Transcript of AE 1220 - The Goss: 135 Year-Old Message in a Bottle

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 to 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, how's it going?

Good, Pete! Yeah, thanks. Hang on. Apologies for those who haven't listened to the previous couple of episodes that we've been recording using the using the new technology. I was about to apologise for what Pete just did. That we're wearing remote mikes that are lapel-attached, so they're right below the beer drinking orifice.

I thought you were going to say 'beard drinking orifice'.

Beard and drinking orifice.

Hard to drink a beard. Yeah. So this was a cool story. The amazing Victorian time capsule, 135 year old message in a bottle. "Message in a bottle", found in Edinburgh. So, Scotland.

Yeah.

The thing that blew my mind. So they have this photo in this, of a very old bottle, below a wooden floorboard that's been cut through.

Great isn't it?

It looks like it's been framed.

Yeah,

But it turns out..

I don't think..

.. the person- plumbers, literally dug through and went through and it was right there.

Oh! Look at that! You couldn't have done it better. Mind you, that's. We see the after shot. He probably was digging through and went, 'Oh look, there's a bottle cork or something in there.' But yeah, it looks amazing.

Yeah. So, "A rather incredible discovery occurred in Edinburgh, Scotland, where a woman found 135 year old message in a bottle under her floorboards. Everything started in October 1877 when two local workers left a note under the floorboards at Morningside Villa. The message was placed in a bottle and left untouched. Until now, when-" I don't know how you would say this name. Is it Eyelid? Alyth. I don't know. It's one of these Gaelic spellings.

Yeah. Eilish.

Eilish. You reckon?

Eilidh Stimpson, a mother of two, found it in her Morningside home in Edinburgh. I can't imagine living in a country where, the buildings in which you live, are hundreds of years old. And have the potential to have those sorts of things just around under the floorboards in the walls, you know, because anything in Australia...

The first house- Yeah, but the first house that we, your mum and I lived in, we were only renting it so we weren't going to be digging the floorboards up.

Was this back in the 40s?

Back in the- No. Yeah. Ha ha ha. That house was at the time when that house would have been 90 years old and we were living there.

Well, I guess, yeah..

When I was living..

Certainly houses built in the 1850s and 60s in Australia that are still around.

Well, how old would the one have been that I was living in on Driberg Street in North Melbourne?

That would have been 1880s.

Really? That old?

1880s to 1900.

Okay.

It's- it's end of Victorian era. It was not Edwardian. They built a different style of place then.

Jesus. Yeah. Crazy. Crazy. But it was interesting. So they they got the plumber in, he cut through the floorboards and was..

Found a bottle..

A bottle that had a rolled up message..

With a note in it!

So what did the notes say?

The note says, hang on, I've got to try. And it's handwritten and scrappy, so..

Ah, I've got the thing in front of me here. The message..

It says, James Ritchie, John Grieve. Laid this floor but did not something or other. Something or other.

Drink the whisky.

Yeah. October the 6th, 1887. Whoever finds this bottle may think our dust is blowing along the road. Now, that's pretty rhetoric and existential. Is that.

I can't believe you can read that.

Like, that's. You sit there and you go, What am I going to write? And this is the question. When I suggest this story, this is the question I'm going to give you in a minute. But what am I going to write for something? I'm going to stick this note in here and go. Our ghosts are still here.

Yeah.

Our dust will be blowing down the road. This is. That's highly existential for somebody to put as a note in there. Assuming that somebody is not going to find this until well after they're gone,

Well, they would be waiting for the house to be demolished, I guess.

Yeah,

I guess it's one of those things where you often look back in the past and think that people didn't have the same kind of existential thoughts or feelings or conversations that we have today. But you forget that they were grappling with the same kind of things with mortality. And, you know, the shortness of life and everything.

So the question and I can't remember the whether the whole article, I don't think it does go into who these dudes were, but..

Ah, it does. It says that they were two men registered as living in the new Newington area by the same names in the 1880s. So they found the men. I think they were just workers of some kind.

So the question is they were not living in this house. This is not the gay couple, secret gay couple living in there. As in 'We're about to build our our living home, we'll put it in here'. These were the two workers who were building the floor on this house, obviously, and went, "Hey, this would be a cool idea. What do you reckon? Hey, Jimmy!" "Yes, Johnny?" "Let's put this wee bottle in here with a note in here. What can we possibly say that'll fuck with their means in 100 years when they find it?"

