Transcript of AE 1218 - The Goss: Dad's Trip to Darwin and Central Australia via The Ghan

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. How's it going?

Good. If I stop coughing.

Well, I'll edit that out so that the first thing people hear isn't you coughing into the mic. But we're at home, at my place, sitting down, doing the first Goss episode in ages.

I know. It's been months.

It's been a while.

Remember the last one?

A while between drinks?

It has. Speaking of which, we haven't got a drink.

Well, you grab one. I'm still smashing my Pepsi.

All right, well, I'll wait till you're done with it.

The good thing is, you can go over to the fridge and still talk because we're sitting down with some of my..

Yeah. Your remote mikes?

Yeah. Uh, so I wanted to get you on. I was trying to get you on the other day to chat about your trip to the Northern Territory in Central Australia. I don't think you would call it a trip to South Australia. Really? You didn't do much there. Besides..

We ended up coming through South Australia on the way home.

Yeah, I'll grab you..

A couple of days in Adelaide.

I'll grab you a beer. So tell us about the situation.

The situation?

Yeah.

What we did.

What was the setup?

Um, well, my sister and brother in law who live in Canada, were coming to Australia for our nephew's wedding. That you went to, as well.

Yeah.

And then they, whenever they come here, they- Thank you. They- Sorry about the tapping. They try and go somewhere that they haven't been in Australia or somewhere, at least Andrew, my brother in law, hasn't been. And this time they wanted to go to Northern Australia, so they were going to go to north- Western Australia, up in Broome. And also wanted to go to Darwin and catch The Ghan. The train that runs from Darwin to Adelaide.

It's always really funny. Sorry to interrupt you, when talking about states or territories in Australia that have names like Northern Territory, Western Australia, Southern Australia. Or South Australia and then portions or places within there that when you're using say..

Northern Australia.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well you, you said "north-western Australia" and so you sort of like, so is that the- are you just meaning "north-western Australia"? Or are you meaning "North, Western Australia".

It was the north part of Western Australia. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Obviously in spoken language you don't see the, the hyphens.

Well that's it. And so my brain for a second was like, 'Does he mean like in part of..', like I was thinking Broome. So is that in the north-western part of the Northern Territory or is that- No that's in Western Australia.

That's Western Australia.

So he means the north part of Western..

It is both north-western Australia.

And I guess you could say north-western Western Australia if you really wanted to confuse people.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So they wanted to go there. They hadn't been to Broome before? Because they went to..

I don't think last year, I don't think he could have been to, my sister, had been to Broome at all. So they'd never been there. They'd been to WA a few times but not to the northern part of WA.

Yeah.

And I don't think Ingrid had been to Broome before, but I also wanted to catch The Ghan. And so that was the main idea for the holiday.

Do you want to mention what The Ghan is and what the history of it is? Why it's called The Ghan?

Yeah, well, the Ghan, it's the train that runs from Darwin to Adelaide, and obviously Adelaide to Darwin. Historically, and it's only done that for the last 30 years-something. I can't remember when, when the extension was built, but traditionally the Ghan railway went from Adelaide to Alice Springs and back. Alice Springs being in the centre of Australia and it was- well, the track was laid on the old camel track that was, that before railways, the transportation was done with camel trains. And it was called The Ghan after the, the naming of the camel ears, which they called them Afghans, even most of them were actually Pakistani.

Yeah, I remember..

Which, Pakistan..

..about that.

Yeah, Pakistan didn't exist at the time. It was part of India. But because they were from western India, they were known as Afghans, even though they weren't from Afghanistan.

Yeah, it'd be interesting to know what language they were speaking at the time, like if it was Punjabi or if they were speaking Farsi or something like that, because there is a bit of a mix in that area, I think, of the Middle East.

I presume there is, and I don't know.

I assume that there must have been some Afghanis initially and they were just like, 'Yeah, yeah, you're all Afghanistan. You're all from Afghanistan.'.

Exactly.

What is really interesting there, I just thought is like, in English, we tend to shorten country names in order to be rude, right? Like, if you call someone a Jap, instead of Japanese, that's very- it's rude. I don't know if it's rude, if it was rude originally prior to World War Two, when we went to war with the Japanese.

Yeah, I don't know.

The Western allies called them..

The Japs.

..derogatory.

Yeah. As a derogatory term.

I don't know. If it caught on then. But then, you know- and again, guys, don't repeat this, but you could also say Abo for Aboriginal.

Yeah.

And it is, it is weird where Aboriginal..

That's like using the, the N word for an African American..

Yeah, that's about as offensive as it gets.

Yeah, it is a strange..

And I tell you that because I'm trying to educate you on, on you know..

