Transcript of AE 1297 - The Goss: How 'Dropping In' Culture Has Changed 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, okay. 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 Aussie English.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. Okay, 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.

Oh, yeah. Don't know what you've been doing. All right.

I'm going to get the audio going. Dropping in, Dad. Did you want to drop in later?

No!

No one ever does.

It's inappropriate.

So you want to introduce this story while I grab a beer? Have you finished yours or are you still going?

No, I'm still going.

Weak.

Um, yeah. This is a story again from the ABC. We seem to be referring to them a bit.

Well, they- I must be following them on Facebook because that's where they all pop up and I share them to you..

You don't have to follow them. You just, you click on one and then the Facebook and..

Yeah, the algorithm?

Google algorithm. Just..

Our digital overlords.

Yeah. Pops them in more and more.

Mhm.

Yeah. What's the etiquette of dropping into someone's house?

Don't.

Yeah. Don't. Well, that used to be. It was. And I don't know when it changed, and whether even if it has changed. And that's the, the, the premise of the article is, "Is it no longer cool or acceptable to just turn up at somebody's place and knock on the door and go, 'Hey, just passing. Thought I'd drop in.'" Which is the old cliched comedy..

Why are you here?

Saw the lights on.

Turn the lights off.

Yeah, exactly.

Shut the curtains.

Yeah.

Draw the blinds. Yeah. All right. I'll, um..

Cos and I mean, we. I mean, when you're kids, you do it all the time.

Yeah.

Going 'Hey, yeah.."

Is Pete home?

Yeah.

It's- No, he's not! Piss off!

Can it be interesting to see how that changes with Noah? Because I imagine that since I was a kid, changes have occurred. And there's probably certain etiquette that I'm yet to experience because my kids aren't at that stage now of being able to freely roam around the street and go to the neighbour's house or whatever to hang out with the kids. Um..

They'll be able to do that by the time they're about 20.

Yeah, well that's it. It changed, didn't it? Like, we've talked about this quite a bit. And it's not just Australia, but when you were growing up, you could just go out in the streets from what, age? Like seven..

7 or 8.

Yeah. Whereas when I was a kid, that wasn't, I wasn't allowed to just roam around..

.. As a teenager. Really?

Well it would have been primary school. And it would have been our main street. And hanging out.

Yeah, but you wouldn't have just been.

But it wouldn't be just. I wouldn't go to the shop..

Hey, I'm going out.

No. It would be, I'm going to Luke's..

I'm going to Luke's house. Okay. Make sure you're..

200m away.

Yeah, it wouldn't be just. I'm going out to hang out.

Yeah.

So whereas for us, it was. Yeah. Yeah. We'd, you know, Where are you going? But, I'm just going out in the street with my friends!

Yeah, and mum's just like, Fucking go, mate!

Yeah. As long as you're back by dinner time.

Leave me alone!

Leave me alone! Go and run around the block. That used to be my, that was the usual thing.

Yeah.

Um.

So. Yeah, but that changed when I was a kid. I didn't get to do that at a young age.

No. Well, I remember when I was. I think I was eight when I first went to the local, um, council library was, um, about a 20 minute bus trip away. We didn't have one in our suburb. There was two suburbs away, and we didn't have a car. My father had a car for work. Um, but only he was allowed to drive it. And obviously he was at work during the day. My mother didn't get a car until I was probably about 7 or 8. And so we used to go by bus everywhere.

Yeah.

And we used to go to the library, you know, and mum and the three kids would get on the bus and go. And it was a big sort of half day outing to go to the library. But then when I was about eight, I was, Can I go to the library. Oh yeah. Off you go.

Mhm.

All right. Go and get on the bus. I had to walk, you know, 400m down the road to get to the bus stop, get on the bus, sit on the bus for 20 minutes. Get off, go to the library, come back. And I cannot imagine letting you do that when you were eight, you know.

Well, they were. Wasn't there a series of murders? Like there was some in Adelaide, right, where three kids went to the beach and just disappeared.

.. again.

Yeah. And they pretty much worked out that it was a guy that was living down the road from them that, um, gave them money to get something to eat and then just took them home and probably did what he wanted to do with them. But I think it was after that point, right, that you guys started. And this was sort of a global thing during the, probably what, late 70s 80s that parents started to monitor their kids a little more.

Yeah..

And you had that series of serial killers in the US, right.

Yeah.

Was it late 70s and 80s? When Ted Bundy and all those types were going around? John Wayne Gacy, or whatever his name was?

It was, but I think it was also, um, I don't know. I'm sure it's different if you're living in a small country town.

Yeah.

Um, and everybody knows each other, and it's quiet.

There's no traffic.

And it's traffic. It's now, you know, we were literally our playground was the street, out in front of our house.

Yeah.

Um..

And there would have been so fewer cars..

It was a reasonably busy street in the, in the local context. Our strip of it, when I was a little kid, was the only bit that was actually bitumenised. Every other street around us was dirt roads.

Really?

Um, but for whatever reason, about 250, 300m of our bit of the street was bitumenised until I was about 7 or 8, and then the whole lot got you know, was a big program of making all the roads in the suburb. But we'd just go and play and you go, Oh, car coming!

Yeah.

You get off the road, let it go. It was a straight road. Get off the road. You go out and play for five minutes. Car coming! Whereas I can't imagine you letting your kids go and play out in the street out here. They've been about as busy as our street was.

Yeah. There'd be no point though, because..

They'd be off the road every 15 seconds.

Depending on the time of day.

Yeah.

The time of day they're going to be here though, like in the mornings and the afternoons.

Yeah. Pfft.

There's going to be, there's no point in even being out there. But it would be the danger of just running out onto the road and getting hit by a car.

Yeah.

That would be the main thing. But then there is that whole strangers just walking around.

Stranger danger thing.

Yeah, that's. That's probably way overblown compared to what you actually, proportionately, should be afraid of.

Oh! Absolutely!

Yeah. But at the same time.

But it is controllable.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So.

So anyway, this, this article, let's do a little bit at the start here. "Dropping in used to be a common way of staying in touch. But is it still okay to do in Australia? Etiquette expert Anna Musson says unexpected visitors can be a horrifying thought for many. If you're dropping past.."

Excuse me?

"And they just get a knock on the door, most people look at that with a little bit of terror." So it is one of those things. I get it with parcel drop offs, because two, the only people that I have knocking on the door during the day are people dropping off parcels, which I don't mind, or people asking for money.

Yeah.

And it's about 50-50. So it's almost once a week there'll be someone knocking at the door and they do- you know what they do? Hello! Like, Hey, it's me! You know, they use that kind of language that makes you think..

Think, Oh, I know this person!

Yeah. They'll be like, Hey, anyone there? Like, G'day!

No.

And you'll be like. You'll open the door and then be like, Fuck! I'm like..

So, not today.

And it's so funny because you just see in their face they're like, So how's it going? How's your day going? And you're like, Fuck. You both look at each other and he's he's thinking..

.. I've been trained..

How do I get this guy..

.. to do this routine.

Have a conversation about bullshit? And you're thinking, this guy's just going to try and get me to have a conversation about bullshit before selling me something or asking for money.

Yeah.

And you both look at each other like, agh.

Are they really selling you something? It's, the only thing they're selling are services. Like, Switch your electricity! Yeah. Piss off. I'm perfectly happy with my electricity.

Yeah.

But I can get you a better deal! Did I ask for an argument? You know, it's. Or they're charities.

You here to argue as well?

Yeah. Or they're charities looking for donations.

Yes.

And fortunately or unfortunately, the charities are the easier ones to deal with.

Well, I just shut the door.

Yeah.

I try not to be rude, and I..

Just say I'm not interested. Go on.

Yeah.

Um, and it is not wasting their time either!

Well, they're paid probably by the hour or by sign up.

Yeah.

Whereas I think the, the drop in thing. And I've got a theory about this. I when I read this story, when you sent it to me, I went I, and I didn't even look at why and any discussion about it, but I reckon it's to do with the fact that when I, and I look back when I was a kid. When I was a kid, I only ever knew my friends mothers.

Mhm.

Because their mothers were always at home. There was one friend I knew, his father because his father was an artist, and he worked in a little studio right by the front door. And he'd walk in and he'd go, Oh, good day, and come and have a come and have a chat. Everybody else I knew the mothers. And so the mothers were always at home. And being a housekeeper at home meant that the houses were always tidy. There was always a cup of coffee available. There was something. There was- people baked, they had things to eat and those sort of things. Now somebody knocks and you go, Oh shit! The place is is chaos! I wasn't expecting visitors! I haven't got anything to feed them! I haven't got any- whereas..

The only people that I allow to come over at the drop of a hat are those that I am not ashamed to show my mess to.

Exactly! And so I'm sure that's part of this thing of, you know, it's that fear of- not the fear that people are going to, you're going to have some random dropping in, but it's that, Oh geez! The neighbours have just dropped in to say hello! I don't want them in where I've got dishes in the sink and I've got..

But it's ironic..

Crap all over the floor.

We set up these expectations as a result of having that kind of attitude.

Yeah!

Because if you're not going to have people over when your house is complete chaos, they're going to always assume, well, everyone else's house is amazing. Like, as I remember, I used to laugh when mum, mum would tend to lose her shit prior to Nana and Grandpa coming over, or family, and be like, We've got to clean the house! Pete, vacuum! Dad, clean the toilet! Take the cats outside! And it's just like, Mum! But this isn't how the house normally is. It's. It's like, yeah, but we have to pretend it looks like this all the time!

Billy Connolly used to tell this joke about the Queen, the late Queen Elizabeth. He said, The Queen thinks the world smells like fresh paint. Because wherever she goes, 400m in front of her, there's somebody painting the bridge or the buildings or..

Well, yeah, it feels like that at times because, yeah, it's just like. But yeah, the irony is that if you just showed, if everyone just loosened up and showed their houses being..

This is how we live.

With less than perfect, everyone else else would relax, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And it would become this, this self-imposed prison..

Or they'd go, We're never going to drop in there again because their house is a pile of crap! Yeah. So you go, All right. Good. We don't need them here anymore! We'll only invite them when we've cleaned up.

It's so funny, though, because you do go to people's houses and you'll, you'll forget that they've probably spent the last half day cleaning the house, preparing for you to show up. And you show up and you have, you know, you go in and you have your tea or coffee..

Make a mess and leave!

But you look around and you're like, you feel like shit because you know, your house looks like crap and you're like, Their house is pristine! But you don't see them running around like mad.

No, I know. Yeah. So it is one of those weird things.

But yeah. So.

.. the etiquette of dropping in.

Do you have many friends that you would just drop in at their houses at the drop of a hat or..

I don't have many friends!

True that.

No.

But..

And it's- No, not. No. In a sense that I've got lots of acquaintance friends.

Mhm.

Um, and, you know, some that I've known for over 60 years, but but I wouldn't. And the acquaintance friends are the ones that I think you don't just drop in on.

Well, but it's, you're not going to just drive to Melbourne and then show up at someone's house without telling them first.

There's only, like the neighbours. If I don't drop in at the neighbours, many of the neighbours. Hey, I'm here, let's- and have this expectation that they're going to pull a beer or make a cup of tea or a coffee or, you know, pull food out or whatever to..

.. going to get some biscuits?

Which used to be the thing! When I, the neighbours are always dropping in at our place.

Yeah.

Um, when I was a kid. And my mum would do the same thing. I'm just going to go round and see Joan, or I'm going to go down the road to see Irma or whatever. Um, and as soon as you did, it was, I'll put the kettle on, have a cup, here's a biscuit or a cake or whatever. Um.

Do you think we've lost something, though, as a result?

I think we have. And we've lost that sense of community, I think. And again, it was partly because people were home, you know, mothers were home. Uh..

And if you walked around the suburb here..

You could walk around knocking up 27 doors and there'd be nobody home!

Because everyone's at work.

Everybody's at work!

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's the same-.

Or you would knock on the door, I'm the cleaner! Do you want to come in for a cup?

Yeah. That's it. This is my house. But you can come in.

Yeah.

It is one of those things.

You want for the television.

I think I've only more recently become aware of just how lonely I am. But people are, in general.

Lonely in a crowd. Yeah.

Well, yeah. And that's the thing. Like, it was funny. I was reading an article, I think, or watching a video recently where they were saying, how many close friends do you have? And by definition, that is someone you see more than, so it was twice a month or more.

Yeah.

And in the 60s, what do you think the number was?

It'd be 100.

No it was, it was 12.

Oh.

Close friends that they would hang out with.

Adults. Yeah.

That they would hang out with on a regular basis. What do you think it is today?

Two?

It's one.

Yeah.

And isn't that sad?

See, I don't, I don't know that anybody, I don't think I see anybody more than twice a month.

Yeah, but then that's..

Other than family.

Yeah.

And we're all fortunate.

And none of us have friends!

No, exactly. But we're fortunate that, you know, that Jo and I have both our children and therefore our four grandchildren, all living within one Ks, walking distance. The other one 15 minutes drive.

Well, we weren't allowed to move away.

Yeah, exactly.

You guys..

Shame on us!

We shamed you. Said, You move away, we're never coming to visit!

That's it.

If it's more than half an hour's drive.

We die. Pretend we're dead.

No, no. But it's so. Yeah, I think we've lost that sense of community. But. But part of that was inevitable because we we now live. Funnily enough, we now live much more socially than we did when we were younger.

Which is why it goes deep.

Yeah, it's wide and it's electronic.

Yeah.

It's social media and and handsets. I hesitate to call them phones because the last thing people use them for now is to actually speak with a phone call.

Well, yeah. You get a call from a number you don't know or even a number, you know, and you're like, Fuck, I don't want to talk. I'm busy.

Yeah, yeah, leave me a message and I might get back to you.

Yeah. That's it. Just text me. I'll deal with it when I'm ready! It is funny, though, right? Because calling someone without letting them know, or showing up to their house without letting them know first. It's that kind of 'I demand your time'.

Yes.

And you, or I expect you to give me your time without any, any preparation, no matter what you're doing, effectively, right?

Yeah.

And back in the day, it would be like, of course, because I don't have the ability to get back to you later. There's no internet. I can write you a letter.

Yeah.

I can give you a phone call, maybe, later on. But there would be the whole, Well, we'll just smash it out. Or also that it isn't done that often and it's not that easy. Because again, you didn't have the technology to be able to just send someone a text message no matter where you are in the world..

Yeah and I, you know..

Saying, g'day, how's it going?

But I mentioned that my, you know, my mum, I'm just going around the corner to see Joan, one of our family friends.

Yeah.

And, you know, I grew up with their oldest son, um, who was a close friend of mine. Went to school together for 13 years. Well, 12 years, unfortunately, he died when he was 17. But, um, but Joan would be at our doorstep three times a week. Mum would go round there. And it was just, I'm just going to. There wasn't anything. I don't have to go and get anything or do anything. It was just I'm just going to go and say hello.

