Transcript of The Goss - My Parents' Roadtrip up the East Coast of Australia.mp3

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.

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 www.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.

What's that? And I'm going to ask you about your recent holiday. Oh, we can talk about road trips.

Road trips?

Yeah. You and Mom recently escaped the grandchildren and children.

We did, three and a bit weeks.

Almost a month.

Yeah. On the road again.

Can't wait to get on that road again.

Yeah. So how was it? Where did you go? What did you do? What did you see?

What? At one sentence, answer to all of that.

That's it?

Yeah.

Yeah. Do your best. It's just- calm as the whole way.

Yeah. We went north. So- which, living where we live, you can't do anything else.

Well, you can go south but...

You can go a little bit east. A lot west. But no, we. I had a bird photography conference that I was going to in the Gold Coast in south east Queensland. And for those of those who are not aware of where we live, and Australian geography, that's about 1600 kilometres north.

So a thousand miles.

A thousand miles north about that. So, you know, 2 to 3 days driving,

You could do it in one. You just wouldn't be able to stop.

You could do it in one long one if two people driving. Yeah.

And very, very limited stops to go.

Very limited stops. Yeah. Toilets.

Just one of those ones where you've already taken the bottles of drink and everything that you can then refill with piss and throw out the window like truckies.

Yeah, exactly.

If you guys ever see plastic bottles on the side of the road with yellow contents.

Yeah.

Do not open.

Do not open.

Don't touch them.

No, no. We weren't, we weren't quite that fanatical about it.

I can imagine. Imagine if you drop that to Mum.

Yeah exactly.

She'd be like, did you bring a Shewee?

Yeah,

What the hell, God, this conversation! We just opened a beer. I've had one mouthful. Pete's clearly had two.

I'm excited to have you back.

Yeah. Cause this has been a while because I've been away, so. Hang on, hang on. I'll fire up.

Probably explain that joke. There's going to be a lot of people thinking, what did he say and why is he laughing? A Shewee is a plastic device that women can buy, or men can buy as well for women, so that they can pee standing up when they go camping.

Yeah.

So it's, it's yeah, it's designed to allow women to be more in a bottle. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Kinda 'how did we got on to that so quickly'. Anyway, we'll just rewind and start this again.

Yeah. Don't tell Mum about this.

Yeah. So, hey Pete! Yeah, it's good to be back. Now, yeah. So we went to this conference in the Gold Coast and rather than just flying up, spending a couple of days there and then coming home again, we decided, having not been away for more than just a couple of weekends for the last three years that we'd spend a few weeks.

And so we drove up through sort of central New South Wales and crossed over into Queensland at the Gold Coast, spent a week at the Gold Coast, and a couple of days in Brisbane. Jo, your mum, has a cousin there and then we went up to Lamington National Park. I say 'up' because it's, well, it's actually almost due west of the Gold Coast. It is 'up' in an altitude sense because it's, you know, mountain, semi tropical rainforest. Hmm. And stayed at a place called O'Reilly's, which your great grandfather claims to have been the first paying guest at 100 years ago or 96 or 98 years ago or something. I think the first guest house was opened for paying guests.

Might need a fact check on that. Yeah.

Well, I don't think we can because-.

What a yarn!

Yeah, actually your mum. Well.

Give us their records. Yeah. Went to the library. They have a library in the guest house. They have all of their old guest books.

Where's number one?

They didn't have the original guest books in there. I think they might have in an archive somewhere but they didn't have them publicly available.

They're funny.

But. Yeah, so he was a parent. This is your grandfather's father. He was a friend of the O'Reilly family.

So this is your...

No, your mum's.

Mum's. Okay.

Okay. So your mother's father's father was a friend of the O'Reilly family who were dairy farmers that moved up into the Lamington Plateau in south east Queensland and started a dairy farm there.

But it's rainforest and it's a long way from anywhere and it's, it's mountain territory, so it's really inaccessible. So it was quite difficult for them to get their goods out and to maintain a property with cattle on. So but what they were finding was that three or four years after they started the farm, the Queensland Government opened a national park there and they...

They thought that'll be ours. Thanks.

Yeah. No, no, no. The national park surrounds them and the actual O'Reilly's guest house is still on private property in the middle of the national park.

Okay.

