Transcript of AE 1070 - The Goss: Dad Publishes his Book 'Becoming Australian'

G'day, you mob. Pete here, and this is another episode of Aussie English. The number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So, today I have a Goss' episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news whether locally down under here in Australia or non-locally overseas in other parts of the world.

Okay, and we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right. If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goss'. So, these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English.

So, it is particularly good to improve your listening skills. In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au, where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads, and you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time.

Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time, keep practising, and that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit, I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode, guys. Smack the bird. And let's get into it.

What's going on, dad?

Hey, Pete.

Man...

...Before we get on to anything else.

Becoming Australian. Nice.

Here we go.

Hold it up.

The family, if I hold it up... (both talking)

...Photo of me on the front?

It just disappears. No, you didn't make the front cover.

You bastard.

You want me to- Hang on, I have to find you and... (mumbling) You did make- You made something somewhere.

You might want to mention what this is that you're holding up for the people who can't see.

...I will. Here we go. We're going to put you in front of me.

You're gonna have to hold it up higher, I think, dad.

I can't hold up too much because if I hold it up there it disappears. There you go, there's Pete as a baby.

That does not look like me.

No.

Far out I have a lot of hair.

You did. You look like- My mother decided that your father was Chinese for a while because you had this big swathe of black hair.

Yeah.

Yeah. Family history book, just finished. Yay! Published.

Yeah. Do you want to give that a spiel? Maybe just talk about what it is and why you decided to...

What it is and why I decided to do it. Yeah. Well, it was sort of a- I got interested in our family history when I was probably in my early 20s, just from a general interest, you know, my grandfather lived with us and just talking to him about, you know, old family stories and things. Because he was the only grandparent that I really knew.

My- His wife, my mother's mother, died when I was- Before I was two years old and my father's parents lived in England. Never met them. And in fact, my father was sort of- He never spoke to them after about 1950, so I never knew them at all. So, the only grandfather I knew was the one who lived with us for the last 12 years or so of his life.

And so, I sort of got interested in family history then, and then my father died when I was 25 and my mother died when I was 40. And I looked at them and went, if I don't start recording some of these stories, my grandchildren who at the time didn't exist, but now I've got four. We'll never know anything.

So, I just, you know, got interested in family history, started collecting things and this huge database of information which is completely unintelligible to anybody else. I decided I'd put it together and write the book about my family history. So, it's really a letter to you and your sister and your children of this is where I came from, so.

It's a tough one, isn't it? When you write a book and you've got a target audience of two?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, six. But it's the same- And obviously I've got, you know, well, I had two and a half sisters, but. Two sisters who have the same ancestry and their children as well. So, it is as relevant to your cousins, not that they have children yet, but, you know, and their children in the future, so. I'm only- I'm going to get 25 copies run off to start with, and that'll probably be enough.

I decided in the end that while I say published, it is self-published and printed and so on. But I decided in the end not to record an ISBN, which would mean that a copy would have to go to the National Library and the State Library of Victoria. Because it contains a lot of personal information, and it contains chapters written by my two sisters as well, and I didn't get their permission to do that, so.

Yeah.

So, that was- That's the really, you know, the only distinction really between publishing and producing multiple copies of the book.

So, there's no way...

So, a few cousins and things will get them.

I was going to say, you should just break it to the audience, but. Take it that you're not selling these...

I'm- No, I'm not. Yeah, you want for $100? Which is about what it would cost to print and post.

Good God.

Well, when you are doing a print run of 25, they cost $70+ each. If I did a print run of a thousand, they would probably cost me $30 each, so.

But it'd be 30 grand. Yeah, yeah. Far out. So, looking back, was it worth doing?

Oh, well, ultimately the test will be you and your sister and your children.

I'm not gonna read it, I've got stuff to do, dad.

No, I know.

I'm just going to flick through and look at the pictures.

...The other thing too was it was a- It was a lockdown project when I sort of started thinking about it at the beginning of last year.

Yeah.

And then when we went into lockdown in February, I thought, oh, well, I might as well just start putting this together. And then one thing led to another. And, you know, it's finally come to fruition, which was sort of- It was fun.

As much as anything else, it was fun just to look at the holes and try and make a complete story, complete in a sense of, what do I know and what do I not know? And what holes do I need to fill? And finding out a bit more information about my aunt and uncle and stuff to fill up a chapter on them was interesting. And getting back in contact with a couple of cousins that I haven't spoken to for years was fun as well, so.

How do you know when it's done?

Well, your family history is never done because...

No, with the book, I guess...

Well...

...How do you know when to say that's enough? Because it's a diminishing curve...

Of course it is.

...Returns curve, right. Like learning a language where, I mean, learning a language you're never done because it's not sort of a finalised product that you have at the end of the day, except for maybe on your deathbed.

But, you know, with like an album that you're creating, you know, a musical album, it's always one of those things that people talk about where it's like, how do you- How did you know when it was finished? So, was that difficult for you?

...Good enough, enough? Yeah, it is, although with this one, it started off with, well, I'll just write me, I'll just write my story. Ironically, that was one of the last ones that I ended up doing because I thought, well, if I'm going to do me then- And I asked my two sisters if they would write theirs...

