Transcript of AE 1228 - The Goss: Aussie Olympic Hero Saves 4 Lives - Becomes Local Hero!

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.

Dad?

Pete.

What's going on? So have you done a Bradbury lately?

What, you mean come from behind and win an Olympic gold medal?

That's it. Well, it's not necessarily literally that, right? You don't have to win a gold medal. You have to triumph unexpectedly in a sport event, especially due to luck or misfortune.

Sport event, a life event now. I think it's..

I don't think it's necessarily sporting anymore, but yeah, if you come from behind in any kind of situation and then end up..

But not just come from behind, it's come from behind when everything looks hopeless.

Yeah, that's it. Right? And yeah, it's 'doing a Bradbury'.

Yes.

Don't explain where that comes from for anyone who may not know.

Yeah. For those who don't know, Stephen Bradbury was a speed skater. An Australian speed skater.

Ice skater.

Ice skater, and at the, and a sprint skater. Not the long track skating, which is, you know, people just get out there by themselves and they're effectively doing time trials. Sprint skating is that you've got four or more people on the, on a small indoor, effectively an ice hockey rink at once, at once and just haring around as fast as they can go. And at the 2002 Winter Olympics, he made the final. So he's a good skater anyway. But he was quite clearly the not, not expected to certainly win.

The least favourite..

He might, he might have got a medal, you know, if he'd done very well in the, you know, the final of four people. But coming around the bend on the last lap coming into the straight to finish..

He was dead last.

He was fourth, and the three people in front of him got tangled up and all fell over, and he just skated past them and won!

Right! In the last turn! Yeah,

Right on the last turn!

Literally 50m..

50m left.

And he gets a gold medal.

And he gets the gold medal. So..

Probably our first and last gold medal for speed skating at the Winter Olympics.

Yeah, I can't imagine we're ever going to have another one. So.

But I remember him getting interviewed after that and it being like, you know, did you- what was your plan? What was your strategy? And he was like, stay at the back, get out of the way..

And hope that somebody falls over so he could win a medal.

Yeah. And so it was hilarious because he'd actually meant to do that unintentionally. It wasn't like he was trying his hardest and was just getting smashed and was left behind. It was..

If he'd been trying his hardest, all four of them would have gone over. Yeah.

But yeah, he managed to just do it. And I think speed skating is probably one of those sports where that happens so frequently..

It does. Yeah.

Towards the end of a race because they are still so close to one another and they take risks or nudge one another to try and get out of the way.

Yes.

And yeah, so it was a freak occurrence. But it's cool. It's a cool story because it instantly entered the zeitgeist, the Australian culture, right? Pop culture, and 'doing a Bradbury' became a common phrase that you would hear that became like a, you know, a- What would you say? You'd hear it in your house all the time.

Yeah.

Within probably what, months, of that event happening? Maybe a year?

It became within weeks or months.

Yeah. And it was probably the media turned it into a thing.

Oh yeah. Well he became instantly famous around the world as the shock and awe story in sport.

And you can see the video of it on YouTube. You'll see..

.. after a week, the rest of the world had sort of lost it. And every now and then it would come up in sports metaphors and things of, you know, 'Oh, do you remember Stephen Bradbury, that guy from Australia, that did that in the Olympics?' But within Australia it just, yeah, 'Bradbury' became not just a name, but a thing. So.

It's so funny, isn't it, when like, an event takes place like that. Where an occurrence, something happens that isn't necessarily the first time it's ever happened. Right. You would imagine there's been plenty of races where someone's come from behind and ended up winning.

Yes.

And even come from behind and ended up winning because of error on the people in front who've screwed up. But it hasn't necessarily entered the linguistic, you know, arena for that language and become a thing.

This is where the whole field fell over.

Yeah.

Yeah. Like, the World Athletics Championships that's on at the moment. Earlier in the week in, in fact in the first, second day. So it was the first, one of the first finals on the track. The mixed four by 400m relay.

Yeah.

The United States were expected to win and they had been boasting about going to break the world record. The Dutch were leading with five metres to go. And Femke Bol, who, the Dutch woman who was running the last leg, fell.

With five metres..

Just fell over. With five metres to go. As in tripped over herself.

Yeah, yeah. She's just exhausted at the end of a 400 metre run and she just fell over. So it was the Americans won. Now it might have been. They were very close. Now it might have been the American woman had got past her anyway because she was clearly fading.

