Yeah, I do! I buried the, buried her at her boyfriend's 21st birthday party.

As in let her out of the car and so she could safely go away to heaven.

And it was one of those weird one I was. I had been playing basketball in Melbourne, and I was driving back home and going, you know, living in the Dandenongs where the direction I was going in because I wasn't playing right in Melbourne, I was playing just south of Melbourne. So we were driving. By the time you get to the second half of that drive back in those days, it was wilderness, you know, it was rural. Um, and I remember driving along and this young girl on, you know, a couple of kilometres past the last bit of civilisation, which was a pub, and it was about midnight. And I went, what is this? She looked like she was about 16 or 17, you know. What is this girl doing walking along the road at midnight? And I wasn't intending to pick her up. Um, I just pulled over, wound the window down and said, Are you okay?

Mhm.

And she just said, Ah, I haven't got any money. So I couldn't get a taxi. I was at the pub but I closed and they kicked me out and I'm going to my boyfriend's 21st and I went, This sounds like bullshit to me. And I'm..

You were just like, Really? I'm about to be wrong.

And this is before the days of mobile phones.

Yeah.

And, and I looked and went and she had nothing. She was just walking along the road. No, not even a handbag or anything. I went..

You should have just been like, All right, see ya!

Yeah, well pretty much. And I just sat there and went and I said to her, I said, what have you, why would you trust me?

Yeah.

Picking you up? And she just said, I just need to get there.

Mhm.

I mean there's a risk here of all sorts of things that..

I'm about to get stabbed!

Exactly. But the bigger risk is the next person who comes along to pick her up.

It's funny isn't it, because you have to kind of weigh those things up.

And this is, yeah, this is the, I was a school teacher at the time teaching teenage kids. Um, and I just went, If it was one of them, I'd want somebody..

Turn around. Any weapons? Any weapons.

Exactly.

Like, please stand in the car.

And look, you know, there's also the, you know, the risk of, you know..

Her just saying something.

Her just saying, Oh, you know, this guy picked me up and look what happened. Um.

You'd be like, God damn it.

And so I said, so where's the. She said, Oh, you can just drop me at the corner. And I said, there is no chance I'm going to drop you at the corner. Give me the address.

Yeah.

And I drove her to the house. She said, You know, just drop me here and I said, Nope!

Yeah.

Come with me! And we walked up the door, knocked on the door, and it was a party in midnight. It was a party going on. And there's this woman who was a bit older than me, answered the door, and and she looked at the girl and went, Oh, whatever her name was. And I just said, I'm just going to tell you, you can deal with this how you choose. I picked her up on this spot. She'd just been at the pub.

Yeah.

And this girl looked at me and went, You bastard! I went, Nah, I'm sorry.

Yeah, I'm not gonna. I'm in trouble.

I picked her up because I didn't want to leave there. And this was the boyfriend's mother. It turned out that the whole story was legit.

Yeah.

But it was. And the woman just said to me. She said, thank you for doing that.

Yeah. Jeez.

If. And then turned her and said, Why didn't you call us from the pub? Oh, I didn't have any money. He said, surely they would have just let you use the phone, you know? And then, Why were you at the pub? You know, you're 16 or 17, you know, so. But. Yeah. And that's the last time I've ever picked somebody up.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, um. Yeah. Hitchhiking. It's, um. And you just never see it. Now, I can't remember the last time I saw somebody.

I think there'd be areas in Australia. It's one of those you don't.

See in Victoria because it's illegal. So.

Yeah, but I imagine there are areas where if you're regional or you're, you know, the small towns, you probably know people recognise people. It probably happens more frequently where. Yeah. And it's one of those weird things like the smaller the town, the more friendlier people are and the more I think, you know, open to those sorts of things. But as soon as you there's a certain threshold of population size that you get past, where people stop waving and smiling at each other and just being like, ah, my, my own business and keep to myself.

Oh, look. And I've had times where I've stopped and asked if people are okay on the side of the road, particularly out in the country. Um, you're not going to do it in the city. People walking down the street.

'You okay, mate?'.