On what not to say as well as how to say things.

And you may hear people using it, and it's not okay to refer to anyone that way. But it is interesting that it's just the first three letters, two syllables of the word Aboriginal, and yet it has such a strong, you know, derogatory connotation and meaning. Despite not- there's no kind of like sexually explicit language or you would say like extra racial kind of stuff on top of it. It's just a shortening of the word Aboriginal, which is fine to use for Aboriginals.

Yeah, well it is, and it's similar to obviously a different meaning but similar. So as I say, the N word. And it's interesting. We say the N word because we choose not to say..

.. even as you're Australian.

Exactly.

I feel bad saying the A word.

Yeah, in America. Because that word was really just a different style of saying 'negro'. And- but it was used in a way that was deliberately derogatory, derogatory. And so similar thing, you know, the word came from something that didn't mean anything. It was just a natural speech.

Yeah, so it would have come from Nigerian or Nigeria or something like that, yeah.

Presumably. And and yet it is now associated with, you know, with an insult.

Well, there's so many layers to this that are really interesting with the N-word.

Sorry. Apologies in advance. I'm wearing a lapel mic and I'm about, and I'm about to take a drink out of a can, so.

The interesting stuff with the N-word is that Americans will differentiate between the N-word ending in an /r/, E R. And because they pronounce the R, so they would say /er/. And then there's the version that just ends with an A, that would be /a/, but for Australian pronunciation, we would pronounce both the same way and there's no differentiation. But also it's sort of racially acceptable for black people to use it. Or people of African American descent. And like, they would use the A-ending to be like colloquial, very informal. Not every single one of them, but it's part of like rap culture and gang culture and all that sort of stuff. And you'll hear that language being used, especially in TV shows and everything. But they won't use the /er/-ending word unless it's explicitly related to being racist or the racist word. You know, if a white person was trying to be as offensive as possible to an African American in the US, they would use the ER ending. Not the A ending, because then it would sound like they were being sarcastic, right? As in making fun of them. Like, when they say cultural..

Oh, cultural acquisition.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You do see some white people from the US sometimes using that language and it's because they're from the ghettos and are surrounded by black people and, you know, for better or worse, have like become a part of that culture. And it's, you know, it's just so strange to kind of see it. But anyway, yeah, we're kind of getting.

A bit sidetracked.

Sidetracked. But I guess the reason I brought it up was it's interesting that we use the word 'ghan', which is a shortening of Afghan from Afghanistan, but it's not rude at all. It's just the name of the train. And originally the camel. The camel train that would have taken place. So yeah, I guess I just noticed that. It is funny how sometimes you can shorten a person's ethnicity or the country they come from and it's incredibly rude and other times it's just, you know, Australian slang..

That's, yeah, I think and as we've discussed, I think it's not that the abbreviation itself is rude, it's just that that abbreviation has become rude in subsequent usage. So, so yeah, so we, and then when they decide to do that, they invited us to come as well and we had always wanted to do The Ghan. So yeah, beauty, we'll do that. But then when they suggested it, I said, 'Well, why don't we do some more time up in the Northern Territory?'

Because you were going to meet up with them after they'd done Broome.

Yeah, they were, they were going from Broome to Darwin and we were just going to go to Darwin and catch the train back and I said, 'Well, Jo', your mum, had never been to the Northern Territory, never been to Darwin and I- and I'd never been to Kakadu National Park or Litchfield National Park. Because the only time I'd been to Darwin was for work. So I've been around the town but never been outside it. So we said, Well, let's spend an extra week or so up around Darwin and the northern, you know that northern part of the top end as they call it, of the Northern Territory, and do the two national parks. So we did that and then back in Darwin, and then caught the train back. Four days, four day trip on the train. But..

And so how far is that? How far is that train trip?

3000km. Roughly. It's 2.8 thousand or whatever, but it's roughly 3000km. And we split it up and they do- It's a tourist train. It's not a just a standard commercial thing. So the trips are, you're basically travelling in the train overnight.

It's like a little hotel kind of thing on a train.

Exactly. And you're spending, you're travelling overnight. And then every day they stop and you do an activity during the daytime.

Is that organised by them? Or are they just..

It's organised by them and they just..

.. get organised by them?

It's part of the deal. But in addition to that, we split the trip and spent five extra days in the centre of Australia, around Alice Springs. Because again, Andrew had never been there and your mum had never been there. And so we decided to, to do that as well. Ingrid and I have been there before.

You've climbed Ayers Rock, Dad.

I have.

If you did that recently, you'd be cancelled. But you had to do it right. You were forced to climb it.

Technically, yeah. The the only other time I've been to Central Australia was with 120 school kids.