Yeah, but how many times I've seen that same kind of thing happen where someone tries to celebrate too early in a marathon or whatever and they don't realise the person's metres behind them, and they start slowing down with their arms..

Many cases of that, particularly in heats and semi-finals in sprints.

Yeah, yeah..

Where they slow down, you know, there's no reason to slow down.

Yeah.

And the irony with the Femke Bol one though is that that happened about 15 minutes after another Dutch woman fell 20m from the line, leading in the 10,000m. So two Dutch women fell that were, that were leading, within eyesight of the finish line..

There's conspiracy in there, Dad. There's a conspiracy and someone doesn't like that Dutch!

Well, ironically, ironically, Femke Bol won last night in the 400 metre hurdles. Her pet event.

What is that line from is that um, Austin Powers? 'There's only two kinds of people I don't, I can't stand in this worldp people who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch!'

Yeah, I think it is Austin Powers. I love that guy. You know, the Dutch get picked on because they're the nicest people in the world.

Yeah, I don't know. It's one of those things. You don't have to be a bad person to get picked on, right?

No, exactly. And particularly when it's done by, you know, in humour, in a, in a movie.

Yeah. But anyway, I guess my point is. Having learnt a bunch of languages now, you quite often learn phrases and ideas and things where you're just like, That's such an obvious thing that- we do that in our native language, but we don't have a way of expressing it. You know, those, those things that aren't translatable. And I think that 'doing a Bradbury' is something that you couldn't easily translate into another language because of the cultural layers to it.

Yes.

And it's just, yeah, that's why it becomes a phrase because it summarises something so complex and so quickly, summarises something that everyone complex...

.. and everybody, everybody can easily understand it, but it only makes sense in Australia because everybody, you know, certainly everybody over the age of 30 remembers Stephen Bradbury doing that.

Yeah.

Whereas intellectually, if you got, if you got told the story, you'd go, 'Oh, that makes sense.' But to a non Australian, it just hasn't become part of the culture. So.

I'm trying to find this thing. There's a guy, yeah, here it is. Hyperart Thomasson. So there's this, I think it's Thomasson in Japanese is it? Is a type of conceptual art named by the Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei in the 1980s. It refers to useless relics or structures that have been preserved as part of a building or the built environment which has become a piece of an of art itself. And so this guy has like an entire book where I think he's gone around Japan, and he's just taken photos of useless parts of architecture that have been left in place, just for the sake of leaving them in place. And so it's called Hyperart Thomasson.

So not ruins, just..

No, but like, you know, a, as a stair handrail that is still there. But the stairs have been removed.

Yeah.

Or like stairs going up to a up to a door on the second floor. But the door has been filled in with bricks and then painted over. But the stairs are still there. Japan's got heaps of those, right. I think there's a whole bunch of those sorts of expressions and phrases that..

I suppose lots of languages do that we just don't know about.

Yeah, but there's always someone who's like, 'Oh, that reminds me of this Japanese concept of blah', and you're just like, That's so funny that that is a thing. And I recognise that that's a thing. But we don't have a way of expressing that. And we have to use a Japanese word, you know, the art of blah. And I love Japanese people are just like, or Japanese culture is just so fricking weird man. I just love it. I wish if I came back again, if I got to reincarnate, I think I'd probably want to come back Japanese just so that I could experience it on the inside. But I remember like. They just, they come up with the most extreme hobbies that are futile. Or seemingly have no real point besides, besides just doing the hobby. Like, there was one that I recently saw where there was a video on YouTube or on Facebook where this, there's a job. Someone makes incredibly small fishing rods out of bamboo. Right? And you're kind of like, okay, he's just making them and collecting them. No, he's making them for people whose hobby is catching incredibly small fucking fish.

Oh, really?

With incredibly small fucking fishing rods. And so, yeah, so his job. So you have these guys..

He's, he's providing the materials for an even more ridiculous hobby. So you think initially you're like, 'Man, this guy has a really weird hobby' and he's like, 'No, this is not a hobby. This is job.' And he's got like, This isn't the weird part. The weird part is he makes them for someone who goes then out into the rice fields and sits there quietly..

With their little..

And the job is to try and catch the smallest possible fish with the smallest possible fishing rod. And so they end up catching things that are like mosquito fish. And they don't keep them. I was like, They're going to have some sort of a thing where they catch a hundred of them and they turn it into sushi or some kind of dish. No, they just release them. And then he walks off, you know, and he's just like, 'All in a day's work!', like a sunset. And the guy's just like, 'Yes, that was a quality day in my life', you know? I just find that stuff endlessly fascinating. There's always something that some Japanese person has taken to an extreme in the past, and it's become a full movement.