What's he got to do with you? I'm just walking this down with a dog.

.. sad!

.. taking my dog for a walk down the street. Um, but. And I had it the other day when to me, I was just, you know, out up in the country photographing birds..

I imagine people come up and they're just like, Are you okay?

'You bastard.'

'Are you okay, mate?'

Um, 'You look like you're going to have a heart attack!' No, I just parked the car and, you know, saw birds flying around in the, you know, roadside vegetation, um, parked the car, got out, walked probably 7 or 800m back up the road following these birds up there. The guy's just driven past. Said, Is that your car up there? Yep. Said, You're okay?

You're like, I'm trying to find mushrooms!

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

'You want to come for dinner? I'm cooking beef Wellington.'

Yeah. That's it.

Yeah. And and he and he just said, Okay, I just want to make sure. I said, Well, thanks for stopping, you know. So.

'Get out.'.

Yeah.

'Give me your car.'.

Exactly.

'Where are your keys?'

And so I mean, that's a pretty common thing. If you're out in the country and you see somebody doing something that appears to be stranded. But but there is also that element now of the fear of carjacking and stuff, 100% that people go and, you know, I to be frank, I am not the typical sort of cohort type carjackers that you would assume. I'm walking down the street with a camera, pointing it up in the trees, you know.

'He's gonna rob us!'

He's gonna rob- he's going to hit us with his camera!

What's worse is he's going to show us his pictures.

Of his fucking birds.

'And then there's this other one..'.

'Just take the man! Just take the car!'

'.. yellow tufted honeyeater was down here.'.

Yeah. Jesus. 'Just take the car, man. Don't. Don't punish us.' 'We don't care about your fucking birds.'.

Exactly.

Yeah, I don't know. I found it interesting. Yeah, because it's one of those things that obviously, the further we go into the future, the more I'm sort of becoming interested in going back and watching films from Australian history and like the 50s and 60s and 70s. And I feel like there would be a lot of this kind of cultural stuff that's slowly crept out of the normal, you know, behaviour of people, or our normal culture that you guys would do, but like smoking indoors, right? That was something that happened when I was younger.

Smoking!

Smoking. Yeah.

Smoking will stop- but seeing people smoking in pubs and restaurants and trust me, you see that in in all sorts of shows. Is it that 'we're a weird mob'? That, that movie from the 60s about an Italian migrant who comes over and looks for work and he's, it's effectively a whole..

The thing about him, understanding the culture and the language.

Yeah, it's a great film and I think you'd find it on YouTube. 'They're a Weird Mob', right? They're a weird group of people. 'They're a Weird Mob.'

It's based on a series of books that he wrote.

Yeah, but there's a scene where he goes into a pub and I think they're all smoking and having a drink straight after work altogether. Like it's that.

Yes.

That rush hour time, right?

Yeah.

And that..

Well, that was 6:00.

.. happens anymore. Yeah.

That was 6:00 closing.

Yeah. And so watching that though, I remember watching that a few years ago and being like, these are so foreign to me, these cultural things that at the time would have been so normal and natural are so foreign to me, and I only know of them through film and through stories and through other people telling me. So I wonder how many, how many things today, you know, that we do that we take for granted. Um, that in a number of decades you'll look back and be like, what the fuck were we thinking?

That's an interesting thing, isn't it? Because I think, I look back at the last 60 something years about the changes that have happened. Um, and most of the last 20 years have been technology related.

Yeah.

Um, that, you know, communications is the obvious example that we we all walk around with a camera in our pocket that is also a communications device. Well, and you've.

Seen those things on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook, the little, um, videos reels of people asking, uh, their daughters and their partners how they answer a phone, do they? The signals with your hand?

Yeah.

How do you hang up a phone? And they show usually the younger person pressing their hand, like a button on their hand.

Yeah.

Or holding their flat hand up to their ear.

Yeah.

And these are all weird..

Doing the thumb and the little finger..

Yeah. Exactly. Like you've actually picked up one of those..

And they put it down horizontally.

Yeah. There's a whole bunch of..

What does the word 'hanging up' mean?