That's it, yeah.

So when you're supervising kids, you can't choose not to do an activity. So.

So yeah. You'd probably get a pass then. But yeah. Not like Pauline Hanson.

Well you can't climb it now.

Well, you could. It's just illegal. And they've removed all the..

.. they've removed all the chain and everything that you could use to get up there.

That's it. You would, I think getting up. I would prefer to getting down without the chain or the safety equipment. Coming down would be easy.

Yeah. Yeah, it could be quick.

It's just the landing at the end might be a bit of a problem.

Yeah. No, imagine that starts raining up there.

Yeah.

Ugh, but yeah. So what were the highlights of the trip? You did a lot of photography whilst you were away there.

Yeah. Yeah, well, everything was a highlight. So it's- I love Darwin as a, as a city. It's because it's a small city.

Yeah.

It's roughly the size of Geelong.

It's a bit smaller, isn't it?

.. where we live. A couple of hundred thousand people.

Yeah.

Probably a bit less than that. But it's a tropical city. So it's that- I mean, the Indigenous people will tell you that they think, they reckon there are six seasons because they will tell the seasons based on..

Changes.

The changes from one environmental condition to another one. Not like we do based on temperature, but it's, 'Oh, these plants grow at this time.' 'These flowers come out at this time.' 'The birds come back on this date.'

And did you get to learn much about that stuff?

A little bit, yeah. We went to a few of the Indigenous cultural centres and museums and things and they have lots of displays on that and it's really cool.

That'd be so interesting to know about how the seasons are split up 'indigenously'. And is it the same per group? Because you would imagine if you've got an- I should pretext this with the highest diversity, linguistically, is from northern Australia in that area. So Indigenous people have been there pretty much since they got to Australia. It's probably where they arrived. And so there is such a high diversity. There's something like 29 language families in Australia and the main one when you look at one of these maps is pretty much 90% of the continent, in terms of, so it would be like Europe and European languages, right? So everything from French to English to Russian, to Farsi even, is all Indo-European language. That's a single family. Would be the same for indigenous language in Australia. But up in that top area there are so many different families of language. So that would be like having Chinese, Japanese, English, you know, all next to one another. And having evolved next to one another, you would imagine that they would treat those things differently because of that time and the language they use and everything. But then also you're kind of like, well, they're in the similar kind of environment, so perhaps they all have the same set of seasons. Are they, you know, has that cultural sharing..

Well, they certainly seem to. It's now well, well, in terms of what you see in the cultural centres and museums and things, the displays they have on that, are all pretty similar.

Yeah.

In that region. So I don't think there's too many sort of local differences.

Yeah.

There may well have been in terms of the way they've done it, but now it seems like this is a general agreement on what they were. But the, those seasons are simplified to the dumb Europeans, like us, who, we just say 'There are two seasons up there. There's a wet season and the dry season.' And I had never experienced it before, but we were there right on the tail of the wet season.

As in it ending.

Ending. And you know, the joke used to be I have a friend, a work colleague, that is, from Canada. And when he came to work in Australia for a year, he asked me after a few weeks. He said, 'I've got a friend who lives in Darwin and they've suggested we come up there. What's the weather going to be like?' And I said, 'It'll be 32 degrees and it'll rain at 4:00.'

And he looked at me and went, 'Ah ha ha'. And I said, 'No, seriously, look at the weather report. Now. Look it up.' And it's- and because that was in November, which is the beginning of the wet season and, and that's basically it. It's hot, it's humid. And in the wet season they have thunderstorms and a lot of rain in the late afternoon. Every day. And in the dry season, it's hot, not so humid and it doesn't rain every afternoon. And we experienced that when we first arrived in Darwin. We got there and it was hot and humid. And then 3:30 in the afternoon it was pouring with rain. We were out walking and just got caught in the rain. And you know, you don't feel cold, you just get very wet. And a week later when we got back there, having been there for a few days, gone out to the national parks, come back again. It was hot. It wasn't humid and it didn't rain.

It was past..

The dry season happened! Like, what? We're away for a week. What happens?

So the transition is really that steep.

Yeah,

.. imagine it'll just be a 'Oh, okay. I guess we've just switched seasons.' You imagine that changes to winter and autumn and spring and everything aren't necessarily a single day event. It's gradual.

No, no.

Leading into..

Exactly.

.. from the other.

Yeah, we sort of artificially divide our seasons, you know, temperately, into those four seasons in most places in the world. But in the tropics, it's very different. Because they get these things and it's not necessarily the same day or week or whatever every year, but once the rain stops, it just stops. It doesn't sort of peter out for a month.