Well, it makes you wonder if..

Apologies to my Scottish friends and relatives for my really bad Edwardian Edinburgh accent.

It makes you wonder if people are doing that today and if, and if and when people will find it in the future. I guess they're probably doing it digitally, more so than physically like that.

I can't remember it. Were you at the- you were at the primary school, but you can't probably remember it happening. But when I was the president of the primary school that you went to. There was a..

Time capsule.

A time capsule put in, and I think it was put in for 25 years or something. So it's probably coming up soon.

Yep.

And it was, you know, kids designing things and putting it in and what message do we want to send and so on. But that's the question I had. If you were going to put a time capsule somewhere, what would you put in it? I suppose it's dependent without pre-empting your answer. It's dependent on the context and where you're going to put it and why. But you're building a house. Like these guys were, whether it's your house or something. What message are you going to send that you're expecting to be found in a hundred years time?

I don't- It's one of those things. You ask them questions so that they get an idea of what you're wondering.

Like, "Get a bottle!" isn't it, and go find it?

Yeah, that's it. This is "Is Elon Musk eternal yet?"

Yeah.

Did he finally..

Did he get to Mars?

Yeah. I don't know. I guess that would be kind of superfluous, but it would be funny. I don't know what you would. I feel like they're kind of. I'd probably be thinking more about what can I leave that'll be interesting to the people who find it.

Whether or not it's a physical message, I'd probably leave something like put an iPhone in there, You know, buy a brand new with a battery charger.

Yeah. Buy a brand new iPhone with a battery charger because..

Excuse me.

You think they're everywhere at the moment. But how easy is it for us to find a Nokia 3310 or whatever, 3210 or whatever, they were from the 90s, right. I imagine they're still floating around because they were pretty.

They've actually just been reintroduced.

Yeah, but the original ones, right, Especially in mint condition with..

Annie's little purple one that she had.

And I think that's one of those things when we think about Roman times or even, you know, indigenous cultures around the world. When we think about the past, a lot of the time what we would like to have, besides obviously their thoughts and what they were, you know, having conversations about, is the physical objects that they were potentially using or interacting with, you know, and a pristine mint condition version of whatever it is. So yeah, stuff like that. I don't know, maybe. What are your concerns? What are you worried about? At the moment, like, my biggest issue at the moment is housing. It's fucked. You know, I'm worried about if I'll ever be..

Did Donald Trump ever go to jail?

I know. Yeah. I don't know if you'd. What would you leave in there that would be funny. Do you think, like..

This?

Practical..

This story? I love this! It's so cool.

Besides that..

Because it's, yeah..

.. If you can leave an object in there that would make them laugh or make them think about 'What the fuck is this?'.

I don't know.

You know, would you leave maybe a CD? You know? You know, something can be like "Hopefully you can work that the answer to life is on this CD. Good luck."

Yeah, it's on this. You don't even put CD.

Can you find something to use it?

Yeah. Although I suspect that there's almost nothing that we could do now that in a hundred years time, people wouldn't instantly be able to work out what it is. Because even..

I think there'd be plenty of things that you could show me from 100 years ago. And I..

Ah yeah! I agree. I agree. But fast forward 100 years- even now. And you can grab your phone, take a photograph of something, post that in a search to Google and it'll tell you what it is.

Well, I guess that's the difference between them having access to technology that can tell them what it is or if they can just look at it and see,

Yeah, but that's that.. But what's the- how is this technology going to go in 100 years? What, at what point are there going to be where they just don't understand what something was?

Yeah.

And because- I can't fathom what the world's information collection and retrieve ability is going to look like in 100 years time. But, but you're right. What sort of what object would you you put in there? I was thinking about this a while ago, totally independently of this sort of bizarre things that are so familiar to us now that are just different. A white tennis ball.

Yeah. But..

You mean as it looks like I used to use.

Yeah, you look at that. You look at me like it looked at me like 'What the fuck are you talking about?' It is lime green. They're yellow! There's bright lime green colour. But I grew up with tennis balls being pink. Yeah, they were actually white, but we used to play on clay court. So you'd play with them for five minutes and they were this sort of light pinky colour. So yeah, those sort of weird things where, you know, if I'd showed you one of those you'd go, was this specially made? Like what? What's this? It's not real. So yeah, one of those sort of things of what could you put in there? I don't know. I asked the question ambitiously that you might be more intelligent than me, which we know is true, but would you come up with something?

