Transcript of AE 1286 - The Goss: Why Aussies Eat Chocolate Marsupials for Easter

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.

Dad, what's going on? Save that for the start of the episode. Yeah. So. Yeah.

Hey, Pete!

We've got a few stories to cover today. Is there anything you wanted to cover first?

Um, I was going to talk about. And maybe it's a bit pre-emptive, given that Easter is a couple of weeks away. Uh, but Easter bilbies.

Okay.

Rather than Easter bunnies.

Yeah. You can do that.

Um.

It's funny. What was I looking at recently? Bilbies are um, bandicoots.

Bandicoots. They're largest bandicoot.

So these are native Australian mammals, guys. They're marsupials, so they're more closely related to kangaroos, wombats, the thylacine, Tassie devils, all those sorts of animals, than they are to humans.

Yeah.

Elephants, seals, eutherian mammals. Um, and Australia is obviously. I guess it's one of two continents that have marsupials. We've got the largest diversity of them here.

Yes. The- we split off from South America, where there's a few other species, and North America would have the opossum.

The opossum.

Right. And it's so funny because they're so ugly and gross, right. The opossum.

Well, they're carnivores as well.

And they're. Yeah, they're this stinky, kind of unpleasant, skunk looking thing that, that is very, um, vicious if you pick it up and like. Not that our marsupials, like, you pick up a, um.

Brushtail.

Brushtail possum.

And they'll rip your arms off.

Yeah.

But they're. But they're still herbivores.

Yeah, but, um.

Cute fluffy herbivores.

Yeah. I remember Kel was telling me because I think they used the word for skunk. I have to, I have to look this up quickly. Skunk. What is it called? It's like an opossum, right?

Yeah.

Possum. Portuguese. Brazil. What are they called again? Uh, kosaku or something like that. Oh, Gamba. Gamba. So, gamba. Apparently, according to her, she kept saying, yeah, it's a skunk. It's a skunk. And I'm like, it's not a fucking skunk. A skunk is a eutherian mammal. That is like, like a, it's a weasel, right? It's it's closely related to, um, yeah. Weasels and otters and those sorts of animals. And opossum is a marsupial, right? It has, a pouch. And she was like, 'Gamba! It's a it's a skunk!' And then I looked it up. And they use apparently gamba for both skunks. And I'm like, that is so weird that you guys have a single word for two animals.

It's like calling an elephant and a hippopotamus the same name.

No, no, no. But it's worse than that, right?

I know because..

They're on different sides of the mammalian family. So to be like calling an echidna and a porcupine the same word and being like..

Or a deer and a kangaroo.

The average person listening to this is going to be like, you're splitting hairs, but it was just one of these funny things.

Or rabbits!

She kept telling me, It was a skunk and I'm like, It's not a fucking skunk! It's not a damn skunk! I'm a biologist! I'm like, and it was one of those things, you get angry because you you question yourself and you're like, have I just gone through my entire biological, you know, history thinking that opossums were musk?

But that's that's sort of colloquial language, always has that. And we're sort of immediately off the track as usual. But I remember having a discussion would have been the polite version of it, um, uh, basically a shouting match argument. Uh, the other person was shouting and I was just laughing, which probably provoked them even more. Um, about.

Was that argument with me, was it?

No, this is this is in Canada. Um, about the difference between tomato sauce and ketchup and..

Sugar's in it.

And I just said there is no difference. The names are just interchangeable in Australia.

Mhm. Mhm.

Um, because but what she was talking about is what we would call tomato paste. She was calling it tomato sauce. And she never explained that. She just kept and I never dug deeper in. And the argument just got more and more perverse about going, They're not the same thing! I said. Yes, they are!

You know, we have this and those..

And I looked it up. I actually on my phone went here ketchup, tomato sauce, Australia shopping. And you look, this is the same label with just a different name on it. And she went, But they're all just ketchup! And I went, Exactly! And then, and then I finally realised that what she was talking about when she started talking about how you use it was tomato paste, I call tomato sauce, which in fact Americans don't even call it. They call it tomato paste as well. So it must be an Ontario thing, but.