Yeah.

You know, and Joan would do the same thing. Sometimes she'd she'd knock on the door and go, Oh, I just need to talk to your mum about it. Come in. No, I won't come in. I haven't got time.

Shut up, Joan!

And then half an hour later, she's at the door. Still..

Just come in!

Still talking to me before I moved up to mum, you know?

Just come in.

Come in. Put that kettle on.

God damn it.

Um, but, yeah, I think now you'd just send them a text, say, Hey, Joan, how are you going?

Yeah.

You know.

But, but that's sad, right? Because I have, I think, thinking about it, I have loads of friends Loads of friends that I talk to, but none that I see.

Yeah.

And that's. It's funny how that still matters and makes you feel lonely, even if you have that superficial direct connection via Facebook. Even if I call them, there's something different about physically seeing someone in front of you and hugging them or, you know, greeting them and hearing them and reading their body language and everything that must have some deeper effect on you, you know, psychologically that..

Yeah. And I've got friends that I've known for. Well, how old was I when I met him? 11? So, you know,

73.

Yeah, 55 years. Um, and we, you know, correspond via social media and text messages every now and then, but we still organise a couple of times a year just to get together. Three of us just sit down and have lunch, have a chat. Because there's something about- we're social animals. And social is not just superficial communication. It's it's I hesitate to use this word because it has a religious overtone and it's not intended this way. It's that 'fellowship' of we are going to do something together.

With the ring.

Yeah, exactly.

Take it to Mordor.

Yeah, right. So we're going to do something together, you know. It's a shared experience. Rather than just chatting to each other via text messaging. So. But then there are other times where, you know, I've got, you know, two close friends who you know very well. Who, one of whom I see quite regularly, the other one I probably see once a year maybe, but every week we are texting each other during football games. So we have this. We have that shared experience that we separate the geography and, and we will be sitting watching the same game on television.

It's so funny.

That wasn't a free kick, you know.

So there's a, there's a service on, on on your computer, a free service called Plex. And effectively someone who- you have to download it. The other person has it. One of you has a server at home where you put all of your movies and TV shows and whatever you want to watch, right? And you can both simultaneously stream it together.

Oh okay.

So you can get an invite and go and watch the stuff that they have.

So can I pause it and it pauses for you, too? So we can have a chat about.

It was, I was doing that for a while with a friend, Sean, where we were watching um, uh, Better Call Saul.

Oh, yeah.

And we were watching an episode by episode. Um, and it was so fun because we would get the phones on too, so we could talk to one another.

Yeah.

Whilst we were watching it, and, um, that was such. It was one of those times, like, it's so funny how you have those moments in, in time that you don't necessarily appreciate that are really profound. Like when Game of Thrones came out, um, every year or two years or whatever it was for a short period of time, whatever it was, two, three months, there would be just almost on a weekly basis. You would be talking about the last episode with everyone.

Yeah.

With everyone! Right?

It was the workplace conversation. I can imagine, because it was around the time I retired, but.

And it was so fun. It was so interesting. And whereas there's so few of those types of events or TV shows that that are ongoing, there may be specific events that take place, like the Aurora thing, right? Where everyone raged up about that online being like, God, it's all that's there online at the moment.

Yeah.

But it was kind of cool for a moment in time, a few days, you're pretty much sharing this with what, like 50% of the world's population has the ability to go outside and see it, but it lasts for a day or two.

Yeah.

And so it is fun when those things happen, but they're kind of fleeting. Pokemon Go was another one.

Yeah.

You wouldn't, you wouldn't have gotten into that.

No, I didn't. But I was fully aware of it because it was just, it infiltrated everything.

But it was so interesting playing it. Like, I remember there would be every day the girls in the office and I would just go out and walk around, um, Carlton Gardens playing Pokemon Go and just hanging out, having a coffee and just playing this game. But then I was talking about this with Kel the other night, where I remember it was just so weird how a game on a phone could change the way people behave in the real world in terms of where they are at any given time. And in a way that makes the world safer. It was so bizarre walking through the CBD of Melbourne, and there were certain areas in the CBD when Pokemon Go was huge, where there were loads of gyms that you could fight with your Pokemon and you would get points and catch new Pokemon or whatever. And I remember going to the front of the is it, um, Queen Victoria Library or whatever it is, the library there. The library.

State Library.

State Library, yeah, on um, Swanston Street, across from Central Melbourne.

Central Station. Yeah.

And there would have been like six gyms all at the front of this one place, because the game had set it up so that it was using a GPS, um, map of the world, and it would set up gyms to be around things like libraries or hospitals or whatever. And I remember there being a..

Common corners and..

Thousands of people. At about midnight.

Just standing around on their phones.

Standing. And it was they were chatting to each other. Strangers, just wandering around being like, Oh, what are you doing? Have you got this one yet? And and you could suddenly have conversations with complete, you know, strangers and you all have this shared interest. But also that it was safer because there were so many people out doing something that was so wholesome that you felt like- it was just funny. Because I remember my housemate was playing the game at the time, almost hate playing it. He was addicted to it and he would just at midnight, he's like, I'm going to the fucking zoo. And then he would walk outside.

Which is walking distance from where you were living.

Yeah, from North Melbourne, and go through Royal Park and then go to the zoo because there were gyms all around the zoo.

Yeah.

And he was just like, I'm just going to walk around the zoo for an hour or so and see what I can catch. And I'd be like, It's fucking midnight, man. And he's like, Yeah? There's just going to be other people playing the game! Going out there too, because no one else is there! So they'll be thinking, I can get these Pokemon. No one else is going to be around. And he's like, It's fine! But it was such a weird moment because that only lasted a few months.

Yeah. But again, that thing will run its race because, and not the social aspect of it I think is what, what made it hang on. Yeah. Because I hadn't, when it first came out, I went, uh, this won't last a week.

As an individual, you kind of like..

As a task, it'll last a week.

Yes.

Because you'll get bored of it.

Yeah.

But the social part of it, I think, is what..

Yes.

Yeah, and that random social shared experience..

I get bored with games pretty quickly. But the fact that everyone was doing this and it had that social side to it tied in, it was very powerful. And I don't even know if the Nintendo, the game developers had even worked that out initially, and that was the plan to try and get people to be social in order to get them to stay on the game, but it ended up being a very interesting kind of thing that happened.

Social experience.

Yeah. And you kind of, I miss those kinds of events that brought people together, that you have a shared experience or a shared interest or shared hobby or whatever it is, and you can, you know, hang out together and just talk shit about that thing. Right? Because I think for the most part, people are so busy with their own lives and our interests are so different.

Well, I think social media seems to have not replaced but paralleled some of that where conversations, even if they're only conversations in your head. Because you're, you'll see a random post by somebody on, you know, somebody's, one of your friends has commented on somebody else that you've never had any contact with and probably never will again. And you go, Oh, somebody made a statement on Facebook and they posted something.

To pause you there, there was a meme on Reddit the other day that was like, um, a skeleton, dead on the ground and a knight standing there being sad because he'd obviously tried to come to rescue a princess or whatever. And they died years before. And the title was like, um, it was effectively like the person has gone online to search for a problem they currently have, and then find someone that had the same problem nine years ago and no one's answered it.

Yeah!

And I was like, Oh, that's so true. You'll get on there and be like, you'll get on these forums and you'll see someone's had the same problem and there's no comment.

I do that, I do that all the time, you know, all the time. Reasonably frequently, when I have an issue, you go and type in how do I, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the instantly the top 2 or 3 things that come up will be either read it or random forums of something and you go..

2007..

And you go, Oh, here's the answer! And you go, No, it's just the fucking question.

Yeah.

And it's there from, yeah exactly, ten years ago.

And the software is outdated..

It's done and, and nobody has even answered it.

The screenshots are of DOS..

Really, Google? Be smarter!

Well, if that's the only option. But it is interesting how online. Yeah. Because as you were saying, getting online and there are loads of guitar groups that I'm in now, I'm getting back into guitar- well, I'm getting back in for the last year and a bit. And, but it's not the same. And that's why I like going to A and B, the local music store and just talking to the guys and hanging out and touching things and, you know, talking to people and socialising that way on a regular basis. There's just something about- jiu jitsu was the same. There was almost a spiritual aspect to jiu jitsu, and it's probably the same with any kind of physical sport. I imagine it's the same with AFL, where even if you're fighting the person, there's something about touching another human being..

You're doing it together.

But also touching them and trusting them.

Yes.

You know, and there being that physical interaction with someone else that I remember, even if you don't know the people like you very well, you see them on a regular basis, but you just fight and then that's it for the lesson. There was I remember just having a better kind of like mental health as a result of going somewhere and physically interacting with other people.

Yeah, and sometimes it's not even physical. It can be emotional. Um, and I remember writing the, you know, writing my chapter of the family history book that I did, and I spoke about my version of spirituality being a, you know, completely irreligious atheist. So my version of spirituality is what makes you feel good.

Yeah.

And the things that you do, because you get this sense of internal joy in doing it. And one of those is live music. I'm not a musician, I can't sing, I can't play an instrument.

Mhm.

Um, but going and listening to a live band play, particularly a really good one. And if you sat there by yourself doing it, you'd go, Yeah, that was good. But when you're with 10,000, 20,000, in the case of some recent concerts, 100,000 people.

Yeah, it's a spiritual event.

It's a spiritual..

It's a mega-church at that point..

It is, it is it's a spiritual experience because you're all engaged in this thing, and I know..

It's a shared experience.

Yeah. And it's that. And Bruce Springsteen, who is one of my favourite musicians, probably my favourite musician. Um, he says that every night when he goes out to play, he performs a magic trick.

Yeah.

And he says, I can't teach you how to do it.

Yeah.

I don't know how I'd do it.

Do you..

But I do it.

Do you think you would have that same experience if you didn't like the music you were seeing?

No.

So you'd just be there, like.

Because I'd just be going 99,999 people are idiots. But it's the same thing going to a football game. You know, I go, no, most of the time I go to a football game. I go to watch my own team play. So you have this sense of joy or devastation, but it is shared with a whole bunch of other people who are also supporting the same team.

Yeah.

And if something excellent happens, you end up high fiving people who are next to you that you've never seen before in your life and you're never going to see again.

Well, that's sort of like that jiu jitsu thing. Yeah.

But you have this shared experience. And that's getting back to the thing about the dropping in stuff. Um, it's just that I want to go and see my neighbour. I'm going to drop in, but we don't do that anymore for a whole bunch of other reasons. So we have lost that little bit of community that that allowed us and mental health is a good example of something that it created a capacity for people to engage with other people, which is so important for us as a social species that we've just lost. And we replace it with a bunch of other things, but they just don't do it as well.

It's not the same.

Yeah.

I wonder how much indigenous groups like I really wish that I could have been, you know, on that, um, 1770 voyage with Captain Cook coming to Australia and seeing indigenous people living indigenously. Like, like living as hunter gatherers in these groups and getting to just experience that from the first person, right. And, but but it would be so interesting also to obviously be in that indigenous group as someone in there and understand what it was like from their point of view.

Yeah.

Because from the outside, you think it must have been amazing..

Interpreting, basing it on your own experience.

Well, yeah. You imagine all these things that you didn't have as a result of being like that, where they have friends and family around them at all times, effectively. But then you wonder from their point of view, what was it like? Fuck, I just can't.

I can't get rid of Pete.

If I try and get away from these people, I'd die.

Yeah.

Like, you know, we have to stay together..

Or..

.. to survive.

They treat me as a leader and they just follow me!

Yeah, exactly. You wonder what it- because it's always really interesting learning about Australian Indigenous people from the point of view of Europeans, because they always saw them as lazy, right? To some degree. There was always that kind of comment on they weren't, they weren't hard workers. They would do the bare minimum type thing and you realise it's like, Yeah, look at the country they fucking live in.

Yeah.

The continent they live on where there's effectively no food. The, the extremes are so harsh that you pretty much die if you, you know, you don't get enough water. So they do the bare minimum to be able to survive and then they just conserve their energy.

Yep.

Yeah. So that they can make it through to the next period, right. Like, no shit! Like, but it's, it's always mind blowing, you know, watching those differences across those boundaries. But yeah, I always wonder how much their mental health would have differed from, say, modern people's mental health as a result of being in a small group that see each other every single day. You know, like you watch something like Big Brother or any of these sort of, you know, survival TV shows where they're all together at once and you wonder, is that a positive thing mental health wise? Is it a negative thing? What are the differences? Like, Survivor is a TV show.

Survivor? Survivor is probably the only authentic one that I, of those shows.

Well, you guys seem to be obsessed with it.

Yeah. You guys. Yeah, I watch it. Jo watches it. Your sister watches it.

Mhm.

Um.

Jo as in my mom.

Yeah. My daughter..

Yeah, not your daughter. Yeah. Jo. Yeah. We sit down with a three year old and go Watch this!

.. obsessed.

Yeah. I reckon Bob's going to win this. Yeah. Um. Digressed. Further sense of levity. Um, I, I think it's authentic in a sense that it's obviously completely contrived, but the reactions and the behaviour of the people is not contrived. Where something like Big Brother is, is it's being adjusted..

Yes.

By the producers every minute.

It's the um..

In order to create..

It's the junk food end of the scale.

It is. So, but survivor really is this we're going to put 24 people out there, put them in two teams, make the teams compete with the knowledge that they're eventually going to join up together, and that the whoever's been kicked off is going to determine the winner. So it is it's contrived, but it's got this sense of rules that everybody understands.

I guess, do they have to all work together?

You've got, well, you've got to work together in order to beat the other team so that you don't get kicked off.

Yeah.

But..

You'd also survive, right? Yeah.

You've got to work together to create your shelter, to- you are given food, but you can go out and collect food as well. But you're given rice and beans. But if you're not in the winning team in the first couple of days, you don't get the ability to build fire unless you can manufacture it themselves.

Yeah.

In fact, there's only one one season that I can ever remember where the team that didn't get The Flint.

Yeah, still managed to do it.

Managed to do it. And they came back going, Legends!

Yeah. Yeah. I wonder, I wonder what it's like. Because like, in my head, I have it as it must be, or I assume it to be, a much better experience socially than, than modern day, the modern day world.

Yeah. Well, and it would be. And there have been studies. And I'm not an anthropologist or a sociologist. You talk to your sister?

Mhm.

Um. About what- yeah, and if you look at- Yeah, you're talking about indigenous populations, what a lot of those um, groups of um, old cultures were related, possibly in the case of many places in Australia, about how many people can you have living in the one place that you can actually support by the physical environment? You know, how much food and water can you gather? Um Rather than what's the ideal size for a social grouping? Whereas if you go back to, say, Europe, where post-agricultural, um, village sizes were all the same.

Yeah.