Yeah. What are you hanging it on.

Yeah. Because originally and even..

That never made on the wall.

That never made sense even to me when I was a kid because we didn't have a wall phone.

Yeah, yeah.

We had a handset. But to 'hang up' meant to actually put the receiver, as we called it, which was a transceiver, but with the receiver down. Whereas the- back in the olden days before that, the old phones, you would literally hang it up on the wall.

Yeah.

You click it off.

Well, even just calling people randomly that aren't, you know, that on a landline or there's like, I just don't answer anyone's phone number who isn't in my phone now. Because I got, I've been spammed so much. This is probably the last 3 or 4 years, of just somehow your phone number gets out there. You've entered it into something online.

It's random now.

Really, they just generate them. Yeah.

Now half the spam is..

Get a hit.

Is legitimate spam, in a sense that they already know your name.

Mhm. And the other half's..

The other half is just, is is a scam. There's a difference between a spam and a scam. Spam is they know who you are.

Mhm.

A scam is where it's just randomised numbers. They just got to, you know, a computer that is just generating calls. And if it answers then it'll either be an automated robot talking to you or a person who doesn't know who you are. But um, but But yeah, I'm the same. I. You know, there was a while, you know, when I was working, um, I had to answer the phone because I didn't know the phone numbers of clients, particularly when I was working for a company that and from all over the world, you know, I had people ringing me from Singapore or India or Canada. And so you'd effectively have to answer the phone from anywhere. You know, you might not answer a phone if it came up as Uzbekistan, but. But now I probably wouldn't even do it, you know. Now, I'd just let it go to voicemail. And if they don't leave a message, I won't call them back, you know, and I won't pick it up. Um, so yeah, there is that sort of thing. But yeah, I think technology is a thing that has changed the way we live so much.

Eating meat will be one of them. Eating meat from animals that were, that were killed and the meat was harvested from them. That the moment that that becomes, it becomes as affordable, if not cheaper to grow it in a lab. We're going to look back on the fact that we factory farmed and everything in horror. I think it's one of those things that morally and ethically, you're going to look back and be like, you guys were fucking psychos.

Yeah.

You know, the fact that you had billions of of, you know, intelligent animals that were being raised on farms just to be consumed. It won't be one of those things where I think you would judge them so harshly because you had no other option. But it'll be that thing of, I can't imagine doing that today, if you had the option.

Yeah, it's funny one, isn't it, because I'm, I think the, the equivalent step back to that is hunting and killing.

Yeah.

You know, I don't think I would be I'm probably physically capable, but I don't think I would be emotionally capable of going out and hunting, shooting a kangaroo, slaughtering it and eating it.

Well, not just the step between there, preparing it to be eaten as well.

Yeah, but I, you know, I don't I don't know that I would, I would be emotionally capable of doing that in that same sense, the whole idea of actually killing the animal myself and preparing it to eat. Whereas I'm perfectly happy to go and buy kangaroo meat, or beef or lamb or pork or chicken or fish or whatever.

Outsource all of the gross stuff.

Well, it's not even outsourcing the gross stuff. It's just, yeah, there's a bit of it. That's the gross stuff, but it's just outsourcing to specialists.

Yeah.

But we're not hunter gatherers anymore. Um, so, so I think it's that step, but I perfectly understand that people did that and they still have to do it in order for me to eat the meat. But it's not the you know, I'm not trekking through the bush with my rifle anymore. I'm using meat that has been, you know, grown on the farm down the road. So.

Yeah, it will be interesting.

How do we get on this from hitchhiking?

I don't know.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Life.

Anyway, thanks for joining us, guys. Hopefully you enjoyed it. And you'll have to let me know if you guys hitchhike around your home. Home countries if it's still acceptable elsewhere.

Yeah!

Apparently it's more acceptable than, you know, New Zealand and Ireland. Apparently those two places, at least based on this article, they were saying it's more acceptable there to hitchhike, which I can imagine because again, smaller population.

Like, tourism..

Tourism and places close together.

Yeah. So. Cool.

See ya!

See ya!