But what they found was as soon as the national park was created, there were people who, you know, bushwalkers and people who wanted to come up and check out the new national park. But there was no infrastructure. So people were constantly asking them, 'Can we stay on your property? Camp on your property?' and things. So eventually they set up a little camp down on the creek, or by a creek there and, and then build a guest house. And I think they opened that up in the 1920s, and that's when your great grandfather claims to have been the first paying guest. So see, so we stayed there, was your mum's birthday and she'd never been there before. So obviously it's a big family history there, but she'd never been there before. I'd been there for a day trip on a previous trip to the Gold Coast.

So you hadn't stayed at the guest-.

I hadn't stayed at the guest house. I'd been there and done a few of the little walks and things and checked out the birds and the view and stuff. But so we stayed there for three nights and then cut across from there into New South Wales and stayed at a little town called Tenterfield and, which I'd wanted to go to. It's a sort of historic New South Wales inland town.

I'd wanted to go there for a while and I'd driven through it a couple of times, but literally not even stopped in the past. So we stayed there for a couple of nights.

What was it about the place that was interesting and made you want to stop there?

Mostly the the number of old historic buildings that they've still got. You know, one of the things that Australian country towns have traditionally done very well is that they've maintained their historic buildings,

The main street, in particular.

Main Street and some of the, you know, the sort of either old colonial mansions or pubs or and often some of the best buildings in these country towns are the post offices and the banks. The bank buildings are often no longer banks because most of the major banks have moved out of small country towns. With online banking being so prevalent, you don't need to have a bank branch there.

But those old bank buildings were built to look impressive. You know, banks in the 19th century built the best looking buildings in country towns and in fact, in cities. So there's still a lot of really nice old bank buildings in major cities around the world. In fact, because it was a prestige thing, they wanted to look impressive. So yeah, so you wanted to see a bit of that. And then we went across the, further out to the coast, back into the coast of northern New South Wales, to a little place called Woolgoolga where my cousin had just moved to, and we were going to go and stay with him. But at the same time that we were going there, he had to go back to, he just moved there and he had a dentist appointment back in his old place in the south coast of New South Wales. So we didn't stay with it.

Wouldn't you just move it? Yeah, well, find the local dentist?

He couldn't because it's an ongoing dental problem, so.

Ah, okay.

So he had to go back to his original dentist. And this is a whole long story of how that actually got screwed up and he didn't need to go in the end anyway.

Because they were what, continuing a procedure or something like that.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay. So you don't want to have to find out where you want to pick off where the old one-.

Exactly.

Pick up where the old one left off or whatever.

So yeah, so we stayed out there and that was a beautiful place, you know, for most I should say, for most of the time that we're away, it was raining as it has been in south eastern Australia for the last month and a half.

Well, what have we had? We've had some sort of a lot of these Antarctic low pressure systems moving across, like, I think we've had five haven't we, repeatedly, one after the other in close succession. And so we haven't had those highs come through to give the...

And I think yesterday...

And that's warm weather.

In Melbourne was the first day in June that got above 15 degrees, which hasn't happened for more than a hundred years.

As in it hasn't been that low, or...

It hasn't been that high.

Wow. Yeah.

So we haven't had that- I think the last time that we had 15 days in a row, in June, under 15 degrees was 1913. So.

Yeah, it is funny, isn't it, trying to work out with this sort of stuff too. Is it how, how tightly correlated or related is it to climate change? Because it's one of those things where climate change causes these events to become more frequent because you can't ever say any single event was because.

Exactly. And that's the whole point is that single events are weather, weather patterns over long periods of time as what climate is. So if we get if we get three or four or five of these in a ten year period, then that's significant climate change.

Well, that's- what's happened in I think it was northern New South Wales and southern Queensland, right. With the floods they've had, Lismore is the place that's been smashed the most and it's had three major floods in the last few months.

Three, three, one in a century.

And one in a 1000 year flood.

Yeah. Which, which the one in 1000 years actually isn't a real thing because obviously we haven't been recording those events for a thousand years to know that that's a statistical thing. But it's just the-.

The point is that it's a lot more than-

If you extrapolate, you extrapolate them, like that, for the severity. But yeah, so that is definitely related to climate change. When you get to those sort of events happening three or four times in a year rather than...

It's going to be so interesting to see what happens, right, with insurance companies, because that was one of those things I'd never really thought about with climate change, but that we're going to have places, especially hospitality venues and people's little businesses and probably even big businesses, too, although they're probably more likely to be able to afford insurance. But we're going to have them under a lot more stress because all of a sudden they're going to be paying through the nose.

Well, it's housing as well...