Across Europe, village sizes are the same across North America. The indigenous people in North America, Native Americans or First Nations people. Um, village sizes were about the same as they were in England. Right. And it had nothing to do with the resources that were available. It was just what's a an acceptable, sensible, ideal group size?

Yeah.

And it turned out it was between 30 and 100 people.

Yeah. Okay.

And that's probably, even if I imagine, you know, when I was growing up, Melbourne had just over 2 million people in it, but I didn't interact with 2 million people. I probably interacted with between 30 and 100 people who lived in my part of my suburb. And other than artificially now, we send kids off to- I went to a primary school that had 1000 kids in it. And a high school that had 1000 kids in it.

But I think if you were to still study it, you'd probably find they still interact with. Because again, you only have a certain amount of time per day and energy, you can't maintain a certain number of relationships. I remember getting on Myspace and then Facebook and being like, Fuck yeah, I've got a thousand friends. And you're like, but how many..

.. got 1000 clicks?

Yeah, exactly. If you go through the people that I talk to on a regular basis, I bet you it's..

Mine too. Mine's about ten.

Yeah, but it'll be one of those, um, what's it called? Not an exponential curve, but the one that diminishes.

Yeah, well, it is exponential, but it's diminishing..

Right? Yeah. It'll be that where the majority of the people that I talk to are my wife, my family and a few close friends. And then it rapidly drops off.

Yeah.

But they'll probably be about 20 or 30 people that you'll if you were to look through the chat histories that I talked to on a frequent basis, it'll be between..

But you're talking to individually rather than liking what they've commented on on somebody else's post.

Yeah.

Yeah yeah. Interesting one.

Yeah. So anyway..

So don't drop in.

Yeah. Well it's one of those things. It depends, right. I think that was the basic thing with the article. It's like it depends who the people are. It depends how you know them. It depends on the context. And we have that, I should have mentioned earlier on when we were yakking about it. But there are certain people, certain friends that can effectively show up at any time. And it's not a problem. Because, you know, like other people who are my age, who are my friends, who have children show up to my house and see the place as a mess. It's kind of like..

My place looks the same!

Exactly. I don't care. Whereas if Nana and Grandpa showed up unannounced tomorrow, I would be mortified for them to see. I would be..

You would only be mortified because your mother would be here as well going, Pete, you should have tidied up!

I would be like, Can we do this somewhere else? Can we just do it in the front yard? Like, can we do it in the street?

Ca we sit in the driveway?

Exactly. I'll get some camping chairs and we'll just hang out and do- and open my garage..

With sloping driveway, we'll slide into the garage door.

It is so funny when you have, once you have kids too, it completely changes where, especially when they're babies and young kids. Because of the, the whole eating and sleeping pattern and everything getting effed up. And you know, if they want to hang out at a certain time, it's..

You just do it.

You can't, or you can't.

Yeah.

But then when they have small children, you kind of you're almost like, Oh thank God. They'll bring their kids over and you're like, go play outside and leave me alone. Anyway. Yes. Well, cool. Good episode.

Yeah! Done!

See you later, guys!

See ya.

Transcript of AE 1295 - The Goss: Australia’s Most & Least Ethical Jobs

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, okay. 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 Aussie English.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, okay. 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!

All right. Dad, what's going on?

Your cat's about to attack me.

Yeah, I know. Scrappy's been let out of his dungeon after having having lunch separated from our other cat, Peach. Because she steals all the food.

She would eat him.

So, ethical and least ethical.

Most ethical, most and least ethical jobs.

Mhm.

Yeah.

How should we do this one? Should we do, like the ethical ones first, but go from 10 to 1? Have you read that already?

I have, yeah.

Okay, so there's no surprises.

There's no surprises. There aren't any surprises anyway.

Yeah, but I can't shock you. It can't be like. What do you think number one is?

What do you think number one is? Yeah.

Yeah. This is a good, an interesting article, right. Where- what are we. What, do we go to the top here. "The most and least ethical Australian jobs have been named. At least ethical, real estate agents. With many Aussies fed up over rent hikes and failures to fix property issues, it's perhaps unsurprising that real estate agents have been named the least ethical job in Australia. The Governance Institute of Australia's latest ethics index ranked occupations from most to least ethical along with sectors and organisations." So yeah, it was an interesting read. Um.

Yeah. The only issue I have with the article is that it's very short. So you basically read half the article. Um, other than the lists which we will go through.

It's long on my, um, my screen because there's so many fucking ads.

Oh, yes. Online news. Um, yeah. But they don't tell you how they determined.

'We interviewed three people...'.

Yeah. And this ethical index? Well, show- what's the- what are the parameters in the index? But anyway, that aside..

Old mates opinion.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Pub test. That aside, um, none of these is surprising, which is, um, interesting in itself. So we can go through them. But the top ten most ethical occupations are all in the caring industry. Broadly.

That's pretty much so..

It's hardly a surprise, is it?

I found it interesting. So I guess we'll go through them one- or do you want to do it from 10 to 1.

Yeah. Do that. Yeah. Do the countdown.

Yeah. So secondary school teachers.

Yeah. That was me. A long time ago.

Yeah.

I'm ethical, but not as ethical as I could be. Yeah.

Ten. Yeah, nine was dentist.

Dentists.

I was kind of thinking. How do you measure the ethical.

What's an ethical dentist?

Like, most of them don't really say much. They kind of just look at your teeth.

Well, they say a lot, but you can't talk back.

I guess it's what they're considered by the public, right?

Yes.

Um, eight is vets.

Yeah.

Veterinarians. Eh, veterinarians.

Veterinarians.

I say 'veterinarians', but yeah.

Yeah, you can say what you like, but it's veterinarians.

Gotcha. Not veterans.

Veterans.

Yeah. Um, then seven is primary school teachers. It's funny that primary school teachers are so much higher than secondary school.

Aye, so? There are three places ahead! And out of a million jobs that you could have, these are the top ten. So.

I guess though I'd probably feel primary school teachers are probably a little more parent like?

Yeah.

You know, like caring. And..

Yeah.

Whereas high school teachers were, at least from personal experience, when I was there at high school, they always seemed a bit colder and. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Six is child care pre-school.

So we're going to, we're going up that same index of, you know take out vets and dentists. We've gone secondary school, primary school, child care pre-school, kindergarten sort of teachers. So.

Yeah.

Um, it's teachers in increasing ethics when they're dealing with younger children.

Yeah.

Which is probably fair.

Yeah.

Um, and because obviously this is all perception, I don't I as we suggested, we haven't seen what the index is made of, but I suspect it is about perception, not about some objective, uh, ethical behaviour measure.

Mhm.

Um, so people will always assume that if you're looking after my three year old, I expect you to be more ethical than if you're looking after my 17 year old. So. Next one.

Uh, general practitioners...

So, doctors.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Makes sense.

Yeah.

And then nurses above doctors.

Yeah.

I guess they have to be...

...much more hands on. Yeah. Yeah.

It's funny, though. I don't know how, this one got Pharmacists.

Pharmacists.

Is number three.

Pharmacists have always had this. And this is one of these things of. Because if you look through, say, if you wanted a statutory declaration signed other than going to a Justice of the peace..

You can go to a pharmacist?

You can go to a, you go to a police station.

Yeah.

You can go to a judge, justice of the peace or whatever. The next thing on the list is usually pharmacist.

Really? I didn't know that.

And then there's ironically teachers are in there as well. Um, doctors I think can be. But doctors, you're never going to go to the doctor's surgery and say, can you sign this for me? Yeah, it'll be ten minutes, $70.

Yeah, exactly.

Um, so pharmacists have always had this perception of being, you know, ethical humanitarian people and the next two are obvious. So if we pause here, if you're if you're listening to this and clearly you are listening to this, you're not going to hear that and not be listening. Um, pause for a minute and think what you think number two and number one are, while we discuss this. But I think the pharmacist one is that people go to the pharmacy to get advice, not just to buy things. Whereas you don't go to..

..go to Bunnings to get advice.

Sorry?

I go to Bunnings to get advice.

Yeah.

Like I would go and get advice from them and they're not even on the list.

Yeah, but it's not life threatening stuff.

Yeah.

This is how seriously you take your woodworking. Yeah, well. Or how badly you are with power tools, but all right. Number two!

You do it.

Ambulance service.

Ambos.

Ambos. And then number one is the most obvious one.

I don't know. I don't know. It's one of those ones..

I might have switched one and two?

Yeah.

But, fire services.

Yeah. Firies.

Yeah. People who like..

Most of them volunteer.

Ironically, police is not on there. I would have thought police would have been in there.

No.

Um, but I think there are so many people in the community who've had bad experiences, or perceived to have bad experiences. But nobody has a bad experience with an ambo or a fiery.

Mhm.

Um, and yeah, ambos are risking their lives in a sense that they're dealing with lunatics some of the time. Um, but fire people risk their lives just by turning up at work.

Yeah.

Every day.

Yeah.

And if you do that job, you've got to look at it and go, hmm. These people are serious people, you know?

Yeah.

And look, in our area where more than 50% of the firies are volunteers.

Yeah.

That's somebody who's just going to risk their life because of community service. Yeah.

I remember seeing Tony Abbott. As much as I didn't really like him as a prime minister and just..

Yeah, he was a CFA volunteer.

Yeah. And you were kind of like, that bumped up respect a bit. Especially when I think it was Black Saturday and everything was taking place and he was just volunteering and..

He used the media..

Maybe they found him and got photos of him..

And he just walked away.

Just let me do my work. Yeah, I'm trying to do my thing.

Yeah. Tony Abbott was a prime minister. Not at the time, but he was a past prime minister of the country, and I had no time for him as a politician. Ironically, he's one of these guys, apart from his religious beliefs, and I'm not religious, so we probably would have had some differences in opinion around that.

Just slightly.

Just slightly. But pub test. If he's sitting next to you at the bar stool or the pub, you'd probably have a pretty good conversation going. He's an okay guy.

Yeah.

Yeah. But as a politician.

Yeah. Well.

No.

I think politician brings out the worst and most.

Yeah. Yeah. So, uh.

So least ethical?

Least ethical. So we can do. We've already named the number one because it was in the headline. But.

Yeah.

If we do it, start at the bottom. This one might surprise people. That a...

I guess it depends also what was below this was 11, 12.

I know, but the fact that it's in the top ten is probably not a surprise. But the fact that it comes up as number ten.

Yeah.

Mind you. Yeah. Lawyers. Um.

And I guess it's probably going to depend on what kind of lawyer. Because there are a lot of lawyers you would imagine that aren't you know, if you're just doing conveyancing or, or, you know, tax..

..these lawyers, you.

Just sort of like there's no kind of ethical. I mean, I'm sure you can be.

The trouble with, yeah. The trouble with lawyers is that, um, I think, as you say, other than the service lawyers, you know, that every time you engage in engaging with a lawyer, you are probably engaged against a lawyer.

And both lawyers are making a lot of money.

And so they're both making a lot of money. But also doesn't matter if you win?

You lost.

You lost.

Your bank lost!

And if you lost, the other guy was an unethical bastard.

Yeah.

So yeah it's one of those sort of. Yeah, it doesn't matter what the ethics of a lawyer is in a confrontational situation, 50% of people are not going to be happy.

Who do you think the most unethical type of lawyer would be? Do you reckon it would be marriage lawyers, like..

You mean, family..

You know, when marriages..

Divorce lawyers..

Divorce lawyers.

Divorce lawyers. Yeah. Go for everything...

Do you reckon they would be the most?

I don't know..

Or barristers? Like, for the, um. For the criminals. You know, those who are working for, like, the mafia or whatever.

Who knows? Yeah.

It's always so funny. I remember watching those docos on, um, uh, you know, mafia bosses or whatever, and it's always like the kids end up becoming lawyers or accountants and you're like, no shit, Sherlock.

I've got, I won't name the family. But there was..

Yeah, you encountered that?

There was a family, uh, in the Australian mafia that you went to school with the kids. I went to school with the two youngest brothers, and they both became lawyers. I wonder who they were working for.

Yeah, exactly.

Ceos and managing directors.

Managing directors. I think that's, that one stands up along with the next one, number eight directors of Australian companies. And then number seven, chairs. That's sort of throw the whole lot in together. The senior management of corporate Australia.

Yeah.

When they're often on extremely- well directors aren't, but chairs and CEOs and managing directors on, off and on, very high salaries of large companies. They can do an awful job in a sense. You don't. You never know what job a CEO actually does in a large organisation.

Besides what determined direction, yeah.

Um, into, you know, from the outside. But you look at them and go, is that worth. They got sacked because the company was terrible and they had written into their contract that if they get sacked, they take away a $30 million payout. Yeah. You got sacked because you are hopeless and yet you take a lot of money. So I think people just get jack of that. I think people also look at it and go, nobody is worth a hundred times more than the average worker in the company.

It's hard, though, because I can understand the argument from the point that like if you, if like, if I joined a company as a CEO, was hired as a CEO and turned the company around and the company made billions in profits and someone said, Well, you can have 60,000 as your annual wage. I would be like, Go fuck yourself. I just earnt you, you know, exponentially more than that. I want a proportion of the amount that I just earnt you, especially if it's something that I uniquely could do for you. If you could, if you couldn't hire anyone else to do this, to get the company turned around to make this kind of money. You can make this money, but I want a proportion of it that's significant. Um, so I can imagine that argument is devil's advocate. But yeah, at some point you've got to say, you know, is it you're getting more money than God now, you know.

Exactly.

Is it justified? And how much effort have you put in to actually reward the other people at the, the business who are doing all of the shitkicker jobs or all the other stuff from day to day, even if they didn't have the, the the goals in mind or the the the vision that you had and the you know, yes, it's pretty mind blowing. But yeah, I understand why people like Alan Joyce get huge income, you know, wages and payouts for Qantas or whatever, when for better or worse, they've been able to, you know, objectively make more money for the company throughout tough periods. And you can, you can think, you know, take ethics off the table. Um, if we can hire you and you can make more money for the company, we'll pay you more in order to do that..

Yeah, no question. But the I, I think the whole severance pay.

Yeah.

Regardless of the reason for severance.

I guess it's just that.

Like, if you say..

If you want to hire me, these are the conditions..

I know well and..

.. end up hiring..

And the trouble is that everybody does it, so there's no differentiation.

Yeah.

Um, you know who's going to walk in there and go pay me my $10 million a year? And at the end, I walk out with nothing.

Yeah. Well.

Nobody's going to do that. They're all going to go, You fire me, I want two years pay.

I know. It's pretty..

Because it's going to take me two years to get another job.

Yeah. No.

Yeah. And look you know, one of these of..

Life is..

I'll use an example and I'll name the person. I don't even have to name them because it's the immediate past CEO of the AFL. I have AFL, the AFL. Yeah.

This is a good story.