Well..

And there are people who love it, but..

There's lots of hobbies like that. And I'll use myself as an example. I spent most of Wednesday driving to a location. Sitting at this location for five hours, and then driving home from that location, three-hour drive. So that's like 11 hours..

To take a photo of a bird!

And it wasn't even just taking the photo, it was just seeing it. And the photos that I took were crap photos. They're never going to be used publicly, but they are a record of seeing the bird and it's a rare bird. But so that, that sort of twitching, as it's commonly called, the the just talked about just- yeah, we have just observing a rare bird somewhere is of no value to humanity whatsoever. Other than the entertainment value of the participant.

Yeah. Fulfilment is what you're chasing.

Yeah.

And I think that's the, the beauty of these sorts of things, like the Japanese man who's catching these tiny little fish with a tiny fishing rod. It's so arbitrary. And you look at that on the surface and you're like, this This is fucking ridiculous, Like, like of all the things. But then, yeah, as you say, you think about something like birdwatching. Or there are plenty of things. I think the level of ridiculousness that, that it probably has relates to how useful you think it is to someone else, right? Like, if you think about someone, a young kid playing guitar ten hours a day for years at a time and in his bedroom, you know, it has a completely different feel to it where other people can enjoy the music. It could be potentially a career. It's- so many people do it. It's not seen as a kind of like weird thing. But then if it was a young kid doing that and he was playing the flute, you know, or even not the flute, but some really arbitrary. Like maybe some, you know, ancient instrument from..

If he's, if he's building card houses, you know, houses out of packs of cards and practising that like..

Yeah, you'd be like, what are you- what is wrong with you?

Okay? What..?

But, but it is so funny that ultimately it does just come back to really chasing fulfilment. Trying to achieve something, trying to do something hard and, and accomplish it and the, the self fulfilment that you feel as a result of achieving that thing, whether or not other people respect it or enjoy it is not the point. It's about how you feel about it at the end of the day.

Yeah, exactly.

That's why Japanese people live so long. Because they are in the moment and they are so chill because they're concentrating on doing something and focusing on being fulfilled, you know? So, yeah, I don't know. You guys will have to let me know if I'm missing out on any other really interesting..

I'm sure you'll get..

That's it.

Overwhelmed with ridiculous now.

I don't know. I just love that sort of stuff. I think, I feel like that's something that John Cleese would probably talk about, right?

Yeah.

We went and saw him recently and I found out that I'd been saying his name incorrectly my entire life.

John Cleese.

Yeah, yeah. It should rhyme with cheese because his name is..

Cheese..

.. his surname, yes. Anyway, so yeah, 'doing a Bradbury'.

Yeah.

We wanted to talk about him because he recently popped up in the news. He did. Originally I was looking at it and I'm like, Why is he at a beach and what's he done now? Like, what is he doing? Is he started an organisation or he's, you know, whatever. He rescued four people from drowning.

Yeah, he was just out surfing and noticed some guy get into trouble out the back of the waves and went out to get him. And then there were three others out there as well. And he brought the first guy in and then went back out.

Yeah.

Picked up the three people and tried to get them in, but the four of them on the, on his surfboard were just to, him and the three others, were just too much for the flotation, and they just getting knocked off..

.. a two metre wave.

So he, I think his son, was out with him. And his son went back in and got, and got got the..

I think he got him to go get help when he noticed.

And he came back out and they rescued the whole lot.

That's pretty impressive for that kind of to take place. Obviously, it took place pretty quickly, but it seems like if you only have enough time to go out there, bring someone back and then try and go out there again to save them, and then you get help afterwards, you're like, how did these people not drown? Apparently one of them was a good swimmer and the others just weren't. But yeah, apparently I've heard one of the most dangerous people in the world is someone who thinks they're drowning, especially when you're in the water with them.

I've, I've rescued a couple of people from not quite drowning, but who got into trouble in rips.

Yeah.

And the trouble with rips is that if you don't know surf beaches..

And how the rip works.

And how the rip works, you can't, you can't see that they're there. And if you do know them, they're quite easy to see. But..

But then also you fight against it.

You also fight against it. And there's two ways of dealing with a rip. There's three ways of dealing with it. The first way fails, and that is to try and swim against it.