Yeah. It'll be interesting to know more about what's going on there, meteorologically, right?

Yeah.

What underpins that sudden change? Is there just a threshold of moisture in the air that has to be passed for it to happen?

... that monsoon season over? Yeah, the monsoon season, as they call it, in South East Asia.

Yeah. No, we call it that here too.

Yeah, we do.

I always refer to..

Exactly. And the northern, northern Australia but- and it just turns on and turns off. And so yeah, that was, that was really interesting experiencing that.

Do you remember that down here. I was, I think it was either last summer or the summer before we had a week like that. Yeah, it was very weird. I think it was. We had like some high pressure system just sitting over the top of us.

Oh, yeah, we do get, we do get that, you know- well, you know as well you've lived here half the length of time that I have but our summers we have those periods of hot weather. Where you get that build up during the day, a thunderstorm at night, and then the next day is dry again and heats up and then another thunderstorm.

But those cold fronts passing..

And then a cold front, but then a cold front will come through and then it'll wipe that whole system out. And then two weeks later, it might start to build up again. Whereas in the tropics, it just never stops.

Well, I think that's what the whole nuts about..

.. wet season.

I feel. I think I feel like I would feel claustrophobic. Like, with that sort of humidity and heat on me at all times. And I could handle that temporarily, right? Like if you had that for just a day and then that cold change comes through or something, you'd be like, 'Okay, cool.' You have that, you know, you've gone from air conditioning inside to the heat outside and then back in again, right? But if it's just all the time, it's hot as hell and humid as hell. I think after a while I would be like, 'I'm getting over this.' So yeah, respect to anyone listening to this podcast who comes from the tropics. Yes, especially my wife, who absolutely hates it. She came from, I think, two degrees south in San Luis in Brazil, and she was like, 'It's just 35 and 100% humidity every day!' 35 degrees every day. I'm like, screw that. Yeah, definitely. Well, I like wearing jumpers and pants.

Yeah, well, Darwin is like that. It's, you know, low 30s every day and it's just either low 30s and raining or low 30s and not raining.

Did you go into any of the stores, the clothing stores to see what the kind of difference in apparel that's available is? Because I imagine it's just shirts. Similar to..

You, you basically can't buy- you can't buy sort of heavy clothing, you know. Go and find a jumper or a hoodie or something.

Where can I get my skiing gear?

You'll find the- You'll find the sort of hoodies and those sort of things in souvenir stores.

Yeah.

Because they're branded with, you know, 'Welcome to the Northern Territory' because they-.

.. you expected people are..

..going to buy them and leave, but you're not going to walk into sort of clothing shop and buy them. You might buy a pair of jeans, but mostly it's shorts and t shirts. Yeah, Tropical shirts. Yeah. That what we would euphemistically call 'Hawaiian shirts'. There's lots of know just collared short sleeve, collared shirts. You know, open collared shirts with, you know, bright colours and patterns and things on them. So..

I forget the name..

Which I ended up buying, one which was made out of bamboo and it's the best fabric ever.

Yeah, I think the, I think it's that in Indonesia, so like Indonesian formal wear, there's a name for it. I've forgotten the name.

Yeah. There is.

You guys will be kicking yourselves, I think. Is it batik?

Batik is the fabric.

Yeah.

That's the, that's that batik is the screen printed fabric.

Yeah. So they would have that. And I remember buying that for when we were in Indonesia. It was typically really nice, but I don't know, I think there was some bamboo.

Yeah. But as well, the bamboo was there and it was just brilliant. It got an indigenous pattern on it, but you know, it was bought for 60 bucks that you'd pay for the same thing here. You'd pay $200.

Really. It hasn't travelled very far. I know we're both sort of recovering from illnesses.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

It's that period. So yeah, the best bits were just all of it. What was- So, where are the places you went?

Well, Darwin itself is- Darwin itself is just, it's a really interesting town. And there's two major events that have happened in Darwin. One was the bombings during the Second World War. Which basically flattened parts of Darwin.

That killed about 100 people or so. How many died in the bombing?

I can't remember the number that died, but.

Oh, wow. Up to a thousand.

Yeah, We always- we always think of, you know, Japanese bombings in the Second World War. We immediately think of Pearl Harbour in the United States. In Hawaii. Yeah. That was bombed once. Four minutes.

Yeah. Yeah.

Darwin was bombed- Well, Darwin and that top end of the Northern Territory, I think there were about 90 different bombing raids over a period of ten months.

Was this whilst they were near Papua New Guinea trying to come over the Kokoda Trail?

No, it was before that. Okay. Yeah. But the, the first bombing of Darwin Harbour. While Pearl Harbour is famous, obviously, because it was the trigger that got America into the war..