One of those things that I think about quite often is how much, how much of a person's, how much someone in the future will actually give a shit about the past.

Because it's one of those things. And I imagine that it was like this for people that wrote this note. Where they're probably thinking they live in the present when it was 1877 and they're probably like, Who gives a shit? No one cares. It's not special. But we look back now and think, Wow, it was so different. This was so interesting and blah. And I wonder how much it would be like that where we feel today that, well, there's not really anything interesting that we can instantly pull out and share with the future or..

What are these guys going to do? Here's a hammer.

Yeah, exactly.

And funnily enough, their hammer from 1877, would look pretty much identical to the hammer that we use, except that now the cheap ones have got fibreglass handles, the expensive ones have timber handles still. Why..

Have you seen those surgical tools from the Roman times?

Yeah?

Compared to the modern ones? And you just like 'What?! We worked it out with that long ago?'

I know!

It's like. Yeah, we needed a few basic..

We needed a small, sharp..

.. hold things open. Yeah. And to poke at stuff.

Yeah I know. And, and that's the thing that I find amazing. These guys just got it! There was nothing that they could say other than something existential. Like "It'll be our dust blowing down the road." "But we're still here."

I feel like I would..

It's genius!

I would try and mention someone, right? You know, being like. The hope, hoping the person who finds it can look the person up or find out about them, or it's someone famous. Be like, "I once met so-and-so. And he was a cunt. He was a horrible human being or something." Or like. "Yeah, it turns out this guy was right."..

Or like, you know. Or are you guys still listening to Bruce Springsteen?

Is there new music or do you guys just keep listening to the old stuff?

That's right.

AC DC.

Who's the new Taylor Swift?

I know. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. That's it. 'I'd love to ask you guys something, but I'm dead and don't care.'.

'I'm dead. Don't care. I'm never going to know what your answer is, but I really want to find out.'.

I don't know. It is one of those things where I feel like. You probably could never work out what the future is going to want to know or what would be the ideal thing, because the time would come and it would be something you'd never have realised.

And that's what these guys got it.

Yeah.

There's nothing we can say that is going to improve your lives except giving you an insight into yourself.

Have you seen. I think there's something I remember reading about Roman, the Roman era, where they would have wells that people would throw kind of curses into so they would have issues with neighbours or so on and so on, and they would ride it on a piece of clay or whatever.

Yeah. The neighbours..

And your cat.

Neighbour didn't pay me for so-and-so. Yeah. Go screw yourself. And they would chuck it in the well. And so now they've, they found one of these places and dug them all up and then got all these like bitchy notes from Roman times where people were complaining about, you know, 'So-and-so's neighbour had an affair with my wife and I hope he dies', you know, throw that.

He did!

Yeah, that's it. I think that is always one of those things for me at least. Looking back in the past, it's when you get the day to day conversation or life or thoughts or feelings or emotions is that you often don't get, you know. It's one of those things when I was doing a lot of reading about Australian culture and history from the initial settlement period.

Yeah.

You read that diary by Watkin Tench, right? The first diary.

.. is amazing!

About colonisation of Australia because he came..

If you guys can find it and you want to have this,

Tim Flannery republished it, so it's out there.

Yeah.

Watkin Tench.

Watkin Tench. Yeah. He was a lieutenant in the First Fleet.

Yeah. And he obviously was, you know, probably one of the few people on the fleet that was literate and could write because I imagine even the officers or the other people's soldiers..

Well, the officers could, but the soldiers wouldn't.

So he would..

Sort of be an illiterate,

..Sitting down and writing, you know, about the occurrences like the spearing of Arthur Phillip. Right. And so you get to..

Just day to day stuff! What it was like walking up the muddy street in Sydney..

That sort of stuff is ironically really precious where I think at the time you would think it's something so mundane. Why would I share that kind of thing? Why would anyone care? But I think that would be the thing maybe you would share with. I mean, it probably requires a lot more than just a single note to do it justice.

It does. Yeah. But so it is interesting because in his case, he was probably one of 2 or 3 people who were actually recording daily life.

Who else was doing it?

Well, I assume Arthur Phillip's journals. I haven't read them, but his journal, his journals would have been much more around the management of the colony, whereas Watkin Tench is about events and daily activities.

Just sorry to interrupt you. The thing I would kill for is to have a convict's daily diary.

Yeah.