You die.

And you cannot swim against a rip.

Well, you can. You just don't go anywhere.

No, you don't. You're still going backwards. But you're going, you're going out slower than you would be. One is just go with it because they'll only go a couple of hundred metres off shore and then you just swim sideways and go. Or the other one is you just swim across it and eventually you'll get out of it.

Well, it's like crossing a river, right? In that sense, you don't want to swim up river trying to get back to where you fell in. You swim sideways and try and get out of the main current and get to land in the case of the river.

But so, yeah, I've rescued a couple of people, one of which I just talked them down. The other one I actually had to physically handle because she panicked. As soon as I get there, they just grab hold of the..

And start to climb you.

It's the old thing of the dying man will clutch at straws, but they try and grab hold of you and try, and you just cut it out. So.

Well, I think it's just that instinct, right? I remember this is sort of a side note, but when I was doing my master's degree, I was studying Varanus Varius, right. The lace monitor. And they're Australia's largest goanna and they live in trees. And so they have feet, hands, claws that look like an eagle's foot, really like a lizard crossed with an eagle where the claws are just insanely curved and they're built for climbing up trees. Right? But when we caught these things, we'd have to catch them with a dog pole quite often, try and chase them while they were. They would bask underneath, on the ground or on the side of a tree down low to get the sunlight. They would bask in the sun and you'd have to try and creep up and then chuck a dog noose over them.

Or use a trap where you've attracted them with like rotting chicken. But I remember it was when I first started doing the fieldwork and capturing these guys. You, you have to kind of like duct tape them up. It's almost like some kind of BDSM kind of thing where you you duct tape their hands together, you duct tape their feet to their tail and you duct tape their mouths so that they can't bite you. And you have to let them go against a tree. So when..

.. they've got something else to grab hold of..

We would, when we would let them go. You initially, you've got them all tied up, mouth is tied up. You push them up against the tree so that they can feel it. They can see it. You don't do the back legs. You unwrap them and put them onto the tree. You undo the front legs, you wrap, unwrap them, put them onto the tree. And you're pushing the lizard, which is about the size of a cat, right? Maybe a bit heavier, some of them longer.

They're about two metres long. So.

Yeah, but I mean like the bodies. Yeah.

Yeah. There are about what, 8 to 10 kilos.

They can do some serious damage.

Oh yeah.

But you were pushing it against a tree so that it couldn't get out and then you would have to take the mouth. The last thing was taking the mouth thing off and holding the head and letting the head go. But you would have to let it go against a tree. Because if you just let it go on the ground, its instinct is to climb.

Yeah.

And so there were stories of people who got fucked up because they just..

Ran straight up.

Yeah, they let the lizard go and there were no trees nearby and it just turned around and ran up them effectively. And you just. Yeah, you would not want to. I've still got a scar, I think somewhere on one of my hands. Yeah. There it is. From where I got scratched by one of these guys. They just tore me open. But yeah, I remember that being a funny sort of panic response from these lizards. The other thing was for them to also just not move.

Yeah.

They would just. It would be like they're playing dead and then they would just go, Yeah, but yeah. So Bradbury got in the news recently.

He did!

Came back..

Got an award for bravery, for rescuing these people..

Back in the limelight. Yeah. So that was pretty cool.

So we have a new 'doing a Bradbury'.

Yeah, well that's it. Is it going to change the- there's going to be two different synonyms for it. Now the language is evolving.

Yeah, it's funny that that whole idea, as we were talking about, of a person's name becoming synonymous with a, you know, effectively an action that has been stretched past the thing that they actually did.

Well, this is Buckley's chance, right?

Yeah.

Potentially.

Well, not..

100..

I, I've got two answers to that one. But do you want to tell them about where the commonly accepted thing about Buckley's chance? Because that's only a very Australian thing. And in fact it's a very Victorian thing. So.

Well we live in the area that William Buckley escaped.

Or where he ended up.

Yeah. So he was an escaped convict or a convict that was brought to Australia in the early 1800s, I think 1803..

1803 was the settlement in Sorrento.

And so across the bay, across the bay, here he was. They were here. I think they were just scouting the place out when..

They tried to create a settlement.

Okay.

And it lasted..

It was only temporary.

It lasted a few months. They were intending it to be a permanent settlement on in Port Phillip Bay. Yeah, but what they didn't realise that the water that they had was a ephemeral water. It wasn't, it wasn't there permanently. So there was a stream that they were camped beside to start with and then it dried up..