I remember having this sort of issue when asking or thinking about getting a role in America, right? People were like, What the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, you mean a sandwich? And you're like, it's not a damn sandwich. Like a sandwich is sliced bread, right? Yeah. You cut your bread and you put stuff between. A roll is..

A sandwich is just two bits of bread with stuff in the middle of it. And it It doesn't matter how the bread is manufactured so.

Well, that's weird right? For us, like when you see a subway sandwich artist or a rap artist or whatever it is, and you kind of like, They're rolls.

Yes. A bread roll.

There are no sandwiches that are sold at subway. They're all rolls. What do you call baguettes? Right. Yeah. But yeah, that was one of those things where..

It's just local use of language.

Yeah. I didn't appreciate- though culturally, I don't think Americans do that kind of 'roll' culture. Like we have Bakers Delight and Brumbies and these bakeries, they don't have rolls.

They don't traditionally have bakeries.

Yeah.

You know, you can walk around a you walk around a large sort of shopping centre, a shopping mall in Australia, and there'll be at least two bakeries in it.

Yeah.

And that are specialising in basically just producing bread. They might have a few cakes and bits and pieces as well, but it's mostly just bread. That doesn't exist in America. In Canada, one of the Australian ones, Bakers Delight, has been rebranded in Canada.

Well, what? They started up over there and just turned it into something else?

Yeah, it's it's exactly the same as what we have, but it's just got a different name. It's called Carbs. C A R B S.

Yeah.

Um, and can't see those in the US, so people just don't understand the idea of it. And whereas in Europe, the whole idea, you know, French bakeries. You've been to France, I haven't. You know, every street in France has got a bakery in it that, you know, they're either doing pastries or bread or.

And it's one of those things. The bread here, the pinnacle of bread in Australia typically is freshly baked, um, bread.

Bread.

Bakers delight does the sort of commercial version of it. There are smaller bakeries that will typically have better quality stuff because they're more sort of like artisan or whatever you want to use, you know. France seems to just shit all over Australian bakeries in that like, all of their, their bread. They've just nailed it for a thousand years, right. And they just, I don't know if they use different wheat. Um, so that this is apparently this is related to why there's less obesity there. Um, it's because of the bread and the way that they cook it. It doesn't have the same kind of, I guess, calories in it that it does here. It's it's interesting, but yeah, we got sidetracked. So marsupials and bilbies..

Yeah, bilbies. So. Yeah. So there was a movement about, I'm trying to remember where I first heard of it. I think about early 1990s.

It would have been when I was a kid..

When you were a kid.

And being a big thing..

And the whole, because the whole Easter Bunny thing, um, is obviously a thing. Umm..

I gotta look up where this came from.

But, but a relates to, um, buying chocolates. So Easter eggs and then chocolate rabbits and those sort of things.

Speaker1:
And to pause you there. As for the character of the Easter Bunny made its way, as for how the character of the Easter Bunny made its way to America, History.com reports that it was first introduced in the 1700s by German immigrants to Pennsylvania, who reportedly brought over their tradition of an egg laying hare named Osterhase or Oschter Haws from the old country. Yeah. Easter hare. How weird is that? Because it is one of those things, I remember there's a South Park episode, right, where they take the piss out of a effectively, um, Christianity, uh, Catholicism and the Easter Bunny. And they kind of mix it together as this big conspiracy where, um, you know, the Catholic Church is hunting for the Easter Bunny because it undermines Jesus, you know? And so they've, like they capture him and put him in a cage and they want to torture him and find out all this, 'Where do these eggs come from' kind of stuff. And you're just like, it's so funny how they just they tie all those things in and come up with something hilarious. But I remember watching that when I was younger and being like, you're right. How do you grow up thinking that Easter Bunny like chocolate eggs is some sort of a normal thing?

I know!

What the fuck.

Well, you know Santa Claus, tooth fairy.