And they totally..

Australia was already in the war and they surprised..

Caught them with their pants down.

But it was also a big deal because of the number of, and the reason they attacked it was because of Pearl Harbour was a major US naval station. So there were a lot of ships there, but there were more ships sunk in Darwin Harbour, mostly commercial ships. And far more bombs dropped on Darwin Harbour in that first raid. It's just that we didn't have those huge big ships like the the USS Arizona, the big battleship that thousands of people died in.

Yeah.

And but yeah, so it was a significant event so..

You look at the images, like I'm looking at some of them here. And it was like Darwin got flat..

Flattened.

It was like everything was destroyed.

It wasn't a very big city in the 1940s, but it got flattened and, and then it recovered, obviously, post war. And in fact during the war, because it then became a, because of the fear of invasion of the Japanese into Australia. And because the Japanese were in New Guinea and Australia was fighting there, then Darwin became a sort of military centre during the Second World War. So it was rapidly rebuilt during and after the Second World War.

Yeah.

But then there was the cyclone in 1974, Cyclone Tracy.

Which repeated the complete levelling.

Which did even more damage, but it literally levelled the city, which was quite a large city by then. And so they're the two things that you hear about everywhere. It's Cyclone Tracy and the bombings and, and there's lots of museums and stuff around that. And that's really interesting history. And certainly I obviously I wasn't born before the Second World War, so I don't remember that. But I remember Cyclone Tracy like it was yesterday.

Yeah.

And at the time it was the most powerful cyclone hurricane ever recorded.

Really?

Yeah. Yeah, winds of 280km an hour.

Jesus Christ, that's horrifying.

And the, they talk about it and it wasn't just the wind. Wind will do damage but it's what the wind does that then creates the damage. And they talk about the, because most of the buildings there were built with corrugated iron roofing. And once that was getting ripped off, it was the corrugated iron and flying around at 200km an hour plus that was just flattening everything.

Well, that's the most horror, horrifying part about seeing footage of tornadoes, right? Especially big ones.

Yeah.

Whatever the names are. But when you get up to like a level five tornado or whatever, that's like, you know, a kilometre wide. And you look at the videos and look up videos of these.

Tears up a house.

When you just see this stuff that looks like sand going around the tornado from afar. And then you realise it's beams of wood and cars and, you know, cows and all sorts of other stuff. And you're like that. That's the horrifying part. It must be so weird, if you ever to were to be in a tornado like that, and not be killed instantly. And be picked up, to just be kind of like flying around. Because I imagine that you would be I mean, it would be horrifying, but you, you'd be lifted off the ground and wouldn't necessarily just die suddenly. You would be flying around until you landed.

Exactly.

But yeah, that'd be crazy. So yeah.

So that's Darwin.

Was a good Indigenous culture wise, though? Did you learn a lot of new stuff or not?

Not in the city itself. There's, there are museums and things, but we then went to Kakadu National Park. And Kakadu is, while it is a national park, it's owned and co-managed by the Indigenous groups up there. And so everything around Kakadu is, it's effectively an Indigenous cultural centre. Giant National Park Cultural centre. So that's really interesting. And there's lots of rock art that varies from hundreds of years to tens, 10,000 plus years. And that in itself is just interesting to go and see some of these paintings and things on rocks. And the wildlife there is amazing too.

I've heard it's been getting fucked more and more and more because of the invasive species. And the mismanagement. I don't know if is it Kakadu or Arnhem Land? It'll be either or both, but apparently it's getting really bad with the water buffalo in particular and the donkeys and the goats.

Yeah. The buffalo are being, certainly in Kakadu, buffalo. Buffalo are being hunted to keep them out.

Yeah.

But you know it's a huge area and you can only access it during the dry season. So, then at the end of the dry season by the time you can drive vehicles across most of it.

Yeah.

Because half of it is underwater, yeah.

Well and the water buffaloes, funnily enough, have no issues sort of trotting around, you know. Plopping around in the water and just enjoying themselves and eating the grass.

So but, it's beautiful in itself. But we were again, we were obviously there right at the end of the wet season. So there's a lot of places that we couldn't get into. But took a flight, an hour flight in a light aircraft, across the, the sort of cliff faces and the rocky area and then these- because it's so wet still. The waterfalls there were just amazing. The irony is that by the time it's dry enough to be able to drive into the waterfalls, there is no water. The pools are still there..

It's just..

You can get helicopters. You can get helicopters, but they're expensive. I have no idea what an hour in a helicopter would cost, but..