He he he hung on and he hung on, and he hung on in the job after he after he decided he was going to leave about two years ago. And he gave them 12 months to replace him. And then there was this drama with one of the clubs, um, that we can talk about in another time, but, um, and he decided that he was the only person who could oversee this, so he stayed on. Nothing happened for six months in this thing. It's just gone on and on and on and on and on. And then he decided he was finally going to leave. Five months after he leaves, he's now the CEO of Tabcorp, one of the major gambling companies that is a sponsor of the AFL. And, I go, Really? It's no wonder that..

.. people of interest?

People have been whining for years about gambling companies are so tied into sport because that's what people gamble on, which is fine. I have no problem with gambling companies. I have no problem with gambling. What I have a problem with is when they are major sponsors of sporting organisations. It's a huge conflict of interest. And the AFL, a lot of the clubs, I mean, my club, for instance, um, doesn't- they refuse to have gambling on any..

Jerseys.

Jerseys. They won't take sponsors. They don't have poker machines in their club rooms. They don't have, you know, on their social club, none of that stuff. Um, a lot of the clubs are the same, but the AFL as an organisation will take it. And then it's TV companies as well, who are, you know, they're paying billions of dollars for five year broadcasting rights. Um, because they're selling advertising. Who do they sell their advertising to? Gambling companies. And then they don't treat it like advertising. They treat it like advertorials. We'll go in the middle of a sporting thing, go, okay, now we'll go to blah, blah, blah from a particular gambling company. We talk about who to talk about. No, who. What are the odds on this game? You go, I'm sorry, that's an ad and it doesn't get included in your ad time because it's part of your broadcast. Anyway. So that's why I think people are, um, object to that sort of senior leadership when that unethical behaviour is, it's you could say it's not unethical to take you can take a job wherever you like, but we but..

It's like becoming the CEO of a cigarette company or, you know, any of these sorts of companies where it's like we're selling misery.

Yeah.

Effectively.

Exactly.

And we know we're selling, you know, and you can say, look, I'm just the head of the company, and I have to do, you know, but at the same time, you know what you're doing, you know, that you're in an industry that is causing, you know, a lot more harm than it is benefits. Yes. Oh, but we we sponsor the Little League teams at the local. So yeah, but their dads are all in debt.

I know. So.

Six.

Hang on. We go. Six, four and three are all escalations of the same thing. Number five, senior executives. It just ties into the other sort of company leadership.

There's pretty much just two big chunks here. And it's..

Yeah.

It's people who work in big companies.

Leaders and politicians.

And politicians. The next..

Local politicians, six. Four is state politicians, three is federal politicians. Interestingly, I would have thought..

The more senior you get..

The more senior you get, the less ethical people think you are, which is sort of bizarre. I'm not sure what the differentiation is, particularly between federal and state politicians. They're effectively the same. They're just obviously at different levels of parliament. Local politicians is a bit more different. You'd expect that because there's less kickback possible in a local politician.

But there was lots of weird shit happening, right, in Labour, in Victoria recently. Wasn't there this whole investigation came out where it was branch stacking or whatever it was.

Yeah, but that was at state and federal level.

Was it? Yeah.

Its local branches, but not so local politicians. Yeah. Your average person in the Geelong City Council or whatever you think is.

Yeah.

People are not doing that for career development or whatever. Yeah. Your average 22 year old might be, because they're looking I'm going to be the Prime minister one day. Where do I start? I'm going to go run for local council. But um, yeah. Anyway, I'm not sure about that.

But I can imagine. I can see why politicians. Because you are, you know, they talk out of both sides of their mouths.

Oh, constantly. And that's the thing is, I don't think..

.. Everyone nuts.

And there are a few examples. And usually they get found out and they get sacked or forced to resign.

Paid out, and then they leave and get it.

They leave and get their huge superannuation payout.

Barilaro was a sort of good example, and I probably don't want to get defamed, or defame him or anything, but look into the story of what happened with him and how he ended..

That new South Wales politician.

Yeah. Leaving, um, leaving politics because of the friendlyjordies coverage and everything and you're just like, especially all the stuff they brought to light. Again, assuming that it is true. Um and friendlyjordies definitely had a lot of evidence that he was showing. You, just like just horrified at the amount of, you know, the kind of stuff like we saw that with, um, Gladys Berejiklian, right, where she was on the phone to her boyfriend who was gloating about getting some deal for real estate, selling his property or whatever to make a, you know, millions of dollars. And she was just like, Yeah, I don't need to know that bit.

Yeah.

And you're just like. And then she was like, Oh, I didn't know what he was up to. And you're like, then how did you know you didn't want to know that bit?

I know, I know.

Like, you guys are so foolish.

I think, I think there are some there's corruption in politics. And you can say corruption is the ultimate in unethical. But I think the perception about ethics in politics is particularly state and federal politicians, is that they don't necessarily lie, but they never tell the truth.

Yes. Well, they tell whatever they need to in order to make..

The answer is always going to be the ten second grab that makes the news. They'll never answer a question.

Honestly.

And that's where I think. Well, they never answer a question. Full stop.

Or they do with like..

What's your, what's your favourite colour? Well have you heard what we're doing with, you know, it doesn't matter what the question is. They're going to give you their message. And I think people just get jack of that.

But that's the system. I guess that's how it's set up. Anyway. Number two, directors of foreign companies operating in Australia. It's like, yeah, I wonder why that's high up there.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's the all of the directors of Australian companies was down at number eight and roll all the other senior. Then you look at the people who have no, um, financial interest in Australia other than making money.

But I'm sure it's the same for Australians who are leading companies overseas. And then, yes, number one..

.. Which was already taken away. Real estate.

You know what shocks me? That isn't on this list? Um, marketers or salespeople.

Oh, yeah.

How are they not in the top ten? Because I would imagine they'd be above lawyers, some of these like directors of companies or whatever, like because I imagine they have the insane, perverse incentives of just sell as much shit to as many people as we can for as much as we can. And I get a percentage.

That's advertising. Advertising. Advertising is what's what is advertising?

Well, it's trying to get you to buy this stuff.

Trying to sell you something you don't need.

Yeah.

That's, that's not unethical. What is?

Yeah.

Look, I think regardless of advertising and marketing, I can see salespeople I think is probably different in a sense of and again, we don't know what the index included, but I think most people would not see salespeople as unethical because most people have a good experience with salespeople. They're being bullshitted the entire time, but they have a good experience. You know, I went to a shop or I went online and I tried to buy something and I got what I wanted. Uh, all things were happy. Tick.

Another one that's not on here. Car salesman.

Yeah.

How is that not on there?

Well, used car sales. Used car sales are sort of lumped in with real estate.

But just in general cars, cars, car sales people. Because they try and sell you so much crap that you don't need, even if it's a new car.

But yeah, the upselling is.

Yeah.

Would you like fries with that?

Let's have this one. And there was I was reading something on Reddit recently where there was someone who I think it was probably linked to this article on Reddit, and then the people underneath were commenting on it, and one of the guys was like, I used to work at a used car sales or not a used car new car sales place. If they ever try and get you to buy those premium annual packages or whatever it is. Care packages for the car, it's complete bullshit.

Of course it is.

And they were like, all they do is like, maybe for two minutes, vacuum the car out. They might use a squeegee on the front of the car. You know, all this stuff that you could do yourself, and it's 500 bucks a year or whatever. He's like, so much of that stuff is just padding and garbage for them to make more money.

Yeah, of course it is.

Yeah, there was loads of those sorts of comments that were like, I do this job and it's this and you know. Yeah.

Yeah. Real estate agents doesn't surprise me. I mean, the reasons that they give in the article are Ah, I think that that's just, um, I think it's soft journalism in a sense that they're, they're picking the pain points that are obvious. Um, you're basically saying people are ticked off with, you know, the, the, the price of rent and that, you know, their problems with their rental properties are not getting fixed.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, yeah, that doesn't make people unethical. It just makes them bad at their job. Um, I think the underlying thing and apologies to all those real estate agents who are listening to us, I think the underlying problem that I have, and I think many people have with real estate agents, is that they, by definition, serve to have a contract. A contract, conflict of interest. They're serving two masters. They are the buyer and the seller.

Yeah.

And they're the agent for both.

Yeah.

And so you can't do that. It's impossible to do it ethically..

At least, yeah, ethically.

And I think everybody sees that. And knows that.

But I remember..

An individual's possibly very ethical, but the very nature of their job is unethical. Regardless of the ethics of the particular people.

I called out the guy that was selling us this house because he was like, you know, oh, you can trust me. It's a really good deal, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, who do you serve?

Yeah.

Who are you working for? And he was like, oh, the seller.

I'm like, why would I believe anything you tell me? Like what? I'm just going to trust you? Like.

I know.

Like, you know, that's a really good price in this market. That's like, Based on what? Like you're just saying that. Yeah.

Yes.

And how do you, how would you do? You reckon there's a way of being an ethical real estate agent, or do you think inherently the job is just..

I think the job is just it's it's by very definition it's unethical.

Yeah.

Because you said you're serving two masters. It's it's it's a salesperson. Like, if you're a pharmaceutical salesperson, you're not selling directly to the patients.

Well, this this though, let me stop you, there was the issue they had in America and the opioid crisis, right. If there's a movie or a doco I think I watched on this, it may have been a movie. I can't remember the name of it, but it was that on the, the, um, is it what was it called? It starts with C, I think the drug that they were having all these issues with the pain medication.

Oh, yeah.

And the company hired all these beautiful women, these models, to go around selling it to doctors.

Yeah.

And the incentive was the doctors got to kick back on every pill they sold.

Yeah.

And you were just like, Oh, my God. I remember watching that and just being like, yeah, great. Like. Like. No shit. So they're going to now prescribe this for everything.

Exactly.

Because they get a dollar a pill back to them directly.

Well, see. That's that's not just unethical. I think that's illegal. It should be illegal. It's certainly immoral.

Yeah.

Um, it's probably not illegal, but, you know, that's happened in the in a lot of industries, you know, medical industries in particular of not just pharmaceuticals, but, you know. Oh, I sell products to surgeons. Surgical equipment. I'm just going to invite all of my customers to go skiing in Colorado this year, and my company will pay squillions of dollars to have all these surgeons who are already earning millions of dollars to go on this junket to Colorado on my, and I'll go with them just to buy them drinks. And so they'll keep buying my stuff.

Yeah, well, that's another one.

What is the next job do? Oh, Disneyland's no good. You know, use something better.

How are plastic surgeons not on here?

Yeah.

I would have thought they'd be up high on the list, depending on the type. But like the American, um, you know, facial plastic surgery type person, you see them on..

Nips and tucks and lips, yeah.

And TikTok going viral. And there was a huge issue with..

Botox and boobs.

There was some, some of them in Australia that got done because they were doing some really unethical practices in order to maximise their, their income and everything, and they got found out and had to like hand in their licenses or whatever. And you're just like, Good God.

Yeah.

Anyway, so yeah, it was an interesting read.

I don't know how accurate it is.

Yeah. Let us know what you think the most ethical and unethical jobs are.

Yeah, I don't know. Can you think of any that weren't on there that that should be, whether ethical or unethical. Like, zookeepers you would think would be up there. You know, like. People..

Unethical zookeepers.

Yeah. These people who work with animals.

Never met a zookeeper I didn't like. And I worked at a zoo for three years.

Yeah.

Anyway, thanks for joining us, guys.

Thanks, guys. Bye.

Transcript of AE 1294 - The Goss: Australia Just Had the Best Aurora in 500 Years!

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, okay.

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. Okay, 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.

Pete!

I wonder how many episodes start with that.

Dad.

Dad. Pete. Pete.

I always think it's unique. And then I'm like, no, I did it every single time.

Yeah, well, it's unique, but repeated.

Yeah. Repeat.

Yeah. Repeat.

It's re-peat, re-peat! So the aurora!

Yeah.

How epic was that?

It was amazing.

Did that blow your mind? Because I remember..

It blew my mind because I've photographed the aurora a few times and I've seen it before. But where you actually have to go and photograph it with a long exposure.

What for?

Yeah. To get..

We were doing a long exposure when we were there.

Yeah. But but the long exposure, you know, just to get a vague, purpley glow in the sky.

The very top of it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because I guess..

But this one..

Over the last decade or so, I know you would tell me every now and then I'm going to go out early in the morning to photograph the aurora. And you'd come back with photos that would be long exposure and have a bit of the red hue on the horizon. But, um, this most recent one just blew the, the fucking roof off, right? Like, it was just absolutely ridiculous. And it was worldwide. That's again, we were previously talking about these shared events being just so epic, right?

Yeah.

Um, whether it was TV shows all coming out at once or Pokemon Go, but the Aurora was one of these interesting sort of moments in the zeitgeist that happened on social media all simultaneously. And I think..

Well, the thing is that it it got reported on social media, but it happened.

Yeah.

It's a natural event that everybody could see.

Well, I could see it from my front door!

I know!

I remember going on..

.. a back deck and go, Look at that!

Well, I remember going out there and holding my phone up, and these people walking past with their dog being like, What the fuck is this?

I know.

And I was like, Guys, guys, guys, come here. Come here. Come here. Have a look at this. The aurora. You can see it above this person's house. Despite the street lights. Despite the light pollution from our suburb. It's right there. You can see it with your naked eye.

I know.

How effed up is that?

It was amazing.

And they were like, Oh. Oh, yeah!

Yeah.

But yeah. So were you initially expecting for it to be as intense and spectacular as it was, or were you just thinking it's another event with the Aurora?

Look, because I'm on one of the Aurora watch mailing lists. Um, so you get notification from the Bureau of Meteorology that just says, you know, we're expecting, you know, there has been an event on the surface of the sun.

In 18 hours.

So, you know, in the next 24 hours, you are likely to be able to see at high latitudes blah blah blah.

Mhm.

Um, and you get those on average once a month ish, sometimes nothing for six months, sometimes 3 or 4 in a month.

Really? Okay. So it's quite frequent but then not as..

Yeah, and then 90% of the time you get nothing.

Okay. So you go out there and go out during the day or you missed it.

Yeah, you don't see anything.

Yeah.

Um, this one though, that had been 3 or 4 days in a row where those Aurora watch things came out. And then the last one came out and said, This one's going to be..

Intense.

Yeah, more spectacular or intense. I can't remember the word they used. It wasn't either of those, but basically what they were saying is, don't miss this. Um, but I hadn't expected anything like what we got. You know that what we got is what you get at 70 degrees north or south.

You reckon?

Once every few years. Yeah, but. But they only get green. We got reds and purples and green and, yeah, it was ridiculous.

You wonder what it would have been like at the poles. I imagine it would have just been green, but intense.

Yeah.

But they wouldn't have had that spectral.

No.

Variation, across the colours, as a result of being further away from the poles.

Yeah.

And but yeah. So this article, this is on Space.com and it was, We may have just witnessed some of the strongest auroras in 500 years. And that blew my mind. I didn't realise like I thought, oh, okay, we've got a good one. But, um.