And they were like bugger.

So they left..

Went back to..

They didn't go looking for anywhere else. They just went back to where they ended up. And yeah, they ended up in Van Diemen's Land.

But yeah, he ended up running off in the night with four other convicts, I think. And there's an episode on this, on the podcast with Adam Courtney, who wrote a book about it. So go check that one out. But he ran around the bay effectively over a few days and the rest of the convicts ended up either killing each other or running back home and getting punished, you know, going back. But he ended up living here for 35 years, 35 years with indigenous while the wrong people.

Yeah.

And then when was it? What's his name again?

Batman.

Batman came over in 1835 or 38 or whatever it was. He encountered one of the first people to come out of the bush was this white bearded dude..

Tall!

And they were like..

He's about he apparently he was about six foot five. Yeah, he's a big guy. So.

And so, yeah, he was pretty much there warning them that they were about to be killed by the local indigenous people. But so yeah, his, the whole Buckley's chance thing was him.

The chance of surviving.

The chance of surviving was effectively nil. Right. If you were here by yourself with the indigenous people because not just, because the indigenous people would potentially kill you or anything like that, but because the way of surviving in these environments was so extreme that you would have to have indigenous level knowledge to be able to survive. Because you had to move around, follow different food sources, find water, all that sort of stuff. But he somehow managed to survive, I think, for about six months to a year without any Indigenous people.

I'm not sure for how long, but he may well have had incidental contact..

He ended up down in Torquay and then eventually he, he sort of got adopted into the Wathaurong, a Wathaurong clan or tribe around and lived with them for the majority of it. Yeah. But yeah. So that expression..

The bizarre thing is he just happened to be an indented head when Batman arrived here. Well, I think he probably saw the. Yeah, he would have seen the boats nearby or heard about it because I think he heard about it. But. But yeah, the whole 'Buckley's chance' thing apparently either comes from that or a store called Buckley..

Buckley's and none was a name of a store in Melbourne, a department store up until about the 1960s, early 70s. And that had always been my thought as which one is it? Because? Because the expression used to be that 'Buckley's chance' was a contraction of 'You've got two chances, Buckley's and none.'

Well, you wonder if it is one of those things where..

I reckon they're contracted together..

They just merged into a single thing. They would have been people who who had that expression or saying 'because of Buckley's and none'.

Yeah.

And there may have been people prior to that.

.. 'got Buckley's chance of surviving'. Yeah.

Yeah. Which is ironic because yeah he ended up- we use it now to mean 'you've got no chance' but Buckley survived.

Yeah!

So it's, it's almost the actual Buckley's chance is like winning the lottery.

It is an ironic expression.

Yeah exactly. So yeah, it's a cool one that you'll often hear. But yeah, those sorts of expressions with people's names immortalising them effectively.

Yeah. And I know that there's a few of them dropped out. Yeah, it dropped out of- and this was a sporting thing, probably even just an athletics thing from the 1960s, late 60s into the 70s and 80s was 'doing a Beamon' and that just sort of disappeared. I think when, you know, eventually people just sort of forgot. And that was Bob Beamon, who in the 1968 Olympics in the first jump, broke the world record by 60cm. It's like it is the single greatest sporting performance ever and nobody will ever get close to it again where you can you know, you can break a world record by effectively about 10%, you know, yeah, it was 8% and it would be like somebody coming out and running 100m in 8.8 seconds, you know, just breaking it by a second, not 100th of a second or a 10th of a second, but and that was and the thing was, he wasn't even favourite to win.

There was a Welshman called Len Davies, who'd been the best long jumper in the world for a couple of years and he was the favourite to win. And Bob Beamon just came out. Did this jump in the first round and went, 'I'm done.' Like, no point in me taking another jump. Jesus. And that was that just the freak performance thing came out for a while. But but it was so, and it was such a specific thing that it wasn't transferable to anything else.

How did he manage to do it? Was it a different technique or it was just he used the same as everyone else and just..

It was just a superhuman- One day it was just this superhuman performance. Like, who knows what? Everything..

Aligned.

Just aligned. His entire physiology aligned on that second that he hit the board and took off.

Yeah.

It's bizarre.

But. All right. Well, anything else to mention, Bradbury Wise?

No, I think we'd Bradbury'd out. Well done, Steve. You did a good job.

I know. That's it. What was he, a hero?

Yeah, exactly.

All right. See you next time, guys.

Bye.