Speaker2:
Yeah.

We've believed in all. Well, we don't believe necessarily, but we perpetuate all of these childhood stories, so. Yeah. But yeah. So the whole Easter Bunny thing was, you know, when chocolate manufacturers started to move away from just producing eggs to, you know, come out at Easter, which now they come out in January, but which is a different grant. But they they started producing things like chocolate rabbits, you know, chocolate Easter bunnies. And, um, there was a movement, uh, among some conservation groups in Australia to perpetuate the idea of the Easter bilby as the Australian version of the Easter Bunny, because the bilby is an endangered marsupial. So, as you say, it's a bandicoot, a large bandicoot. Um, and to sell chocolate bilbies as a way of raising money for bilby conservation. Um, and it just became a thing. And then a couple of the big chocolate manufacturers started doing it. And now you see Easter bilbies all over the place in Australia.

Speaker1:
Well that's it. If you want to do your bit and give back to the environment, especially in Australia, obviously if you're going to lash out quite a bit of money on it on chocolate during Easter.

Speaker2:
Yeah, make it bilby shape rather than a rabbit shape.

Speaker1:
They they typically gold. You'll see them. They look like rabbits.

It was Lindt. Yeah.

Yes.

Do you want to check that up? Just..

Ah yes, there it is. Lindt. There is..

I think Lindt first did it.

Yeah.

Um, and they're gold wrapped, gold foil wrapped. So.

It's pretty much the same. It just tastes, all that better because you know your money 10% of where it is..

Speaker2:
At least it was then. I don't know whether they're still doing it or they're just riding on the the history. But yeah, it was just an interesting thing of how you take something that is so popular and such a commercial marketing tool, um, and convert it for good. In theory, um, uh, is just an interesting way of doing it, so to say, Oh, well, we can actually make a thing. So.

Did I share that article with you? I can't remember about the greater bilby. Because, so there's two species of bilby, is the lesser and the greater, the lesser has gone completely extinct, or at least hasn't been seen in 60 or 70 years..

Which is the definition of extinct.

Yeah, but that's how, if people wonder how things come back from extinction, usually it's they're classified as extinct, which means they..

Haven't been seen in something like 50 years..

50 years by biologists, hasn't been officially recorded. But if they quite often, I think, was it the black footed ferret? That was one of the earliest ones that I remember hearing about watching a doco with you. And this was like in the prairies or something, right?

Yeah.

Speaker2:
24 of them.

Badlands of um, in America, where it state it in? Might be South Dakota or.

Speaker1:
Some guy just had them on his farm, didn't he?

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker2:
He had this tiny, little..

Tiny little colony of..

Speaker1:
20 of them or so.

Speaker2:
And they took them all into captivity.

Yeah. Bred them.

Bred them up and then released them.

Yeah. But.

And now they did this a viable population, wild population in The Badlands of North America.

Which is great and these guys are they're so cute. Look it up, like black footed ferret. They have these little black feet. They're like, well, they're sort of like my cat Scrap, right? They're like these cats with these funny little black and white markings on them. And they're just very cute. But we sort of did a similar thing with the greater bilby. So they're the larger of the two and they're still extant, but there were only a few dozen left, I think 50 or so, and they got pulled out of the wild effectively and bred up. And and they had to in Australia, we've done a lot, especially in the arid environments of conserving areas where they typically fence off a large area to keep keeping out foxes..

.. keeping out rabbits.

Speaker2:
And cats..

Which are the competitors. Rabbit is a direct competitor to Bilby.

Yeah.

Um, and then keeping out, you know, as you say, rats are harder to keep out. But cats and foxes are the big problem.