Well, in my 66 years, that's the only time that I've ever been able to see it, other than going this vague pinky glow on the horizon. Yeah, I think with the naked eye, I think whereas this one we were, you know, we were down at the beach together, standing there going, Holy shit. And it was the entire southern sky.

Yeah.

It wasn't just a little bit of glow and, you know, ten degree angle of it. It was the entire southern sky.

It was pretty mind blowing. I'm glad. Like, so with the story was that. Yeah, I think I just saw online and I was like, oh fuck it, I'll go down to Barwon Heads and I'll send dad a text because I'm sure he's going to go out and photography, do some photography or try and photograph it. Um, and you were in Melbourne, weren't you? Driving back from..

Coming home. Yeah.

And then I said, oh, well, just send me a text. When are you going to go down? And I'll go down and check it out.

I said, yeah, I'm going to, I can I was driving along down the back of, out of the back of Geelong going, I can see it from here.

Yeah.

And that's when I just called you..

And said, go..

Hey Siri, call Pete. And-.

Careful what you say.

Yeah, exactly. It just popped up.

Yeah, exactly. Who doesn't have a phone on them. I am.

Good.

Um, and I, um. And I just said, yeah, I'm going there, turn up.

And it was insane, right? Like..

It was.

As soon as you showed up, it was really the thing for me that it was kind of a letdown, but impressive at the same time because I was totally. You see all these photos of the Aurora online, and you forget that they're long exposure. So you just assume you're going to look at the sky and it's going to be bright green and red, you know, at least from the ones that we've seen. Um, and it's not that. But this time when we went or at least when I went, it's the first and only time I've ever seen it. But you could definitely see this, this very obvious glow.

And movement.

And movement. Yeah. It was really weird. Just I imagine it's what it's like being on acid, right? To some degree where you're watching..

How would you know?

The sky is just changing the light intensity. And you could see the arms of the aurora coming out and everything in your eyes. But it was pretty faint. But then the funny thing was, you would hold your camera up, and I don't know if there was like multiple second delay on just you having the camera open and looking at the sky. But as soon as you hold the camera up on your phone, you could see what it would look like.

Yeah.

And it was just intense as. And there were a whole bunch. I couldn't believe the quality of the photos I was getting through my, um, my phone camera.

Good.

Now, despite it being like a ten, 3 to 10 second exposure each time. But it was just ridiculous. But yeah, it was really cool watching. And you could see the intensity change, right? It was dull at first, well, dull compared to what it became. And then it really intensified and then sort of got dull again, dull off.

And then it intensified a little bit more later, but not to the level it was when you were there.

Yeah, but it was mind blowing. Yeah. Just looking, because we went down to Barwon Heads 13th beach Beach, which is effectively looking south to Tasmania, across the bay, pretty much across the bay, across the Bass Strait.

Strait. Yeah.

Um, and so there's nothing impeding your view. You can just look out to the ocean. And it was just taking up the entire sky.

Yeah, it was.

Across in front of us.

Yeah. It's ridiculous.

Yeah. So, yeah, that was, um. That was funny, and I didn't. I didn't really appreciate how much this was happening everywhere in the world. I remember posting a photo on Instagram and then having someone, a friend who's followed me for a long time, um, messaging me, and she was like, I'm in far north Queensland and I can see the red on the horizon.

Yeah.

Like, she sent me a photo and she's like, Is that the Aurora? And I'm like, It looks like it to me. Like it's the top of the red part. It's the same colour as the one that I'm seeing. You can't see the intensity of it like the whole thing. But you can see the red. And she's like, I'm like in, you know, wherever it was, it was above Brisbane.

Yeah.

And she's like, I can see it.

And she's like..

Well, I was saying, I was saying that it was, um, up to 26 degrees latitude, which is near the tropics. Like the tropics are 23 degrees.

Yeah.

Thereabouts. Um.

Ridiculous.

That's crazy. Yeah.

Yeah. So it was obviously it would be so interesting. I don't know, I'll have to look online if there's any um, International Space Station photos of like just the spread. Because in my mind I see it as normally, you know, you see it above the poles as green, but it must have spread all around the top way further along than normal. But apparently it was due to these, um, what are they called again? C M.

Coronal mass ejections. Coronal- it's what causes them.

CMEs, right.

And the corona is the like..

A crown.

To use a metaphor, it's the skin of the sun. It's the right outer part. And a mass ejection is just effectively it's a storm on the surface..

Under these weird like rings that appear and then explode out?

And it just blows out.

Yeah.

Um, yeah. Gases and charged particles. Um, and takes 18 to 24 hours to travel the 150,000,000km to Earth.

Yeah.

Um, and those charged particles in there excite the particularly gases, but mostly oxygen and nitrogen hence the different colours to different gases in the Earth's atmosphere, but they do it because of the way that it's hitting and transferring through the atmosphere. It is most obvious at the poles.

Yeah.

Um, and..

Well that's the magnetic field, right? It's more intense at the poles than it is around the other sides. But obviously it was so strong that it was seen much further..

Into the tropics.

Yeah.

Well, subtropics.

It was funny too. I was reading this article from Space.com and again, this is titled, um, We may have had we may have just witnessed some of the strongest auroras in 500 years.

Yeah.

Published on May the 21st. And they were saying it was funny because it hit Mars, I think, a week later.

Yeah.

As a result. And, um, it would be interesting again to see photos from Mars because the atmosphere in Mars looks different during sunset. And everything, like the light moves through the atmosphere differently because it's a different thickness and..

Thinner atmosphere and different composition.

Yeah. Yeah.

Almost no oxygen.

Yeah. It is one of those things. You wonder what the aurora looks like on different planets. That has any of those planets has to have an active. Um, well, don't they have to have just an active? Um. Well, yeah. Atmosphere, but active magnetic field.

It's the atmosphere as much as anything else. Because you've got to excite gases.

The particles.

Yeah. Gas particles.

A little flight.

Yeah.

Or to refract it. Yeah. Anyway. Really cool. But I had no idea too, that it was the most intense in 500 years.

Yeah, well..

That really hit home.

Well, 500 is the guessing..

But that's effectively them saying, well, since records..

You're never going to see it again!

Yeah, exactly. So did that make you happy that you went out and saw it that night?

Oh yeah. Yeah. But you could see it tomorrow. You know, there could be another equivalent thing. It's just they, they happen on average over, you know. Well, whatever people are extrapolating it to over 4.5 billion years, they happen about once every 500 years.

Well, you wonder at that level. You wonder how it must happen on almost a daily basis on the sun..

Oh, of course.

The angle that it's shot out into space. Just completely misses us.

But but, well, it probably won't miss so much. But it's also that the intensity of it is so little that it's the excitation of particles in the Earth's atmosphere is just not going to be visible. So yeah.

So yeah.

It was cool.

Pretty cool, pretty cool.

Sorry you guys missed it if you did.

I know and sorry for spamming you guys. If you were sick of seeing all these photos from pretty much everyone everywhere about it online at the time. Anyway, thanks for joining us guys, and we'll see you next time.

See you!

Transcript of AE 1293 - The Goss: Should Aussie Schools Ban Homework?

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; whether locally Down Under here in Australia or non-locally, overseas, in other parts of the world, okay.

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. Okay, 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!

G'day, dad.

Hello, Peter.

Am I in trouble?

No. We just. We just raise the. Raise the level of decorum. Yeah.

Formality?

Formality. Yes. Sorry, your cat's harassing me.

He wants some affection.

He is getting affection. I'm scratching him on the neck. But that's not enough.

He's such a pest. But he's a good pest.

He is.

He always sleeps with me. Kiss my feet. Warm at the moment.

Uh oh.

Under the covers.

You sleep under the covers between your feet.

Yeah. It's great. It's cold at the moment, and we're trying to keep the heat off so that we save money. Last electricity bill was, like, 700 bucks.

Holy moly.

I know. Winter. It's brutal.

Yeah.

So. Go on you, Scraps. Good boy. So, "Education researcher calls for primary schools to have courage to rethink homework."

Yes.

And you were like, 'fuck yes'.

Well, 'rethink school', but 'homework' in particular.

Yeah. That's it. So let's, this article again is on ABC news. Um, "When Estelle Truman was growing up, homework was par for the course. But now her two daughters are in primary school at Townsville in North Queensland, homework isn't mentioned. There's no purpose. Ms Trueman said." Um, "If we get home and want to prepare a meal together or spend time together outside before bed, we can and don't have to hope that we won't get in trouble tomorrow because we haven't done the reader."

Yeah.

So yeah, it was an interesting article talking about, I guess, the research related to, um, levels of homework at primary school age and whether or not it's beneficial. And effectively, this, um, Professor John Hattie had done a study with 130. It was like a meta study of 130,000 other studies, saying that there was no evidence that it was really useful at primary school age. And you used to work as a high school teacher, and..

I did.

In the education industry. So how did you,, how did you feel about homework in general, but also obviously at primary school versus high school?

Well, I think there's a, there's a difference between, you know, the distinction between primary school and high school is an artificial one in a sense that, you know, we they're very different forms of education, but that's a consequence of the way that life is taught at both ends. You know..

How did we end up with this division between primary school and high school? Because it seems arbitrary, as you say.

I- do you want the historical thing to it?

You go to town.

Um, two generations older than me. Most people did not go beyond what we would now call Year Eight.

Yeah.

At school. And in fact, that was, you know, a lot of them wouldn't have gone past Year Six or Year Seven.

So they would have finished effectively primary..

They would have finished it effectively at what we call primary school.

Yeah.

High schools were considered for higher education, to go on to professional careers, university study, those sort of things. Um, now that has been completely diluted and changed over four generations.

Yeah.

Um, so we're left with this artificial construct of primary schools are structured in a particular way that, you know, you start off as a five year old in Australia, five year old or six year old, and you go to school. Um, and then seven years later, you progressed to a high school. And instead of being in effectively one class with one teacher, except for maybe art and sport and music, um, to being in ten different classes with ten different teachers.

Yeah.

Um, over one summer, you know, so that's an artificial change. Um, but it's just it's a result of, you know, the history of the development of schools 150 years ago.

One, I guess in the West, we pretty much developed these schools to get people to be factory level workers, right?

Yeah. Well, a lot of the times, the way we structured schools, you can go back even further than that. You can go back to agricultural times. The way we structure school was we didn't give people a summer off because they wanted to go on holidays and things. We gave people summer and early autumn off because they had to go home and be at home to harvest the crops and do those sort of things. So.

So that's really where we get, you reckon the summer holidays from and everything. It's all about that.

Originally it was done that and then and the legislation in European countries, you know, was not everyone was the same, but legislations around the amount of time that people had to spend in school in terms of hours a day, days, a year, and so on, was created based on the expectation that we'll just do what we currently do.

Yeah.

Now that's a different story around. We're talking about homework, but um, the reason I'm talking about that distinction is that I think homework for primary school students is a complete waste of time. Um, except..

Hence I'm wanting to talk about this article. Yeah.

Except for Reading.

Yeah.

Uh, because there is an enormous amount of educational research that suggests that children who read at home are going to be better learners than children who don't.

Well, I guess it's cross.

In fact, it's even..

Disciplinary, right.

It's even more bizarre..

Than every..

It's children who have books in their house are going to be better learners, even if they never read one.

Well, we just have loads of books and don't actually show the kids.

Yeah.

Like well, yeah.

Well, they're screwed both times.

We just leave them in..

The money gets spent on the books and the kids don't get to see them.

We just know by having them, the kids are going to be smarter.

Exactly.

That's how it works, right?

Exactly right!

We just have a garage full of books.

So, I think reading practice is a good thing to do. It's also if you treat it the right way and don't make it a task. It's also a social thing to do with kids.

Yeah.

Let's sit down and read a couple of pages of a book.

It's funny. I feel bad a lot of the time because we don't do a great deal of reading. We do from time to time, but a lot of the time they want to watch videos of things on YouTube and everything. So Noah at night will be like, when we go to bed, Can you show me how black holes function? How they work? And you're just like, what the fuck, man? How did you learn about that? And he realised he's been watching Transformers or something. And there's been a black hole and.. Or he'll be like, Can you show me how trains were invented? And the cool thing is, you can just get YouTube up and be like, show me how trains are invented, and they'll have a description, you know, on a video and everything, so you don't have to pull it out of your butt.

I know.

But at the same time I'm like, how useful is this compared to, say, sitting down and trying to read? Is this the same quality time spent with your child in terms of education?

It can be.

Yeah.

It can be.

As long as he's interested in asking questions, I imagine.

But at that early stages of educational development, kids have to have to be able to read and write, or at least be able to communicate in a in a language. Now, now, you don't have to because you can. Just as long as you can find a Google app on something, you can search just by voice.

Yeah. You wonder how much that's going to be a hindrance to kids in the future. Because I remember being at school and every now and then you would hear of children somehow making it through to like Year 7 or 8 and being illiterate. Yeah. Not being able to read. At all.

I taught, you know, I was a high school teacher and I taught kids who couldn't read.

Yeah.

You know, couldn't read when I left teaching when you were. And I'm trying to think when I was 94. So you would have been about seven years of age, and you were. And your sister were as good a readers as some of the kids that I was teaching in Year Seven at school.

Really?

12 year olds. So, um, so so that I think that that sort of engaging kids in learning experience is a good homework and setting tasks. You know, as in saying your homework tonight is to do some reading is fine.

Yeah.

Setting them, you know, sending them a sheet of arithmetic to do.

Yeah.

Is a complete waste of time.

Yeah.

And it's..

Well, I think that was part of the the argument in this article, but then also the whole that steals time away from family time of engaging and having conversations..

It is worse than a waste of time.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

But yeah, but it was interesting. I wonder how much having the ability to use things like AI and Siri and phones and all that sort of stuff, and being able to just talk to them and then getting answers back will help or hinder kids at high school, like, because I'm obviously not in that world, so I have no idea. I assume it's affecting it now.

Well, I haven't been in a high school classroom for 30 years/

But I can imagine that if you had a smart phone and you were one of these kids that you were talking about, who was, you know, at the level of reading of a seven year old in Year 8 or 9 or whatever they're going to be able to hide a lot easier.

In a sense of just Google it by voice.

Yeah, but also, I guess it allows it's on the flip side, it's allowing them to function a lot higher at a higher level despite their illiteracy.

Yeah.

But, um, yeah, it's it's mind blowing. Those thinking about those things that there are kids that slip through the cracks and just can't, and go on to adulthood.

I think the other the other part of that is, and I'm not suggesting that all education as opposed to learning and there are two they're quite distinct, but that all education only happens in the classroom for five hours a day.

Mhm.

Um, that's not what I'm saying because but I, and certainly where I, other than maths homework, I used to set maths homework for high school students.

Mhm.

Um and the homework was finish up to this point with the expectation that the kids who were good at it and quick at it could finish it in class.

Yeah.