Through for insurance for these, in these places. Like I can't imagine what it would be like if I tried to buy a house now in Lismore. I'm assuming the price would be very low, the insurance would be very high.

You can't. They won't insure them.

Yeah. Oh, really? Okay. Yeah.

We were talking to a couple of people in Tenterfield in fact, who were from Lismore.

Yeah.

Which is reasonably close to Tenterfield, not in a flood sense, but in a general, you know, it's two or 3 hours drive. But, and they were saying that they are just going to have to rebuild somewhere else or move because- and that's not just them personally, but..

The city.

Most of the people who are affected by those floods, are not going to be able to get insurance.

Yeah. If they want to rebuild there.

Yeah. Yeah. So effectively the town is going to have to be moved.

Yeah. Isn't it crazy?

And Lismore is a reasonably large town. I don't know what the population of Lismore is, but.

It's sizeable. Tens of thousands of them actually.

Yeah, it's not a few hundred people.

Hey, Siri. Yeah, yeah.

Well yeah you've got.

It's in Portuguese though, so I can't, I can't, I can't. I don't know if you could tell it, 'Lisi-more'.

I don't, I haven't, I've got my iPad sitting here, not my phone.

Yeah, all good.

We haven't got serious on that.

Guess I'll have to find out Lismore...

Yeah. Find out the population of Lismore and let us know. Yeah. So from there we actually were out at Woolgoolga, beautiful little beach place.

It's sort of like, like a lot of places where when I was a kid along the Victorian coast or up the New South Wales coast.

Yeah.

That are now, you know, very big tourist places. Woolgoolga is still quite small and I think it's, it's been allowed, allowed, not in a permission sense, but it has managed to stay that way because it's close to Coffs Harbour, which is a large rural city.

It's sort of like Geelong.

Yeah, and yeah, that sort of...

Medium size. No one is Sydney or Melbourne. It's an order of magnitude smaller...

And close to Byron Bay, which is the rapidly expanding capital of the, of the celebrity universe in Australia.

I know. So it's tiny apartment. I think there was like one and a half, $2 million, when I was just...

Can't buy anything.

Having a look...

For less than $1,000,000.

It's just the land is insane, right? Because everyone wants to go there and surf and live near the forest and...

And it's become the place to be, that hippie celebrity lifestyle. So.

We don't have to get vaccinated here.

Yeah, well, exactly.

You just get COVID at a higher proportion than anywhere else.

So, yeah. So Woolgoolga was great. It was the, the highest temperature in New South Wales for two days, the two days that we were there and it was beautiful and sunny. So.

What was that?

Well, 20, 22 degrees.

Ah, perfect.

The rest of the place was pouring-

It's fine.

Rest of the place is pouring with rain and 15 degrees, or colder, if you're up in the mountains. And then we just drove up the waterfall way, which is a highway that runs from Coffs Harbour back inland up the mountains to Armidale, which is the highest city in Australia. City, as in again it's a small rural city, but I think it's 20 something thousand people. But yeah, it's nearly a thousand metres high, so it's up in the mountains. And so this highway that, they call it a highway, but it's a two lane winding road most of the way, goes past a whole lot of waterfalls. So we have lots of walks and things out there.

I think I've seen some of your photos. So you must have been taking photos of those, right?

Well, they were, yeah. The ones that haven't quite got to those, the ones that I've been putting up so far are on the way up.

Yeah. So you're a massive fan of waterfalls? Well, photographers are,

Yeah, exactly.

Landscape photographers are, in general.

Just like a friend of ours who says, I've never met a parrot I didn't like. I've never seen a waterfall that I didn't like.

Yeah. And they're always long exposures, right? This is where you need to be chucking that indie- is it indie filter?

Yeah.

In front of the camera to make it dark because you expose it for longer.

Yes.

In order to get that movement.

Milky water.

In the photo. Yeah. Because frozen water in a waterfall doesn't actually look that attractive.

No, it's true. It doesn't. It looks a bit weird, right? It's kind of like it's just drops and it wouldn't catch your eye the same way.

No.

A nice sort of white.

A 20- about a 20th of a second is the, is as close as you can get to what our vision would see the world like. But most people want to slow it down even further so you get that sort of milky.

Yeah, true. I guess.

Anything from a quarter of a...

If you look at a waterfall-.

...multiple seconds.

You'd have to drop your eyes to catch the water moving, right, as bubbles or as, as like droplets, you would- if you just look straight at the waterfall without moving your eyes or changing your vision,

Individual water molec- particles are moving way too fast.