Speaker1:
I haven't looked lately, but I should know from my PhD. But I would imagine that, um, rats are less of a problem. Like invasive species of rats are less of a problem in arid areas because there are just so many native species of Australian rodents that they wouldn't typically outcompete or directly compete like, I think usually rats and mice. The invasive kinds do a lot better around urban areas where humans have disrupted the natural habitat, and there's loads of waste and everything. You know, that's why the plague rats in the cities, in Europe and everything just passing on disease because they weren't really living in in the wild. They were living around humans and eating all their, you know, all of the effluent and all the other crap that's there. But but yeah, it was really cool. I think from that article I was reading that they had fenced off all these areas, and some of them were quite large, and they had reintroduced the bilbies and then found evidence of them breeding, and now there are multiple thousands. I think it was up, you know, more than a thousand, um, greater bilby in some of these different areas. And it's one of those sad stories where when you look at the historic distributions across the continent of a lot of these marsupial species, especially arid ones, they typically have huge distributions. And I think the greater bilby was one of those where it pretty much their distribution map of Australia is pretty much all of Australia. Right. So we had them in Victoria, New South Wales..

Not in tropical Australia but..

Speaker1:
No, but all the arid areas. And then they've been restricted to a tiny area.

Speaker2:
Because- little patches.

Speaker1:
Yeah. But I hope they, they get sort of brought back a little more. I think going to Phillip Island was nuts. I probably, what, two years ago with you guys, with you and mum and just driving at night and seeing bandicoots on the side of the road.

Yeah, well, they're the eastern barred bandicoot and same thing. Those eastern barred bandicoots are small bandicoot, about half the size of a bilby..

And barred because they've got stripes on..

Speaker2:
They got stripes on the back. Yeah, half the size of a rabbit. Mhm. Um, and they were almost extinct. Um, and Victorian population was still around and there was a big captive breeding program going by Melbourne Zoo and Healesville Sanctuary and a couple of other private conservation groups. Uh, and now they've been rereleased and released down to Phillip Island and is one place where they would have been historically, hundreds of years ago.

Yeah.

Um, and mostly they got outcompeted by rabbits and then foxes and cats got them. So.

Yeah. And I think they had a huge thing of getting rid of feral cats and foxes and everything on the island, so that it was effectively a sanctuary for them that didn't have a fence but had the ocean to keep the stuff away. You just have to make sure none of them come over on the bridge.

Speaker2:
Across the bridge..

Or people.

Which they do.

Yeah, but yeah, but, um, yeah, I remember it being weird just driving along and seeing them on the side of the road. Because typically in Australia, when you're driving around, at least, you know, locally where we are, you're not even going to really see a kangaroo here. If you drive into the bush, you might see, you know, those sorts of more large, larger, more conspicuous native animals, but you typically don't see small things, right, that- maybe possums?

Speaker2:
And often they're nocturnal as well. So.

And bandicoots. When I was doing biology at uni and we went on excursions or, you know, did trips and stuff, and you were out at night surveying things or putting out traps. Getting something like a bandicoot was like catching some incredibly rare Pokemon.

.. unicorn.

Yeah. Whereas back in the day, they were everywhere. And it was interesting seeing on Phillip Island that when they are allowed to live in an environment free of invasive species that are going to predate on them or compete with them. They do just go wild and you see them everywhere. And yeah, it was interesting to think, too, about the greater bilby being or having such a huge effect on the natural environment because they dig these large burrows and these sort of warrens, right, like similar to rabbits. And I hadn't really thought about how important they are for allowing seeds and water and other animals to go down into the to penetrate further into the soil, which is an important thing in arid environments, because otherwise it just blows away, right?

Yeah. Exactly.

None of these burrows. And so apparently they used to just, you know, with the millions of bilbies that would have been there, they would have had this stuff happening all over the place all the time, and the environment would have looked a lot different from what it does today. So, yeah, it is one of those sad things, isn't it? I think driving around in the in the countryside in Australia, quite often, you look out the window and you think, oh, the natural environment, this is how it looks. And you don't realise there's been loads of sheep and cows and other animals going in and changing how, how it all works, the ecosystem and the balance and everything. And so it would have been thriving back in the day. I always really envy probably Captain Cook, right. Or any of those really. Um, is it Dampier? You know, those early explorers or sailors that came to Australia and got to see it as it was prior to..