Those that couldn't, I expect them to have a go at it. And I would always give them time at the beginning of the next lesson to say, all right, who hasn't finished? Let's have a go and work through the stuff that you were struggling with. It was a way of identifying what they were struggling with, but giving them the opportunity to go and just spend longer doing it. Because sometimes everybody has variable times that they take to do things, regardless of whether you're good at it or not. Um, so giving kids more time to do things, um, but with teaching Science. Um, I- and Health, which are the two other subjects I saw taught it, you know, not, you know, the Year 11s and 12s, but 7 to 10. Um, my homework was implied, and that was I used to teach mostly project based work. And if you get kids interested in something, they will spend an inordinate amount of their own time afterwards investigating finding things out, trying things, getting people's opinions and whatever. And that's what learning is about, you know. And to me, it was it was getting kids excited about learning was implying that they will do homework because they would do it just because. Sorry, the cat's just gone mad. Um, it was they would do it because they were interested, not because you told them they had to and that they were going to get marked on it. Um, you know, if it's just another task for kids to do, then it's pointless. So.

So what are your sort of criticisms of the schooling system in Australia, whether it's primary school or high school?

It's not just Australia.

But I mean, in the Western world, right? Yeah.

I think most of the world now.

Um, well, because a lot of it is built on what the Western model is, which is..

It's all built on the old European model. Well, it was it was never designed for learning. It was designed..

To teach people rote tasks, right.

Exactly. Um, and that's. Look, the problem is that we force kids into saying that you're going to spend now. Almost everybody does these days. You're going to spend 13 years at school.

Yeah.

And in those 13 years, we're going to structure it the same way for everybody. Um, and we're going to structure it not based on the best way for you to learn, but on the best way that we can administer it.

It's funny too, to pause you there. I remember someone I can't remember who it was, but I remember them saying, isn't it weird that we send kids to school for 13 years and they come out being able to do fuck all?

Yeah.

Like they can't get a job the next day as a waiter. They don't have any of the. They couldn't cook basic food. They don't have all these skills that you would get you a low level job anywhere at the end of high school, effectively, like you would have to do on the job, learning and all that. So it is one of those things where it's ironic that we have this, this system in place to teach kids to be employable, effectively.

We could say that, you could say it's not just school. You could say the same thing about universities. Other than professional degrees like, you know, engineering, teaching, nursing, medicine, law, those sorts of things where you are being an actual you are being- it's it's it's an academic apprenticeship to being qualified to do a job.

Yeah.

You go into a science degree and an arts degree. The science degree is designed to create science researchers. About 1% of people who do science degrees go on beyond maybe an honours or a master's program, um, to actually do research. Um, you're not being taught to be a lab assistant. You're not being taught that. So you've got to learn that. Here's your degree. Now go and get this job and learn how to do it.

Yeah.

Is very different.

Well, and that would be the majority of-.

Commerce degrees. Arts degrees, you know, just generic degrees, are not teaching people how to get jobs. Um, but universities were never set up to do that. You know, in the last in, in my lifetime, you know, when I went to university, it was academic.

Yeah.

Even if you went and studied arts or commerce or whatever, or medicine or law or anything. It was an academic program. And only about 5% of people went to university. Now more than 50% of people go to university, and more than 50% of the rest go to some other form of higher education or tertiary education. But they're still operating the same way. But getting back to schools, it's it's just this conundrum of we, it's $1 trillion industry in Australia that we cannot pause to change it for a year to get it right, or two years or three years to evolve it into something that will be much better.

What's the fallacy again? It is that thing of like, you just have to deal with breaking the system for a short period of time to then improve it and be able to move.

I call it the touch typing thing. I have never learned to touch type. In order for me to learn to touch type, I would have to slow down and be a bad typist for months because I can type badly, much faster than I could by learning, so I'm never going to do it.

Well, what it's like. I remember where evolutionary biologists would talk about like, adaptive landscape, and this is probably a bit esoteric and hard to describe, but effectively you have like these mountains of adaptation where you adapt to be able to do a certain thing, but you can't jump from mountain to mountain.

No.

You would have to go down into the valleys..

.. are completely different.

Yeah. And then come back up the next mountain. And it's effectively you can't evolve backwards, right. You end up evolving a certain series of traits to be able to do a certain thing. But even if..

And you've lost the traits, the generic traits, to be able to do other things.

Yeah, exactly. And so it's very difficult to, even if it's very close by, get from one peak to the next peak. And that's what it would take, with education. You would need to go backwards for a short period of time.

It all comes down to simple things like, um, we assess kids and adults. And, you know, everything from young primary school age to university students. We assess them based on a standardised test, whether that test be a paper test or a task or whatever else, and you will be deemed as achieving the appropriate thing.

Success or failure.

If you meet a standard in that test, and we give you a certain amount of time to do that in. So in the case of high school, it's you've got a year, so 40 weeks of school to complete, an amount of work to be deemed to have done. Year 12 Biology, I used to teach Year 12 Biology. At the end of year 12, students would be assessed. You got a mark from 0 to 100. Um, now it's slightly different the way the scoring gets done. But effectively you're testing people and saying if you get more than 50%, you're okay. Now what you're saying is, if you can do half of it, that's a win. Because we assume that there's a limited amount of time.

Yeah.

If we had criterion referenced, proper criterion referenced assessment in schools, that says you have to be able to demonstrate your capability to do these things. If you can do them in three minutes or three weeks or three months, that's what it takes.

Yeah.

But the, the, the engagement of teachers to be able to handle kids doing things at, you know, if you've got and the way that it is structured is purely numerical. It's just about a financial thing to say. We'll have 25 students in a high school class. And because that's what we can finance, we can put one teacher per 25 kids. Um, it would be impossible for a teacher to have 25 kids all operating in completely different time frames. But also we would say, well, you know, Pete finished Year 12 Biology, met all the assessment requirements for Year 12 Biology, demonstrated his learning on all of the concepts, and all the practical tasks and everything, in three months. Now, what do we do with him? He can go on and do something else. No, he can't, because that would mean you have to be in another class.

Yeah.

And that class hasn't started yet and so on. So we, we've structured this the way of learning around administrative ease that everybody does the same amount of stuff, the same amount of time. And then at the end of that we say whether you achieved or didn't achieve.

I remember being mind blown by certain people at school who would were academically really intelligent, but then just like socially stupid, right, like or it would be the street smarts versus book smarts type thing. Because I remember there would be a few of my friends who got like 98 into score 99 and you knew, okay, they get it. They can study really well. And they, they memorise things incredibly well. But then you would just be mind blown by how stupid they were in terms of just completely other..

Common sense.

Other usual things that would just be so simple, like in interactions with friends or..

Yeah.

It's just so many other areas of life. But they would be seen because they had a good memory and they knew how to study, and they were, you know, put a lot of energy into that. They would be seen as functioning well. And the rest of you not functioning well, people who weren't like that.

Yeah.

I remember it being like, this system doesn't feel like it. It supports other areas of intelligence.

But we also, we don't tend to teach, um, meta skills like problem solving.

Yeah.

The people who are..

It's memory based.

The people who are good at problem solving do well.

Yeah. But it's, the people of it..

Yeah, yeah, but the people who are not good at problem solving never get taught how to do it. It's, I say never. It's, you know..

It's not the focus.

And look, we used to teach I mean, mathematics teaching has changed. So even over the time that I was teaching and certainly since then, that there is more and more on, you know, problem solving and so on, not just rote learning how to solve an equation.

You used to talk about this with me, right? And me and my sister learning a lot differently from one another. And I would be just like, give me the answer so I can work it out backwards.

Yeah, you were a problem solver. She was a recipe follower.

Yeah.

Um, and providing I showed her the recipe, she could just plug all the things in and do what do you like? Your brain just didn't work that way.

Well, I preferred to, for you to. Yeah. I would be like, give me the final answer. And then I'm just going to keep doing this equation until I get that answer, and then I'll be like, that's how I know how to do it. Exactly. That was my, I need to just, I'm going to go through multiple different paths and I'll get the wrong answer multiple times, but then I'll get the right one. And I want to be able to just confirm.

Yeah.

But yes, obviously you can't do that on any exam.

Well, the thing is you should be able to.

Yeah.

Um, but it's yeah, it's. It..

The resources required to be able to manage students like that, though, would be, um, too expensive, right? Because you would need to. Yeah.

Well, it's more changing to be able to operate that way would be too expensive. Because we could operate that way. It would require more, you know, a higher staff-to-student ratio to be able to do it.

But it's already..

Hugely!

Isn't it?

It is, but not 'hugely' more. It would require 'more', but in order to change it, you basically have to throw the entire school structure out and start again. Uh, and then, you know, it's pretty radical to, to suggest that I remember having an argument with I was, you know, when I was, I was teaching science education at, um, what is now the University of Melbourne. It was the Institute of Education at the University of Melbourne straight after. It was the College of Advanced Education at Melbourne, and I was teaching science education there when the national curriculum was starting being developed. And I was asked to comment on the science curriculum that was being done, and I went through a 10th of it and just sent some preliminary comments back saying, this is a complete waste of time. Because you're not teaching science. You're teaching scientific content. It's, science is not memory.

Yeah.

Science is not just tell me the periodic table. Just, you know, fill in the, you know, 100 and whatever it is now, elements on the periodic table. Um,

This is just memory work. Could be colours, could be anything.

It could be anything. It could be history. You know, it's, um. Science is a process. Where in this are we teaching? Scientific process? Where are we teaching the scientific method? Where are we teaching children to create hypotheses, to understand what is a legitimate test of a hypothesis?

It was funny that I didn't really understand much of that until I got to university.

I know!

And you just sort of like I've been doing biology since probably, what year?

It used to drive me nuts, and I used to teach science like that when I. And you try and squeeze the curriculum into a way of teaching. It's actually teaching children to ask questions, to work out. How are you going to know the answer to that? You know, you you did this thing once and you got this result. How do you know that? That's not a mistake.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, we have to do it again. Correct. Replication. What does that mean? Well, how do you. But in this experiment that you did, how do you know that those three things weren't affecting the result? Oh, we have to work out what the effect of that. Exactly. All of those sort of things. We don't teach that in science. We still don't. And it drives me nuts because if you did that, science would be more attractive to everybody..

Well, because you're learning the basic concepts..

Because you apply that to learning problem solving.

Yeah.

You're learning. Yeah. It's the same thing about Scientific literature. Literacy is not about how much science do I know? It's about how much science do I understand? When somebody tells me something, I've got the ability to go. I don't believe you. Prove it. Show me the evidence. And that's true for everything. When you see the news at night on TV, you go. How do I know that's not just complete rubbish? That's somebody's opinion. Show me the evidence. And that's, that's just..

To pause you there, that's one of those interesting things with the internet and with AI and everything. That's all the more important now. It's the being able to verify, um, information that you receive online because and it's going to be interesting to see what happens in the next few years, just based on ChatGPT and all these other AI things. Because so much of the information you're going to see, it's going to be like, how do you know that's actually real? How do you know that's a real person? How do you even know that? That's exactly you know, that was really said. There are these deep fakes that all this sort of stuff. So I hope you'd hope that it's going to be that scepticism and that logical, problem solving..

It's information literacy combination is really what it comes down to. Is it? How do you believe what you see, hear or are told? And we don't teach enough of that.

I remember always having my mind blown with a lot of that. Like people get told something and they would come and tell you about it and you'd be like, why? Why would you just assume that's true? Like, it sounds good. It's something you would like to be true. But how do you know it's true?

Well, that's, that's more often than not that people will believe what they want to believe. So your cat's gone mad over here. He's.

Ah, he's a pest. He gets into the sink and just licks things and tries to. He's just. Yeah, it's his name. Scraps, I guess. Damn it. Scraps. Anyway, cool. So how do we fix the system?

We can't.

Yeah, so it's just fucked. Good luck.

Pretty much.

Yeah.

Yeah. And and that's. Yeah. Well, you know, you've got children. I've got grandchildren who will be, you know. Well, one of them is..

We need to move to Finland.

Yeah. Well the Finns have sort of got it right.

Or at least they're trying.

Least number of hours. Least number of years in school. And the highest accomplishment.

Best results. And the Polish, I think in this article was mentioned the Polish have started to abolish, um, primary school homework and everything too, working towards, you know, a system that's more efficient and better for, for kids.

Yeah.

Yeah, I imagine. It's funny though I find myself so often just being like, almost irritated at how hyperactive my son is, and wondering, is there something wrong with him? Like, why can't he just sit down and concentrate? And I wonder how much I've just been programmed by society to think that is what a child is.

A good child.

Yeah, exactly. But.

No, he's inquisitive.

Yeah, yeah. And that's. Yeah, that's really..

Well that's, school is almost a war on boys to some extent too, from what I understand where it's just you're constantly trying to put young boys in a certain 'sit still, don't ask questions, be quiet, listen to the teacher' box and you're like, they're not like that at such a young age.

They're not like that at all.

At all.

And most girls aren't either. But girls are, um, are much more likely to comply. Girls are compliant.

They just sitting there going..

There's a complete generalisation, but they're much more likely to comply with rules.

And resent you for it.

And resent- and then..

It'll come back later.

And they're not driven by testosterone either, so that helps.

But when they're trying to impress anyone.

Well, they impress them in other ways.

Yeah, exactly. Anyway. All right. Cool. Thanks for joining us, guys. We'll see you next time.

See you!

Transcript of AE 1292 - How Aussie Do Asian Australians Feel? r_AskAnAustralian

G'day you mob. Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. So I've got something a little different today. The goal today. So I've done a few of these episodes on the podcast recently where I read out and sort of discuss some of the interesting questions that people ask on the subreddit forum Ask An Australian.

If you guys are interested in asking Aussies all sorts of questions, or just learning about these sorts of things, definitely jump over there. I'll leave the link in the description so you can check it out.

Anyway, today's was really interesting. I was having a read and I thought, look, I'm not Asian, I'm not an Asian Australian. [No shit!] But I would discuss it on here and read out some of these comments because there seemed to be a really good discussion happening. So it's going to be great for your English skills, and you're also going to hopefully learn a lot about Australian culture and everything. And the issues that Asian Australians face with identity, when growing up in Australia, when moving to Australia, everything like that.

Editor Pete here: I have since reached out to a whole bunch of my Asian Australian friends, and I've asked them to contribute videos talking about this very topic. I won't include it in today's video, but I will try and include it in a future video because otherwise it's just going to get too long. Anyway, enjoy today's. So without any further ado, let's just get into it.

"As a Chinese Australian who grew up here, I've never fully felt 'standard Australian' in a white Anglo-Australian sense. Most of my friends are other Chinese Asian Australians and we are definitely different to bulk White Australians to the extent that we might as well be different demographics at this stage. I feel a sense of distance to White Australians, which was especially evident during university."