So-and-so is a fuckwit. This person I've got a crush on. This guy robbed me- the gossip of this, like all the interesting..

And the really good rum can be found at number two in the basement!

That I would kill for. It is funny. It's kind of like- I think it's the reason-.

Daily life!

We watch soap operas and all the bullshit about drama between different people. But I think if you could go back into the past quite often because we don't have access to that, we don't associate the two and don't think about those things happening. And I think, you know, it's why we love things like Pompeii the- where you..

It literally is that frozen moment in time.

Yeah. You have food that's still on plates, you know, people's excrement still in the toilet, dead people holding their most precious belongings that, you know, they were running down the street with when they died. And so you have all of this information that you, that never really gets left to the future. Right. And so I think that sort of stuff would really interesting, would really interest me. So I think what would I leave? Probably a diary, right? If you could find just an average person's diary with drama in it, and especially if they had one that they wrote in on a regular basis for a significant amount of time, if you could put that in a time capsule. I think whether the person was important or famous or not, I don't care about. But if they wrote- like Anne Frank's diary, right? Yeah, like she was a 14 year old girl. But in the middle of a circumstance that was just horrific. And yet the reason the diary is so good, she writes so well, but it's about what was going on on a daily basis during that period.

Right. That was so fascinating!

Personal!

Yeah.

It's not a historical political statement.

No.

It's just- this is my life. It's for a period of months. I think it's knowing, knowing that other people are human and experiencing the same sort of thing as you are. Because like Julius Caesar, you know, I recently saw that they've opened up the temple where he got stabbed to death in Rome, and it just blows my fucking mind. Like to think that you can now go to Rome. I mean,

Stand on the steps.

And stand where he was stabbed to death and think you have a connection to that period in time. Like that was such a significant moment, you know, in Western culture and Western history. You know, it must be like what it's like for Muslims to go to Mecca and think about Muhammad, you know, or people to go to Israel and be thinking about Jesus or whatever, like these these figures that are so significant. And to be like, I've gone there. So I can't imagine. Yeah. Having like, you know, if you had Julius Caesar. Like the writings of- what's his name is again, Marcus Aurelius, is it? His thoughts? I need to go back and read those. But that sort of stuff I find, you know, really precious. I would kill to have a diary from an Aboriginal person from a thousand years ago.

Like if you could find out what what was your daily life like? Tell me about the, the mundane, you know.

So for them it's mundane..

What is it like living- what is it like living in a clan with all of your closest friends and family? 24-7. It's like Big Brother all the time, you know, like.

But nobody ever gets voted out.

Yeah, well, and they do. But permanently with a rock to the back of the head. Yeah. How do you guys manage conflict like that? Like, I would love to know so much more about those sorts of things. I feel like that would be the really precious stuff. More than, you know, objects, I guess. I don't know. You think that's.

Yeah. Well, I was thinking about.

Stories.

Stories, yeah. And that. Is that because. The interest that I have had for a long time and still have in family history is once you get the birth, marriage, death dates and where they lived, if you if you're lucky enough to get where they lived, it's what was going on in their daily life. Unless you find somebody famous, then it's interesting to, to- to link into that and you can sort of interpret that. And you've got lots of that in your family. Not in my side and your mother's side. Your Highness.

Only just- only took you guys like a decade of digging.

Well, you know, your mother finally got there.

Yeah. And for those the aside here is that Peter is the 20th cousin of the late Queen Elizabeth.

Yeah, well, the 21st cousin of King Charles.

Noah, yeah. Your son and daughter are the 21st cousins of King Charles.

So you can go back and listen to Mum's episode with me. I can't remember what number it is, but I chat to my mum, Jo Smissen, about our family history and who we're related to, what she discovered. And it was pretty interesting. Because, yeah, as soon as you get into the Royal line,

Then there's, there's obviously, yeah, there's lots of documentation about Edward the first who was the, the first or the last person, the royal that or directly descended from, all the others are associates. But but yeah that, that sort of what was life like for the people who were living here at that time because. The personal stories. Yes. You get now, even today, we can go back 100 years and read newspaper articles and those sorts of things. But there you read an obituary of somebody and you go, well, that's a snapshot that somebody else is writing about someone and they're never going to tell you the day to day stuff. It's like, you know, Pete was a lovely guy. Everybody loved him. He's an arsehole, really. But we can't say that in the paper. Whereas if you get the Here's Pete's diary.

I think if..