It would just look like a blur. Yeah. Whereas if you- I remember that going to Big Waterfall, you probably see this at places like Niagara Falls or those places where it's huge or you're very close to the waterfall. If you look at the top and then follow it down or try and catch. The water is, is falling. It does look so weird, right? You're kind of like, wooo!

Yeah, yeah. And then we just. Yeah, two more nights, got home, spent a night with one of my cousins in Canberra, which is good to catch up with her and her husband and headed home.

So three and a half weeks travelling around the countryside travelled about 7000 kilometres in that time.

Grey nomads.

The grey nomads.

You want to explain what that is. Do you feel like a grey nomad?

Oh, is he old gag? I feel like a 16 year old when you can't have one. Yeah, well, you know, I'd. I would probably feel like a grey nomad if I did it for more than three weeks in a, in three years. But, yeah, the whole grey nomad thing is. The- the sort of cliched retirees who are, not necessarily sell off their house. But the cliche is you sell off your house and buy a motorhome or a caravan and then just drive around Australia. So grey as in grey haired and nomads, as in having no home.

No fixed address.

No fixed address.

Does that lifestyle appeal to you at all? Do you think if Mum was dead and the rest of us were grown up and no longer, you know, we'd ostracise you?

What, are you going to grow up? Yeah.

You'd just be like, Yeah, nah, tap out.

Oh, look, I could. I could do it. Yeah. I'm somebody who doesn't get lonely, in a sense of being by myself.

I love how people who don't like other people say that.

Yeah, I like other people. I'm- I'm-.

Just not near me. Yeah, not around me, not talking to me. I like them to be that they're in the background.

I think the best way of describing my personality, it would be as an intimate extrovert.

Introverted extrovert.

No, an intimate extrovert.

But does that mean you like your clothes off?

Yeah, exactly. No, I like getting, I like getting close to a few people rather than being in a, you know, parties typically bore me.

Yeah.

Because every conversation is just fatuous. Yeah. 'Hi. How are you going? Good. What do you do?', you know, is the next question.

Oh, you mean if you don't know anyone...

You don't know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um.

I know it is annoying you, sort of like 'I want to get...'

I'd rather have a.

Either pretending you person-

...of a dozen people. Yeah, but you can have a decent argument it with. No argument. Yeah, well, argument or-.

What do you like? What do I not like and let's, let's talk about it.

Or, you know, discussion or yeah, you can have two or three little groups of people talking about things and doing whatever they want to do.

Politics, religion and sex. Let's get started into the controversy.

Exactly, exactly right.

No one's related to me in terms of work here, right? There's no HR. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think I could do it. But obviously, you know, I love being around family as well. So it's never going to be an issue with, well, we've got children and grandchildren and the two of us.

Ay, yeah, you know, you can take the grandchildren with you if you want to go for three weeks.

I don't think it'd be quite the same.

Oh, it'd be fun. You'd get to live yea- live life through their eyes. Oh, man, it is so funny how brutal at the moment Noah has gotten to that point of 'dadda, dadda, mama'. And I'm like,

Where's this going?

Well, no, no. I'm like, Who the fuck taught him this, this annoying tone? I'm like, Where do they learn this? And with the rising intonation at the end.

And a whiny voice.

Yeah. And I'm like, I was sitting there thinking about this, and I'm like, Is it just something that one kid started one day and it just caught on because it works so effectively at getting you to be like, what? What, what? With the 'dadda, dadda, dadda, mama, mama!'. And you guys...

So he's an attention seeker. Yeah, but I wonder what it's like in other languages. I'd love to know. You reckon?

I dont' think it's any different.

Yeah, I would love to know if it has that rising intonation. No matter what the language is, you guys will have to let me know. Does that happen in your language when your kids or, you know, kids that, you know, speak to parents and say your name or say 'dadda' and 'mama' and 'grandpa'? Do they have that rising inflection at the end? Is that something that is above the order of language? Right. It's at a communicative level where that rising intonation is, is much more important than the specific language, right?

Yeah, I think so.

It'd be funny when kids running around is going, 'mama'. That's how they get intentionally-.

...Russian one. So, 'mama'. Yeah, Mama. I don't think you get much attention with that.

Yeah.

So to get attention it has to be annoying.

Yeah.

And, and the fact that there is this-.

The crying and the screaming.

Yeah.

It's that inherent annoyance of that high pitched whiny sound. Yeah. That it- and I don't think the rising intonation is necessarily deliberate. I think it starts at a normal level and in order to be annoying, it's got to rise.