"Many Asian Australians tend to feel excluded in classes because white Aussies would oftentimes ignore us, or passive aggressively talk with each other. Asian Australians seem to also do this as well. To be honest, in terms of interests or the media I watch, I mostly consume Korean and Japanese media along with Hollywood generic stuff. I'm very removed from local Australian media and politics of which I care very little about, question mark."

"I do notice that Asian Australian subgroups differ in how 'Australian' they present. For example, Filipino Australians seem more or less in the same social circle as white people, but Australian born Chinese from mainland China in selective schools might as well be their own Australian subculture at this point. Most of us can't really make friends with Chinese internationals or mainstream White Australians."

"Our friend groups are usually this pan Asian Australian mixed group, with specific interests and experiences that others may not understand. Ultimately, I think I definitely feel 'Australian', but just a different type of Australian."

And then "Edit: For the average Chinese or Asian Australian, I think it can be rather easy to befriend certain rural regional white Australians rather than certain grammar school preppy quote, 'my dad is a lawyer' types." I think that, that goes for anyone, man. "My observation is that the latter group seems more cliquey and hard to break into. Interestingly, my white friends at uni are usually of regional and rural origin."

So the first thing that I note here, obviously again, I'm not Asian. [Are you sure?] I haven't been born and raised Asian Australian and so I can't really talk from firsthand accounts. I can talk from experiences with friends who are Australians, and who are also Asian and what they've gone through. But yeah, obviously I'm not talking from personal experience when I answer these sorts of things.

Before we get into the comments, it sounds like he is a very rich Chinese Australian who goes to a private school, or went to a private school, and then went on to university. So mileage may vary here, but he is probably not the same as the average quote unquote 'Asian Australian' being, yeah, very- from a wealthy family at a 'selective school', as he says, and talking about trying to befriend kids at grammar schools like, Oh my God. Yeah, that's, that's the, the rich of the rich, in Australia, if you're going to a grammar school.

University wise. So I can talk a little bit about this, I definitely experienced this as a white person at Melbourne University. I studied there for over 11 years doing different degrees. I found it incredibly difficult to break into Asian circles. And I think most of those would have been students from overseas because they tended to come and end up creating very cliquey groups with other compatriots, people from their own home countries, and they would always be speaking in their native language.

And obviously as a, as a white Australian, I only spoke at the time Australian English and just, it was, it made that barrier very hard to kind of overcome. That said, I'm sure that there was also the same thing the other way, where they would have felt excluded and outside the group or not part of the clique, as you know, migrants or students from from overseas. So it definitely did go both ways. And I was very, very hyper aware of that at university.

Okay. So top comment here from goater10. "I feel comfortably both, but I consider myself Australian first. I feel more Asian in Australia, but I feel more Australian when I'm in South East Asia. I'm lucky I can appreciate the good parts of both cultures." And we can probably dive into a few of the comments that follow up here. Dedem13: "Not Asian myself, but as a first gen (generation) Australian, I feel this. Mum's Spanish, dad's Iranian, never been to Iran due to the political situation and all. Though I'd love to someday, but when I worked in Spain, I probably felt more distinctly Australian than I ever have while in Australia."

And then goater10 follows up. "Yeah, I completely relate to that. Even though I'm close to my cousins in Indonesia and can speak the language quite fluently, they will always remind me how they can hear my Australian accent when I talk to them. They also told me that I carry myself like a Westerner, and that I have that aura that someone raised in a western country has." That's interesting to think about. I wonder what the sort of signals are that give that away when somewhere like Indonesia.

"I was also lucky that while I had somewhat of an Indonesian upbringing at home and ate mostly food from there, Dad would occasionally have a barbecue, bring home pizza, and take me and my brother to the footy, like all of my other friends did, and he and mum would only talk to me and my brother in Indonesian if we had family or there were other Indonesians around."

That's a really interesting thing in terms of how much of your own culture you kind of impart on your kids, and mixing that with Australian culture. I remember growing up, it was definitely harder to connect with kids whose parents didn't embrace Australian culture and try and take part in, say, sporting events or, you know, just those everyday things, have barbecues and that sort of stuff. Because as a result of not doing that, you end up not spending as much time with other locals whatever country you're in.

And so I think that's probably a big part of it, too. I wonder how much this, this original poster's parents, um, were actively trying to integrate into Australian society and, you know, taking part in our hobbies and interests and the aspects of our culture and everything. Because, yeah, again, the less you do that, the harder it is to, I think, feel Australian or feel, um, a part of whatever culture you're in, right?

Let's keep going here and check out some of the other ones. Oh, this was cool. "Smart_cat_6212: Filipino Australians are in the same circle with white people. This part is interesting. I don't really read much into circles. I'm married to an Aussie." And again, it would be interesting to think. What do you mean when you say Aussie? "I just go with people who like me and I'm also an introvert, so it's not like it bothers me a lot if I don't have a social circle either."

"However, I did notice that Filipino Aussies get on well with both Asians and non-Asians. But I think it's more because of how we are brought up. Everybody is welcome. We like being warm towards people and even generous sometimes. Most who I know live here have brought Filipino food at work and shared with everyone. And in schools, they mix with different groups, but also come home to a Filipino household where they still get to enjoy their own culture."

"We also tend to not force people to understand our culture and way of thinking, but we try to adapt to who we are surrounded by. Also, the Philippines is multicultural, so being friends with people from different backgrounds is not new to us. The Philippines also has a long history of being colonised by Spanish, by the Spaniards, for 300 years, which exposed us to their culture and religion. But we have close ties to America and speak their language very well, but also have lots of Chinese, Koreans, Japanese and Indians living there that we are exposed to their culture, religion and food."

Yeah. So that's an interesting thing too, how much the Asian cultures that you would come from, or your parents come from, what their cultures are like, how much they are from countries that are full of, you know, multicultural aspects, people from different countries compared to countries where that isn't the case, you know? So it's probably quite different if you're from somewhere like Korea, Japan or China, mainland China, compared to somewhere like Malaysia or Singapore, or even the Philippines.

In this case, where you have so many different cultures, you may or may not have been colonised. Um, you know, there's there's many different languages that may be spoken there, many different foods and cultures, everything like that. So that probably plays a big part too, into how easily you probably integrate into other cultures when and if you migrate to those places.

So yeah, again, please leave comments below. Tell me about your experiences, guys, coming to Australia or interacting with other cultures or migrating to other places, you know, what's it been like? Have you experienced specific problems that you didn't expect or that are unique to you?

And it's interesting. I remember going to school with a guy who was Asian Italian, right? He was Filipino Italian, his mum was Filipino, his dad was Italian. And he was probably the, the Aussiest guy I knew. He was six foot something tall. He was a very big guy. He was the goalie when we were playing soccer. Just a massive guy, but just the most Aussie dude.

And it was funny because a big part of it, I think, was that both of his parents didn't push their languages or cultures onto him, for better or worse. I remember he used to always be like, God, I wish I spoke Italian, I wish I spoke Filipino, but my parents put in so much effort when they came to Australia to not be from those places or to not, you know, for whatever reason, they decided they didn't want to push their culture and their language and everything on their kid. And it's, it was interesting to see how that ended up, you know, leading to him just having a bit of distance between those cultures. Again, for better or worse.

And I think it was probably a detriment to some degree. Because I think if it were me, I would want to be able to speak those languages so I could communicate with my family members from those countries, and just have a deeper understanding of those cultures. But on the other, the other hand, he was just so thoroughly Australian that, yeah, he just didn't even really consider himself. I don't even really think he thought of himself that much as Asian Australian. He was just like, I'm just, I'm just Australian man.

And yeah, his parents, I think probably took part in lots of activities and stuff in Australia. And an interesting aspect to it too, may have been that they didn't push their languages onto their kid because they only communicated with English. They didn't speak each other's languages.

All right. The next one. So this one comes from Briewnoh. "Very. I mean, I live in Australia. I work with mostly non-Asian people. Heaps of my friends through hobbies or school aren't Chinese, although plenty from uni are. I'm writing in English and read traditional English language media. My voting options are white peeps." Okay! So, "Let me be real. You have this weirdly reductionist attitude that comes through most from you using the phrases 'bulk White Australians' and 'mainstream White Australians'. The fact is that people in Australia come in all shapes and sizes. Take any subgroup, whether it's Chinese Australians from selective schools, or white young liberals or people living in rural areas, and there'll be some sense of distance from everyone outside the subgroup. The model of Chinese Australians versus mainstream white Australia is so off. It's more like hundreds of overlapping subgroups."

"Saying most of us can't really make friends with Chinese internationals or mainstream white Australians sounds so defeatist and sad, dude. I don't think it's true either. All of you, Chinese descent selective school kids, can make friends with anyone with the right attitude and actions. Learn how to socialise at the pub or at a run club or sport. Or find a way to invite people into your niche interests. And, you know, stop hanging out on Asian masculinity subreddits and spend more time in the real world."

So I think, I think this guys kind of hit the nail on the head. In Australia, you will hear about a lot of people saying they have trouble integrating into community, finding friends and everything like that. And I think his point here about being a bit defeatist and just saying, you know, Oh, it's hard or, you know, The average Australian is racist. And that's why I find it hard to integrate into these groups.

You need to put in the work, at the end of the day. People aren't going to befriend you on your behalf, right, for you. So if you want to become a part of, you know, cliques with white Australians or just non-Asian Australians, you're going to have to find interests and hobbies and all that sort of stuff that mean you interact with those kinds of people, right? And so, as this guy was saying at the start, I think if you're spending most of your time consuming Korean and Japanese culture and not taking any part in Australian, you know, consuming any Australian media or any of that sort of stuff, you kind of already showing that you're isolating yourself a bit from what the average, quote unquote, 'Australian' would be consuming, right?

So that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to change your interests, but it's something to be aware of, right? Like if I got really, really interested in, I don't know, Greenland-ish waltz folk music, it's probably going to be hard for me to find other Australians who share that passion. Whereas if I put in some effort to go down the pub or to, you know, join a club. Or to start doing jiu jitsu. Or to, I don't know, try and form a band. Or go to a music meet up, or whatever it is. You're more likely to meet people who are just everyday Australians, or migrants to Australia, and be able to befriend them, right?

So it does, I think, come back to your interests and how much you put yourself out there interacting with other people, whoever they are. Let's keep going.

"Onlythehighlight: I feel pretty Australian as an Asian born Australian, but I just don't fit in the blokey or sporty subculture that is prevalent in social media slash TV." I guess just Australia in general, right. "I fall mostly in the nerdy subculture. There isn't a weird single Australian group that make up your view. Remember, there are so many different groups you can fall into like cookers, tradies, city slickers, nerdy and more that make up our great country."

Yeah. So exactly. I think that's it, right? I don't really fit into the blokey or sporty kind of subculture in Australia, but I have other interests, you know, things like music, jiu jitsu, even indoor plants. You know, I've got loads of weird interests. And you end up making loads of friends based on those interests.

So, yeah, if you're nerdy, if you're into going to the gym, if you're into random hobbies, as long as they're the kind of thing that I think loads of people are interested in, you're going to be able to find like minded people around who want to spend time with you and get to know you and share those, those interests.

One, like, I became really good friends with a migrant who- Filipino migrant who came to Australia who works as a chef here. He's just a great guy. But I became friends with him when I inquired about buying one of his guitars on Facebook Marketplace, and I just ended up chatting to him. You know, he had this guitar for sale. I was kind of interested in buying it, but I wasn't sure about the price and everything. And we ended up just having a chat because we both were passionate about guitars and music, and I was like, what kind of music do you play? And then after the conversation kind of kept going. I was just like, just add me to Facebook, man, you seem like a cool guy. Let's keep chatting.

And I chat to him all the time. You know, I've made friends that way. It's sort of unconventional, but at the same time, we're all on social media, so why not try and make friends on social media if you get the chance. And if you click with people. All right, let's do a few more and then we can finish up.

"DontJealousMe: I think it would depend on who you grow up with, what you did at high school, who you hung out with. Did you go to school with a lot of Asians? Did you try to involve yourself with Aussies? Did you speak your language whilst with other Chinese at school? I grew up in a low socioeconomic white neighbourhood. Only time I felt left out was during Christmas because I do not celebrate Christmas. Also after 9/11, it got a little worse. But then the influx of-" Muslims. He's used, he's used a racial term here. "Came. But I still have a lot of Aussie mates, especially from going out, playing soccer, going to clubs, etc."

So, besides the racist term there, I think his point again is pretty valid, right? As long as you put yourself out there, you don't necessarily have to celebrate all the same things like Christmas and all that sort of stuff. But you, you know, get into clubs, get into sport, interact with other people with shared interests.

"KTR83: Also Asian Australian. I consider myself equally both, but that means sometimes you meet other people who will never consider me 'one of them'. Also equally on both sides. It took me some time, but I'm 100% okay with that." And we've got a lot of follow up comments here, even from the original poster. "Yep, this. Everybody's own definition of being Aussie is also different, which gives space for you to have your own once you realise."

And then Joistheyo said, "I think I consider myself culturally Australian, but a different form of Australian to the mainstream white Anglo ones. Might be similar to how African Americans currently do not relate to people in Africa at all, yet they're socially different to white Americans." And then KTR83 has followed up here. "I get it. Cultural identity can be super complex. It's one of those things that each of us have to decide for ourselves."

So anyway, you know, this has been a really interesting kind of Reddit thread. I thought I would share it on here, see what you guys think.

Again, I can't really talk from personal experience not being Asian. [Okay, okay, we get it. Okay.] But I can talk a little bit about what it was like growing up in Australia and having a lot of Asian friends. I had friends that did kind of struggle with identity, to some degree. But then I had friends who just never considered themselves Asian and only wanted to think of themselves as, you know, true blue Australians. And but for the fact that when you saw them, you could see that they obviously had Asian heritage, you would never have known, right? Like if you were blind and you were chatting to these people and befriending them, you could probably go 20 years without finding out that they're actually, you know, from mainland China or whatever, um, heritage wise.

So anyway, let me know your experiences down in the comments below. Let me know if you enjoy this type of episode, and I'll do more of them in the future. Again, the whole point of this is to just share a bit of Australian culture, and when I myself can't share certain aspects of identity or personal experience, I feel like it's really cool to share these types of posts and talk about them on here so that you guys can think about these things, you know, and we can discuss them. Anyway, I'm Pete! This is Aussie English. Thanks for joining me and I'll see you next time!

Transcript of AE 1291 - The Goss: New Echidnapus Monotreme Mammal Discovered in Queensland

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, whether locally Down Under here in Australia or non-locally overseas in other parts of the world, okay.

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 Goths. 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. Okay, 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.

Pete.

What's going on?

You're just overhang from the previously recorded episode.

Yeah. You guys all have to listen to the slang one. Hopefully.

No, don't.

You'll enjoy that.

It's crap.

Yeah. How's it going? Which episode do you want to do now? We have. We've just started the recording and we haven't even chosen the story.

I know. This is preparation, Pete.