Any kind of invasion..

Speaker2:
Colonisation. Or really prior to, yeah, European invasion, where we obviously disrupted the land, but the introduced, introduction of foxes and cats and rats and all these things that just wiped out loads of native animals and, you know, also the indigenous people. But it must have been just absolutely crazy where they were sailing around the outskirts of the continent on a boat and just being able to keep dropping in different locations and getting out and being like, What's here, you know. And just going for a wander and just and then get on again and a few hundred kilometres up the coast. And let's repeat the next day, like, um, Captain Cook's trip must have been insane because he did what, he probably saw the most of Australia that had ever been seen by that time, right? Like by any individual person or crew.

Speaker2:
His crew. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they went from, um, the Bass Strait. So right on the corner of Victoria and New South Wales, that border on the coast, um, all the way through to, you know, the north of Cape York. So they saw the whole. Well, they didn't see every bit of it, but they went along the whole of the East Coast.

Speaker1:
And then it would have been what, Flinders and Bass. They are the ones that circumnavigated.

Speaker2:
.. circumnavigation..

Speaker1:
And mapped. Yeah, yeah. It must have been an absolutely crazy thing. If you could go back to that period, what would be the thing that you would be most interested in seeing, experiencing?

Mmm..

You know, like, if Captain Cook had you on the ship and you were you got to choose a place to go or an area to experience or a group of indigenous people to interact with. Would there be something that would be top of the list?

Speaker2:
Oh for me, and it's probably familiarity as much as anything else, would be Port Phillip Bay. The bay that Melbourne sits on. I would love to see what the area that we now have, we call Melbourne was like before it was any built environment on it.

True. Um, only the, you know, smaller number of indigenous people living there. Allegedly, you know, people have have written, based on oral history from indigenous groups that the um, wetland area that is now Albert Park, South Melbourne, Port Melbourne, um, was sort of like Kakadu, you know, for hundreds of thousands of birds on these, you know, permanent wetlands. Um, and of course, that was all filled in. You know, Albert Park Lake is the remnant of it, and that's a completely artificial lake now, but it's the remnant of those wetlands. Um..

Well, there were platypi, right? In the Yarra River, and..

Speaker2:
Yeah, I would love to have seen what that that was like. Um, the Yarra River, of course, is completely different because that used to have a, um, there was a rock cascade.

Yeah.

Um, right in the middle of what is now the central business district where the river goes through. And that was blown up and dug out.

Speaker1:
I imagine it wouldn't have been as deep to it would have been a lot wider. Yeah.

Speaker2:
Yeah. So that's what I would like to see, is just what that area of Melbourne where I grew up in Beaumaris, on the coast. What what was that like?

Yeah. Sure.

At that time.

Because there's.

Speaker1:
Those two layers to it. It's an area that you're familiar with modern in modern times, but it would be so interesting to see what it was like even only 200 years ago, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Speaker1:
Yeah. Cool. I think yeah, for me, it would be just probably some of those biological hot spots, you know, around the country and- or even the arid zone where it has been just completely decimated, you know, um, and we've lost so many different marsupials and, and other mammal species. Yeah. And birds as well, to be like, what was it like? Because you hear about those stories. Well, and Swan Bay nearby is a good example where it's called Swan Bay because it used to have, what, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of black swans.

Yeah.

And the indigenous people here would just raid their nests every spring and summer and just live off the eggs and everything. And nowadays you go and you'd be lucky to see a dozen or so at a time, you know..

Every now and then you get a few hundred..

Speaker1:
Yes. So and I'm sure this is a story that's played out all over the world, even if it hasn't been, even if it's an area that hasn't been colonised. It's just, you know, a lot of those phenomena that you would have seen back in the day with so many animals and everything, it would have been absolutely insane. Yeah. Anyway, Bilbies. Go check them out. Easter bilbies.

Speaker2:
Easter Bilbies.

Speaker1:
Thanks for joining us, guys. See ya!