..this is a year in the life of Pete.

If these guys are left a little longer kind of note in the bottle. And it had been like an anecdote of like confessing to something they did at school back in the day. You know, just I had to like..

My sister, who James had confessed to steering the Freddo frog, the little chocolate frog,

.. and James and John here we were in class of 1853. And, you know, Miss Edwards is now dead. But it was us who stole it.

But we knocked the vase off the table. Sorry, Miss X.

Sorry. Not sorry. So, that would be, I think, you know, hilarious. I feel like something like that where you just like..

And Miss X's great grandchildren they go, "She talked to me about that!"

Imagine being able to make someone laugh 135 years from now.

I know you know I know. Well, I'm sure Billy Connolly joke would do it.

Yeah.

That's what you put in a Billy Connolly joke.

How much? How much? I forgot to mention his, his joke about dogs in the dog shit episode that we did. You remember that one?

I can't. I do, but I can't remember the details.

He's like, what does he say? He's like dogs are smart, right? And you can never do a justice with an Australian accent. But he's like, 'Have you ever seen a dog step in a human shit?' Yeah. It's like, amazing.

There you go. That's the line you write in there. Here. Pete Smissen and the date. Have you ever seen a dog step in a human shit? In 135 years, someone will laugh!

And be like this. Can't know..

'He knew! How could he predict this? We still have the same problems. Dog shitting.'.

Yeah, well, that's it. If you want a good comedian, go and listen to Billy Connolly's back catalogue. Oh, man. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So that's worth thinking about. It's just an interesting thing. The story was cute, but I was blown away by the, as I said, the existential nature of what these guys wrote and and what would I have done? I don't think I'd have been anywhere near that clever. But.

Yeah, yeah, it is fascinating. I guess it's just one of those things of like trying to contact people in the past or the future, thinking about how you can be..

So in the past, you can because you know something about it.

Well, they get to contact you, you get to contact them.

But, but when you reverse it and you're trying to, you know, tell somebody in the future about you.

It always makes me wonder. I remember, you know, after a few years on Facebook, I'm like, Man, it's going to be so good in the future. You'll be able to go back and just read all this stuff.

You can.

Yeah.

Have you?

A few times, depending on the situations. Like certain. I think there was one recently. Like when I went through a break up with my ex, Hannah, and I remember I had a friend who I was like, Why don't I talk to this person anymore? We don't really talk anymore. And I was trying to work it out. Like, at what point did we stop kind of interacting on a regular basis? And so I just opened up Facebook and went through our chat.

And went, Oh, that was the last time.

And I didn't even need to really like read through all the messages. But I was just looking at the times of like, okay, there's like 20, 21, 20, 19, 2018, 2016. I'm like, So we send the old message and be like, Hey, how are you? Yeah, good. You? Yeah, good. And that's it. But then at what point were we like on a daily basis.

Yeah.

Chatting to one another And yeah, it was just, it was interesting because I remember like during my relationship with this person, I was always friends with this person and then after it, maybe it was around that time and it was just interesting going back and reading these messages and to it's kind of cringey at times. I go back and look at the things that I was saying or the way that I would talk to people.

Oh yeah,

..conversation. I'm like, Oh my, I...

Don't read what you wrote ten years ago.

Yeah.

Like, I can't imagine what I'd go back and read my thesis from 45 years ago and you go,

Well, but that's not even like, interpersonal.

No, I know, but I just go, Really? I thought this was clever? Really? Yeah.

I think. I wonder how often, though, you would ever live up to your future self, because I feel like the older I get, the more I look back on whoever I was a year. Five, ten. Usually the further I look back, the more of a dickhead I was. So I'm always thinking like, wow, the person who I will be in 5 to 10 years is really going to look back and think, I'm such a fuckwit. I'm like, I wonder..

What, they already is? You're the only one who will really know.

I know, I know. I'm like, I wonder what I could do in the present to actually make my future self proud, to impress your future self. And then I'm like, probably nothing.

Nothing now.

Yeah, that's it.

Because if I have the wisdom to be able to do that in five years time, I'm going to go, Yeah, you weren't that clever.

Exactly. Oh, you're switching. Oh, my God. You went into this? I'm so into this now.

Yeah, exactly.

How many plants did you end up selling?

I don't know, exactly. Anyway, hopefully you enjoyed this episode, guys.

Yeah. Think about what you want to send the message to the future.

I know. See you!

See you!