I would love to learn so much more about people and what life was like there only a few hundred years ago prior to European settlement when you just had indigenous people. You would imagine, especially the interaction with the Makassan people. Was it trepang bringing, coming over here, trading and hunting, cucumber, sea cucumber and everything. Because they've shown that they- Another interesting thing I think I discovered recently was that they actually took, I think, indigenous women back to Makassar on Sulawesi to potentially live. Like that, the cultures were interacting with one another and I think they found DNA there or something.

I'm sure the same was happening in Timor and other places in Indonesia.

The thing that would really blow my mind would be knowing how did they navigate the wet season? Because you would imagine that there'd be all these locations that would be inaccessible during the wet season, but would be accessible during the dry season. And it's kind of like, do you have to- this is, this would be why the seasons and understanding changes would be so important, right? Because they'd be like, okay, this change is happening now, which means the wet season is happening in a few months or a month or so. We need to get to, we..

We need to get to..

..the high ground..

..away from here or else we get stuck here because the water's there and we can't get across it anymore. And there's crocodiles and everything. And so I can't imagine what it was like having- especially, like as a child, trying to grow up in that sort of environment. And it must have been such a steep learning curve. And you wouldn't have really been able to kind of just, you know, dig around like we do during our childhood and play a lot more, I think. I mean, I'm sure they had playtime. But at the same time, you're kind of like they must have- the stakes must have been so high when you've got, you know, free range kids effectively, you don't even have a home to put them in to lock them up. And there's crocodiles outside.

Yeah. Well, I think this is a, this is a bit of a sort of existential hypothesis. But I get the impression and not even, you know, obviously Australian Indigenous people have only been exposed to Western culture for 250 years. But any indigenous culture anywhere in the world that was, that was basically a hunter gatherer style of, or even low level agricultural children's play, is always about learning how to be a functional adult.

Yeah.

Now children's play that we have now in our society is, is basically problem solving.

Yeah.

And it's, but it's esoteric problem solving. It's learning how to read and write and do that sort of stuff. But the rest of it is just, you know, how do I- jigsaw puzzles or adventure games or, you know, building things with Lego. All of that is that..

Play is obviously education.

Yeah. And so I think back in when you're a, a hunter gatherer in a small group of small community of people, the children will be playing. But they'll be playing, learning how to do the things that they are going to have to be doing.

Yeah. I keep wondering what they would have bonded with, like because Noah's got his what we call 'nani'. I think it's 'nanika' in Portuguese or 'nani' or something like that, but it's his little cloth toy thing that he kind of always wants.

His blankie Teddy.

Yeah. So he uses it to comfort himself. Joey has a t-shirt that Kel used to wear when she would sleep with Joey when she was a baby. And I think it started with just trying to let her sleep by herself. So leaving the, the, the t shirt in there. But she's just become obsessed with it and carries it everywhere and has for two years now. Yeah, but you wonder what kids did with indigenous cultures where they wouldn't have had clothing like. Like, we have clothing. They wouldn't..

They wouldn't have had excess clothing.

.. toys that we have.

Blankets to carry around.

And what were they using as comforters, if they had them at all?

Mum, probably.

Yeah. And toys, were they just playing with..

Because that's the other thing is that they would, they would never have been away from their mother, their auntie, their grandmother, their older siblings. Whereas now we have obviously much smaller families and we- and smaller in a sense of fewer children. But also we don't have those extended families that we live with.

So I kind of. I don't know what the word would be in English. Like, I feel nostalgic for a time that I haven't experienced, right. Where- there must be a word for that in another language. So you guys will have to let me know.

There'll be a German word for it, or a Japanese..

..word or the Swedes like, you know, a beer at some sunset or whatever it is. But I feel nostalgic for a time where familial connections and bonds and everything were so much closer. Not necessarily because you wanted them to be, but because you had to have them that way to survive. Right? Like you were in a clan, you were in a group, and geographically you weren't just like, 'Oh yeah, I'm, you know, an Aboriginal guy from Darwin, but my auntie lives in Canada.' It's like, yeah, that didn't happen several hundred years ago. There wasn't just like, 'Yeah, I've got one down the road and the other one's overseas' and you know, unless they'd been taken away by the Makassan traders to Indonesia, never to be seen again. But it must have been so interesting when you had family that you saw every day. I'm sure there would be negatives to that as well because you would just wake up and be like, Fuck this guy, man. Like every day he's here. All we're going to have to tackle..

Ahh, Uncle Fred again?

'I know this guy. We're going to have to take him on a hunt and have an accident. He's just too much', you know, like, 'Yeah, he tripped.'

But look, I think the other thing, too, is that we- and it's only very recent. We're not talking about a distinction between older, you know, what we could call primitive cultures hundreds or thousands of years ago.