When you wonder if every single child stumbles upon it independently. So they say 'Mama' or 'mama', and then they finally realise, Oh, it's this one that gets the reaction. So I'll just, subconsciously, I'll just keep using this one all the time.

Exactly.

Or is it something that, they go to Day-care and they learn from all the other kids who interact with their parents in front of them, because there are so much in terms of language that Noah brings home. And I'm like, you didn't get that from me. No. We we speak in Portuguese here. And, you know, hearing him using auxiliary verbs already, you just like what? Like, what did he say the other day? I do like it. And you're like, that's a really complicated grammatical kind of structure.

It is, rather than 'I like it'.

Yeah. Well, you're emphasising the fact that something is true when the other person has suggested it isn't.

Yes.

So if you were to say to Noah, 'No, you don't like chocolate' and he says 'No, I do like chocolate' and emphasises it, he puts a stress there. You like, the level of complexity that it would take to nail that, if you were learning a language at a later in life, that would take a year, two years, you know, to to get really good at being able to intuit that and not have to think about it. And he's picked that up in-.

Two or three-

Two or three years. Yeah.

Yeah, they can do it very quickly.

It's insane, but it's funny that it's only certain situations, so you will notice him saying things like, replying with the wrong auxiliary verb. 'Have you had dinner?' 'I do.' And you'll be like, 'Ha, you just made a grand mistake!'

Yeah. Yeah.

And like they have- they have-.

The kids also pick up the sort of amazing ability to understand puns and irony and stuff really quickly. I mean, yesterday, you know, you know, we know, we had Noah at our place and we had his cousins there as well, Isabelle and Finn. And Isabelle is a bit older, and I, we're cooking. I decided that she was going to make pikelets, which are little pancakes,

Savoury pancakes, kind of what-

Cold.

They got salt in them.

Yeah. And. And she was gonna, she said, 'Can I break the egg?' I mean. Yeah, yeah. I'll help you do that. She picked up the egg and said, 'Let's get cracking.' And she knew it was funny. So, she's four?

Yeah, she's four.

And she knew that was funny!

And that's crazy. You wonder, though, is that the kind of thing that they've heard in a TV show?

Well, she's heard the term...

Somewhere else.

She's heard that 'let's get cracking' means 'let's start'.

Yeah.

But she's put it together, so. So, you know, that's- kids pick these things up really quickly so.

It is astonishing but I guess yeah it's one of those things. It's easy to be overwhelmed thinking, wow, children learn so quickly. But I don't know, guys, like, to tell you the truth on a day to day basis. The amount of things I have to correct and the amount of times. 'Noah. How do we ask?'.

Oh, yeah.

'Please, Dadda, can I have?' I'm like, Jesus Christ, man. You pick up all this other grammar. Like, you can say things like, 'I do like it', but you can't remember to say, Please, we have this interaction like 50 times a day.

And not only that, you can't actually speak- he speaks two languages, but he can't speak either of them when he responds to you.

Or he mixes them.

Yeah. Do you want this? Meh. Mmm.

Well, I quero... I quero isso. I quero isso. You're, like, wrong, wrong pronunciation. And half of it's English. The other half is Portuguese. Yeah. Pick a language, mate. Yeah. Anyway, it is good fun, but. So, yeah, the road trip. That was good.

It was.

How soon do you feel like going? Do you get to the end of it and you're like, Oh man, I'm so fucked. I'm so glad that..

Yeah, you do it- well, the way we do it too, is you typically you never spend more than one or two nights, say never. We'd spent three nights at Lamington because that was a special treat for your mum's birthday and a week at the Gold Coast. But that was wrapped around the conference. So but everywhere else it was one or two night stands. And that can be tedious, you know,

Just constantly moving.

Unpacking and packing and stuff. Now, we were, we weren't camping, we were staying in motels, so. Yeah, which makes it a little bit easier, um, that all you're doing is just packing up your bags and going again. But.

Cheeky little financial flex there, Dad. 'Oh, yeah, no. We weren't camping. We were staying in hotels.'

No, no, we- I actually do like camping, but it would have been seriously tedious camping with the way we were going because it was so wet.

Well, it's nice to go places and just be like and we can just open the door and everything's ready. You don't have to like set the tent up. And open everything up and...

... campervan idea of, yeah. Yeah, I like camping. If you're going to stay for a few nights and you can set up the campsite. But the overnight stuff, I can't be bothered packing and unpacking tents every day.