Oh, I've got them open here. I just didn't choose which one.

All right, well, pick one.

Well, you choose-.

Echidnapus!

Echidnapus. That's the one I got in front of me.

Yeah.

With old mate.

With old-.

With old mate. Um.

Tim?

Yeah. Tim's on the Tim Flannery.

Yeah.

Famous Australian author and scientist.

Yes.

I noticed him. He's looking very healthy.

He is. He's lost a lot of weight. I hope that's by choice.

Yeah. That's it. So the echidna was fossil of potential echidna and platypus. Ancestor may point to Australian age of monotremes.

Yeah. 100 million years old.

So an ancient monotreme dubbed the echidnapus, which shares platypus and echidna like characteristics, is one of three extinct species of egg laying mammal unveiled by palaeontologists. Today. Palaeontologists. What a great word.

Palaeontologist..

The nightmare of anyone at high school having to do spelling spelling tests. Archaeologist and palaeontologist. I always get confused with these words because I think is it American English where they remove one of the vowels? It's like it's not ae, it'll just..

They drop the, they dropped the ae, which is a combined vowel in Old English.

And so I'm always, no matter how I write it, it seems like I'm getting the word or whatever corrected with that red underline in, in Word. So, another of the creatures shares close similarities with modern platypus, and could represent the oldest known monotreme to have a platypus like body. The trio of fossils are between 100..

Could indicate that it was the first aquatic.

Yeah. Could be. So, they're between 100 and 96 million years old and were found in the opal fields of Lightning Ridge in New South Wales.

Yeah.

So this was pretty cool. Though, it is funny how much they kind of they've really tried to sex it up. To zhuzh it up. To get it to the news..

Echidnapuses is just.

Yeah. And the, the monotreme, um..

Ancestor.

No, no. What is it that they used again? Like the explosion, right. The the age of monotremes.

The age of monotremes. There was one. Not one species, one individual.

But it's very cool. So Lightning Ridge, what's that famous for? In Queensland, right?

Nah, Northern New South Wales.

Northern New South Wales..

Near the Queensland border.

Okay. Is that inland?

Mhm.

It's pretty deserty isn't it.

Yeah. Central western New South Wales up near the Queensland border.

Okay.

Just, just really arid country.

Yeah. So it was a cool story. Um, Tim Flannery was just looking through some drawers apparently and came across..

Yeah, Australian museum.

And came across some opalised fossils.

It's not like these were just dug up.

Not recently.

They've have been..

Two decades.

Stuck in for 20 years in the Australian Museum.

Yeah, it was crazy. I wanted to say here that it was astonishing because over the last I think, 40 years, we've only found four fossilised monotreme jaw bones from Lightning Ridge. So this was like a bonanza because. Yeah, they found three.

Yeah.

Um, and he just found them in a random drawer. And it's so funny how often that happens in museums because they're inherently understaffed. They don't have enough staff working there, and they inherently have massive collections..

And a lot of..

.. too much stuff.

And a lot of the people who are working there are collecting.

Yeah.

They're not necessarily they, they catalogue to the point of saying it was found here on this date under these circumstances, but they haven't been worked up.

And then that was..

Determining what they were or, or, you know, taking all of the crappy rock bits off and identifying the fossil in more detail.

That was always the balance. When I was doing my master's and PhD at the museum at Museum Victoria. It was always that balance of you need to be- you can't. I mean, there would be the workers there who just love doing the field work.

Yeah.

That's what they live for. But then there would be that push from the academics there being like, we have to publish, we have to be analysing this stuff. We have to be communicating with science. And I mean having better science communication to share this. Otherwise we're just sitting on it and it's not.

What's the point of it.

Yeah, exactly. And yeah, it was just um, really kind of eye opening. It was funny. I knew a bunch of the people involved in this, actually. So Chris Helgen, the guy who is doing all of the media release and published this study, is worked closely with my supervisor. I think he was over at the Smithsonian for a while. Um, but yeah, so they found these jawbones, and it's interesting that they can so easily describe unique species based on a single bone from a single individual. Like that would always that always blew my mind that obviously, you know, that it's it was something at some point, you know, that it's similar to other things that are out there, but there's nothing like it. And so it becomes this, um, new species. But that the then the thing that I was always skeptical was the lengths to which, skeptical about was the lengths to which they would, um, describe, like the habitat of the animal..

I know.

And its behaviour and all these things where you're like, you have one half a bone.

Yeah.

Yeah. But I, by the same token.

But it's all by..

And determinal..

It's all by extrapolation.

Yes. Because they look at a jaw bone and go..

Here's what it's diet was.

Here's what, here's what. Yeah. Here's what it's likely diet is. We know that it is related to these other animals who are living after it, but who had very similar lifestyles that we know about.

Yeah.

Um, and we've got much more detail on. So it's all extrapolation, but there is and I'm a bit of a cynic as well, that there is this splitter mentality amongst a lot of palaeontologists of if you discover something, it has to be new.

Well, and that was why..

You can't this be another one to throw in the pile of variety and variation in an existing.

It's so hard to know, right? And that's the hardest part to know when you find something that is significantly different from all the other specimens that you have, whether it's morphology or size. The first reaction of a lot of people would be, this is something new and unique. But when I was doing my my PhD, I remember there was there was a study or a few studies that came out that were that we had the splitters and the clumpers, taxonomically speaking. And this is probably getting into the weeds and going to bore a lot of people, but there would be people who would want to turn everything into a new species. And then there would be those that would want to clump them together and say, no, this is these multiple different types are still one species. And there would be this sort of battle between those kinds.

And not just species, but at different levels..

Or groups.

Of groupings. So.

But the story was that I remember there was it was those dinosaurs that have the bald skull that have that are like plant eaters that smash into each other like rams. I think it was those. Um, and they found all of these different size fossils from a certain area and assumed that they were different species, all living together. But the study that was done analysed the leg bones of these same fossils and found that the smaller ones had the ends of the leg bones that weren't fused properly yet..

Showing they were juveniles.

Yeah, exactly. And the interesting thing was that they, the horn morphology changed significantly through their age and again, makes them look like completely different animals. But like with elephants..

That is elephants. Yeah.

Yeah. Or hippos or whatever the, the teeth and the horns and everything like that completely change as they mature. So it does make you think a lot of the time when doing this kind of work, it just shows how hard it is to really know..

And sexual dimorphism. You look at..

Yeah.

African elephants.

Yeah.

Males are 30%, 20-30% bigger than females. They have um, tusks, females have tusks. But then you go to Asiatic elephants. Females don't have tusks. And so if you're if you're looking at fossils of those, you'd be going, Oh, here's a different species. It didn't have tusks.

But.

This is just how the scientific method, I guess works, though. You know, you put out there your ideas and you allow time.

To wait for everybody else to argue the point.

Yeah, well, and find further evidence, because that must be the hardest thing. Really what these guys want is to be able to go to Lightning Ridge and keep pulling out more fossils from this same period with these same characteristics, to be able to reaffirm what they've suggested. So the two. What have we got here? The three different species, Parvopalus, um, clytiei, which may have been a land based animal similar to a brush tailed phascogale. Do you know, do you want to talk about what a phascogale is?

Phascogale's like a..

Tiny possum.

A little possum. Yeah.

It's like a very, very small marsupial.

Yeah. And to most people, if you saw one very briefly in the wild, you'd go, There's a rat.

Yeah, pretty much.

A small rat with a fluffy tail. Fluffy tail?

Yeah. With a fluffy tail. They're gorgeous.

They are. These fantastic..

Phascogales. The next one was Dharragarra aurora. I imagine that Dharragarra is an indigenous word, which it, it's cool when they use those which shares similarities with modern platypi. And then we have Opalios splendens. I imagine that Opalios is from 'opal'.

Yeah.

I imagine. And this was the one that was dubbed the 'echidnapus' because it had characteristics of both.

Yeah.

So it is interesting because there's a huge period of time they mentioned in this article where we have zero monitoring fossils. And monotremes are the earliest form of mammals, right. Effectively at least that are still alive today. They're the, the very the closest to reptile like group of mammals. They still lay eggs. They don't, they don't produce milk from nipples, but instead secrete it like sweat.

Yeah.

And their babies drink it, but they're still around today. But yeah, there was this huge period, I think they mentioned between 60 million years ago and 26 million years ago. We have zero fossils.

Yeah.

It's just nuts. It goes to show how, how hard it is to find or to fill out the fossil record at times.

And it's. Yeah. And it's quite likely that there just weren't many of them around. Yeah.

But that's what you don't know, right.

Yeah. But this is very early evolution of, of mammals. And so there would not have been a lot of them around and they might not have been, you know, if you're particularly terrestrial animals don't get fossilised very easily.

No.

Um, so aquatic animals do because they tend to die in the water. They sink into the bottom of the water, which is sand or mud, and that sand or mud gets turned into rock very quickly..

And becomes..

Geological times..

Becomes anoxic quickly, too. Right. So you don't have them rotting.

.. Yeah so you don't get them falling apart. Um, so yeah, if you're small, so small animals don't get fossilised very easily because they break apart and chemically dissolve too easily. Small terrestrial? Not many of them. There's no surprise. Um..

But it is cool to think that based on this, you know, finding three new species, all from a specific area. And they were the fossils were found by a miner who then gave it to an Australian opal centre palaeontologist, Um Elizabeth Smith, and her family, and she passed it on to the museum. So he must have found them all at the same time, you would imagine, or at least in a very short period of time. So they probably came from the same..

Here's my little shoe box of stuff.

Yeah. So I guess my point is they probably these animals probably were contemporary with one another at the time, right. Or at least very closely. So I don't know. It is cool to think that we may have so much more to learn about Monotreme evolution, because the current extant number of species is like five, right? There's a whole bunch of echidnas and the platypus.

Yeah.

And that's it. You know, we've got like three species of long beaked echidna, the short beaked echidna..

Yeah, and the argument is..

And the platypus.

How many species of echidna do we have? 1 or 5.

Yeah. And so it's cool to think that there may still be so much more to uncover about Monotreme evolution, and it would be really cool if they did discover this radiation where you have monotremes capitalising on all of this open niche space. Um, you know, millions of years ago, obviously with the dinosaurs still around and then evolving into numerous different species in many different habitats. And yeah, I don't know, it's I kind of found it pretty cool. I also like, I should comment the article guys if you want to find it. So it's..

It's on ABC.

.. news. Echidnapus. Just type in 'echidnapus'..

Yeah, just type in 'echidnapus' and you'll, it'll come up. You don't even need to go to ABC.

Yeah. And it's from the 27th of May. But if you find this on ABC, I'm actually really impressed with the science communication aspect now.

Oh, it's good.

And the art that they've gone to, they've obviously hired an artist, and I imagine they've written it here Pete Schouten? Or [Schouten]? From the Australian Museum.

Yeah.

Has done an image, a beautiful- a few images, but there's one here with the six species of monotremes that are known now from that period; 6 or 7. And you can click on each one and learn about it. And then when you scroll down below that, like there's more images of these really cool animals. But the ABC has embedded, um, this really cool timeline.

Yeah.

Of Monotreme evolution, which again, is just really, really.

Yeah.

So it's just cool.

This is a, this is a science communication article..

Yeah.

Not just a straight news article.

Yeah. Exactly. So you can, it starts here from the Permian-Triassic extinction event 251 million years ago, and then slowly moves forward, you know, through time, deep history all the way up to present, um, and has these sort of key milestones with monotreme evolution and other animals that were similar in form. I didn't realise there was a dinosaur from 250 million years ago that had a similar niche to a platypus, which was very cool and aquatic. So this is Eretmorhipis carrolldongi from 250 million years ago, an aquatic dinosaur with superficially convergent features with the modern platypus like beady eyes and a similar duckbill existed. They were only 70cm long, and they are not actually related to monitoring as well. They are related, but they're not closely related.

Yes.

Everything. Everything alive is related..

They're animals, yes.

But yeah. Um, yeah, it's cool. And it will be interesting to find like.

Yes, I think they mean not an ancestor.

Yes. But it's cool to find these animals that have similar, um, ecological niches and traits and morphologies to contemporary animals, right? Like, when you find these, you see that in the ocean right? With all those different dinosaurs, different lizards, whales, seals, all taking the same sharks, taking this same kind of body form and, and filling those same niches from a completely different animal families.

Well, it's the same from, you know, even semi closely related things. But look at kangaroos and deer. If you get a photograph of the head of a deer and a head of a kangaroo, they're almost identical.

Yeah. And then you zoom out and you're like..

You zoom out and you go, all right, there's two different ways of moving, and all of the rest of the shape of a kangaroo is related to how they move. But the head is what they eat. It's their jaws and how they eat. You know..

One of my this is a side note, but one of my favourite things to do at the moment, because I'm writing a bunch of essays for Aussie English about, um, sort of history, is reading the first hand accounts of people who saw animals like the thylacine and the kangaroo and the koala, and what they how they described it. You know them like, like it's just so, you can't like. It must be so amazing to think about those people who first saw animals that were so unique and out of their wheelhouse, right. Like..

The first gorilla?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, even you see the there's people from the Middle Ages, right?

That's Australian.

Or the medieval period where they tried to draw animals like tigers, leopards and elephants, and they just look stupid.

Yeah.

Disproportionate. Like, child's images, right? So disproportionate. And you realise that they're drawing it from a description from someone else. You know, it's a third hand account. Someone saying this is what it looked like. And you just think, man, imagine what it must have been like to be the first Roman, you know, to see a giraffe or an..

.. archaeologist as well. There are so many cases where re-examination, later examination of skeletons, you know, fossilised skeletons using biomechanics says animals never look like what they are first described as, and drawn as, and painted as.

Well the dinosaurs, right? The initial thing, that initial version of a T-Rex resting up on its tail like a kangaroo and walking around on two legs, really awkwardly standing up like Godzilla, right, is so just not how the animal would have moved efficiently, you know? It's effectively would have been sitting in a position that was horizontal to the ground, with the tail acting as a counterbalance and almost silent, apparently. They had, they looked at the foot morphology and they can work out they have pads that meant when they were walking, they were actually really quiet.

Yeah.

Fucking horrifying.

Yeah. Exactly.

Can you imagine being in the in the Jurassic or whatever and just seeing some of those animals..

Trees farting? Yeah.

No, not even just seeing the animals sitting there, watching you in the trees, and just being like, I'm dead. You know? Anyway, we've rambled on, but that was a cool story. Anything else to add?

No.

So what does it say here: So far 16 extinct monotremes have been found from dig sites in Australia and two from Argentina. So there you go. The max is 18 extinct monotremes. For the past, however long that is 100 million years or more, right? So it's not much. You would imagine there is a lot more species that are there yet to be discovered.

You would think so. Well, obviously that's true with everything.

Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, thanks for joining us, guys. Hopefully it blew your minds as well.

Yeah. Check it out!

See you next time!