There would only be a few hundred years..

Yeah, but even even 100, 100, 150 years ago, within our culture, within European culture, there was no such thing as teenagers. You know, teenagers are very, is basically a 20th century concept.

Noah keeps saying at the moment, 'I can't wait to be a teenager. I can't wait to grow up.' 'What are you going to be when you grow up, Noah?' 'A teenager.'.

A teenager?

Yeah. Not for long.

'What are you going to be when you grow up?' 'Five.'.

Yeah.

And because kids, even my grandfather, who was born in 1879, he at the age of seven, he was still going to school and he continued to go to school. But at the age of seven, he would walk to the next village to a farm, work on that farm for two hours, come home, then walk to another village to go to school. And then come home and then go back to the farm again and work two more hours. So he'd work four hours a day as a seven year old as well as going to school.

It's funny watching docos on the life of, say, you know, the Tudors and the- is it the Georgians, and then the Elizabethans. So the different periods back in England and it's related to the name of the monarch at the time. But like over the last several hundred years. And learning what life was like, there's one of those Tony Robinson docos, you know, Baldrick from Blackadder, he's the guy who does a lot of these docos. And it's interesting seeing what, you know, like dirty Jobs and then they talk about what kids would do in the cotton factories and everything.

Cotton pickers.

Yeah, it's so funny now having kids, it almost brings you to tears when you find those stories and you're just like, I can't imagine how many..

Eight year olds working in coal mines for 12 hours a day.

Yeah, you know, a few years old and they're already sent off to work. And, you know, because that was..

They had little kids doing that in the cotton manufacturing. They had that in the weaving places. They had the little kids crawling around the floor, pulling the dregs of the cotton out to stick them back in to be re-spun. Yeah. Because no one else, nobody else could fit.

And there are stories of them losing limbs and having..

If you stand up, you get your head cut off.

Yeah, because the machines are still working. They didn't turn the machines off. They just said, get under there and yeah..

Keep your head down.

I can't imagine having my kids having that ahead of them after only a few years of life, right.

Can you imagine Noah doing that now?

Yeah, screw that. Yeah, it's horrifying. Anyway, so what about South Australia? When you went down to The Ghan, you went on The Ghan. The Ghan, The Ghan.

The Ghan.

All the way down to south..

Yeah, so we..

..to Adelaide.

Yeah. So we ended up, yeah we're, we spent the time in Kakadu National Park and Litchfield National Park. Did the things that we could drive to there. And then got on The Ghan. The Ghan said four days coming down and we spent a week, well, 5 or 6 days in central Australia. So we went to around the Alice Springs area. The West MacDonnell Ranges are just spectacularly beautiful and we did a couple of walks into some of the gorges there, but we only spent a day there.

Is this where Mum used to go camping as a kid?

No, that was the Flinders Ranges.

Okay.

This was the first time..

She used to live in..

.. Adelaide territory. Yeah.

Okay.

And then we went to Kings Canyon. Watarrka National Park. Did a big walk around the rim of the canyon. And then to Uluru, spent two days in Uluru. And Uluru is just an amazing place. It's one of those places where it is- It's, it's not beautiful in that sense of awe inspiring beauty, but it's awe inspiring by its size and its solitude.

Well, it's one of those..

.. a great big lump of rock stuck in the middle of nothing.

Well, yeah, it's almost like one of those abstract art things, right? That it's kind of like it can be objectively ugly, but subjectively beautiful.

Yeah. And so it's, it's. And you can understand why the, the indigenous people there are so attached to it spiritually. It is a spiritual place. I'm not religious at all. But you go there and you just think, 'Mmm, yeah, if I grew up here...'

I imagine the first indigenous people- because that's the cool thing. Like, we were talking about Indigenous people colonising Australia 40 to 60,000 years ago. And it was in that top part of the country.

Well, by the time you get to Uluru we're 1500 kilometres south of there. By now..

It would have been thousands of years.

To get to there.

I would assume. Again, I haven't looked up on this stuff recently, but they it took them thousands of years to colonise the entire continent. Right. Because you had, you didn't just have people wander off a thousand land and go..

'All right, I'm just going to keep walking until I get my feet wet again!'

Yeah, exactly. No, it was kind of like we just we keep setting up, you know, the next family, the next generation moves another kilometre or two down the road or whatever and expands. So I think it would have taken, you know, hundreds, thousands of years for them to get to Uluru. But you imagine the first group of people to get out there and just be like, 'The fuck is this thing?'

I know.

Because you imagine that first person to set eyes on Uluru who would have just ventured further than his family ever had, but only by a little bit.

Yeah.

Gotten over that hill..

.. and run back over the track and go 'Hey, you guys, come and have a look at this!'

I know. 'Check this shit out!'

Well, the other thing, too, is..

.. what you make of it.

Is that 100km up the road is an even bigger place. Mount- Mount- No, Kata Tjuta is just down the road, but Mount Conner, which is..

Another huge as well.

It's much bigger than Uluru.

And it's a similar thing.

But it's not, it is not as spectacular in a sense of just being this, what is obviously a single lump of rock, sticking out of the ground. It's a mountain, but it's a mountain that's stuck in the middle of nothing. Again. So.

Well, I think Uluru is 600 million years old. I think we've talked about it in the past and it was just ridiculous. Anyway.

Yes. So then from there we ended up back on The Ghan, down to Coober Pedy, which is in South Australia. That's halfway from the centre of Australia into Adelaide and spent a day in Coober Pedy. And Coober Pedy really is the arsehole of the earth. It's, in fact it's thousands of arseholes in the earth.

You might have to explain that, Dad, or..

Because it's a, it's an opal mining town. And because obviously opal mining is all done underground, there's no open cut opal mining because it's just way too expensive to do that because it's you're finding very small seams of opal. It's not an ore..

.. too much.

It's not an ore like a typical metallic mining. You're looking for these seams of, of opal in the rock.

There's some good TV shows, tv shows..

There are!

Right.

Yeah. And so most of the people there obviously are miners or related to the mining industry there. And a lot of them live underground. They live in their mines or ah old mines that are no longer active. And they just they literally just sort of dig it out and create houses underground. Yeah. Which is sort of interesting.

There's hotels you can stay in that..

Yeah, Yeah. Underground hotels, motels and things. Yeah.

That'd be claustrophobic.

I've stayed in one.

Like, 'Screw this! Where's the light?'.

Yeah.

You've got like TVs on the wall.

You want dark. That's underground where there is nothing. Yeah. So, yeah, of course we did that. We went through one of the museums which is built on a mine and a house, and you go through the house and then you're sitting in there and go, All right, we'll turn all the lights off. And of course, half the people have got their phones out still, which means that it's still not dark. And..

'I'm trying to get a photo of the dark!'

Yeah, but not even photographing. They've just got their phones out. Yeah. Really? Like, just put them away for 10s. But, but yeah. So then back to Adelaide and your mum got Covid.

At least it was at the end of the trip!

So we spent, we spent two days in Adelaide being isolated. I didn't test positive, I probably got it. And then, and then we got on another train to come home.

So yeah. Good. So it was a good trip. Worth it. Would you do it again?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, now I'm itching to get back there at the end of the dry season because that's when all of the birdlife is there. Because while during the wet season, the birds are still there, but they're spread out in thousands of square kilometres, because there's just water everywhere. Whereas in the dry season they come into the billabongs and lagoons.

Yeah. So you can find a little source..

And they're all tens of thousands of them. A hectare. Yeah. So.

Yeah, cool. So where's the next big place that you'd like to visit in Australia if you were doing another one of these trips?

Doing another? Well, we're planning one for next year to back to South Australia.

Who's with you?

Mum and I.

Including me?

No. Well, you can come if you like.

If I pay my own way.

You'd pay your own way.

And get permission!

And get permission. Well, you bring the kids.

Oh, yeah.

No, we're going. Probably going to the Eyre Peninsula, which is that, if you're- for those of you who are looking at the big- the map of Australia, when you get to the middle bit, the Great Australian Bight. The Great Australian Bight is the, that huge bay between Western Australia and South Australia and the Eyre Peninsula is the eastern end of that. It's the bit pointing down into the Southern Ocean.

Because it's going to be an El Nino, so it's probably not going to be very wet.

Yeah, well, hoping it's not going to be raining, but.

Yeah. Because I would have thought you'd want the water there to be able to..

No, no, this is this is, like this is not Lake Eyre. This is the Eyre Peninsula. Yeah. Yeah.

It's funny, isn't it, that it's named after Eyre. Right. Mr. Eyre..

Edward Eyre.

So we had the Eyre Peninsula. Lake Eyre, Ayers Rock. Yeah.

No that's Eyre is different. Ayers Rock is..

.. spelled differently. This is a another guy. Yeah. Because I remember there was a guy that got named..

Ayers Rock was, he was the guy who did it was the- he wasn't even an explorer or a surveyor or he was a head of something or other that sent Stewart out to look for things. So.

Stewart The Explorer, right. Hence the name Stewart Highway.

The name Stewart Highway. Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, thanks for the episode, Dad. All right, let's chat again soon.

Chat again soon. Without the cough, hopefully.

I know.

See ya!

See ya!