I thought, you were going to say to write part of yours.

Yeah, to write- No. But to write the equivalent so that, you know, because they're as much a part of my fam, and I can talk about what I think of them. But, you know, for them to talk about their experiences. Because as much as anything else, it's about answering the questions- And I wrote it in the introduction that it was about answering the questions for my grandchildren that I never got to ask my grandparents.

So, the unasked questions for in both cases, so. So, it was an interesting way of doing that. And then it was going back and looking at it and going, well, how much is enough? But you're right in terms of, well, when you've compiled all of this and there's a lot of, you know, its 350 pages and a lot of photographs. So, you know, photographs of people and places and so on.

And that's compiling that. And then you get to the point of saying, well, I've done enough research and collation, then it's finalising the writing. The most difficult part for me because I wasn't producing this as a commercial product, I decided I didn't want to send it to an editor who would have charged me thousands of dollars to do a final edit on the book.

Of doing the editing yourself, it's really difficult to edit your own work. And so, I was finding that I could only do about 10 pages at a time of doing those final edits, and I'd get it three times. And I will guarantee you there are still errors in it.

But it's that diminishing returns. The last time- The last run through, the third sort of proofread that I did of it, I picked up about five errors and I went, there were 500 errors in the first run through.

Yeah.

And so, you know, if I did it again, I might pick up one. It doesn't mean there's only one there, but you just get immune to seeing your own flaws.

Well, you see it so often, too...

Oh, you know what it says, so you don't read it.

That always happened to me with writing scientific papers.

Yeah.

There would always be massive issues if I handed it to someone else. But after I'd read it 10 times, I was like, I'm not seeing...

Yeah. Because you don't actually read it...

Yeah. I just know what's there in each section.

I had to force myself to literally read it word for word, and one of the things that I found is that you read it out loud. Because that means you are reading every word, whereas if you just- I- Particularly doing this as, you know, you just you end up scanning, you go, no, stop it. I actually want to check every spelling error. And yes, I can do a spell check, but a spell check doesn't detect context.

Yeah, the word might be spelt correctly, but it's just the wrong word to put there. And so-on-so. Yeah, but it was fun. Hopefully, you get something out of it and you stick it on a shelf and never look at it again, but, you know.

Oh, well, it's always good to have. I can imagine this is one of those things that's interesting to talk about, and you can probably give some pointers to the listeners here. But I'm always chatting to Kel about her family history because I can imagine that it just shits all over mine.

No offence, but you know...

Hey...

She's...

Your mother's, when book two will come out if I ever get your mother to start writing hers. Because she's got some really interesting stuff because, you know, you're related to European royalty. Yeah, twenty generations ago, you know, the old gag about people say they, you know, their ancestors came over with William the Conqueror when they came to England, well William the Conqueror was your ancestor, so. But, anyway, you're right.

...But yeah.

Yeah, Kel's is much more diverse.

Well, she did a DNA test and found out that she's got at least five sub-Saharan African countries, I think that, you know, lineages that she's come from. So, I would imagine that that's the potential then for fi- At least five people in her history who were brought over to Brazil as slaves from five different countries, there's probably many more than five people that led into her, you know, biologically.

Like her family is partly from five different places in Africa. And then I think she has, you know, Indigenous South American...

Indigenous South American and...

...A shitload of European from all over the place, France, Spain, Portugal, Ireland. And it's just one of these things where I'm like, my God, you should really try and dive in and learn a bit more about your history because it's probably, you know, you think it's boring and it's probably boring for the first few generations. But if you can get back into the meat of it to when people first started coming to Brazil and learn about why they decided to come to Brazil or, you know, why they were forced to come to Brazil...

Yeah, well...

...They're going to be the interesting stories.

That's what I call this book, as you can see, becoming Australian.

Yeah.

Because for me, and I make the point in the introduction that- Because obviously Kel has migrated to Australia. And even though your mother is Australian because both her parents are Australian, she was born in England. And so, you go through that, and your children are first, second, third, fourth, sixth, seventh and eighth generation Australians.

There's only one generation in those eight that have come to Australia that is missing in terms of, you know, that generation either was born in Australia or never arrived in Australia. And so, it's the migration stories as to how and why and when and where did people come? Is the really interesting part. And where do they come from? Is equally interesting, but it's almost that, you know, I became an Australian because my father came here.

My great grandparents came here. Great, great, great... And so on all came here for various reasons, at different times and looking at, you know, where they came from and why they came is an interesting thing to do, so.

Yeah, so what pointers would you have for people who are listening to this? I mean, are there sort of broad tips that you could give people who don't necessarily have- What's it called, the system that we have for, you know, Christian births, deaths and marriages that has held a lot of our information over generations? Parishes, right? Parish documents.

Yeah. Well, there's church records and then there are the civil records as well.

Yeah.

So, obviously in Australia, we've been recording, you know, civil registration started very early in a contact, yeah, within decades of Australia, you know, or at least New South Wales becoming a colony. And in many European countries, it was sort of early to the middle 19th century that civil registration, that is the government were recording births, deaths, marriages. But before that, it was the church.

And in fact, where- If you're English, we have a huge advantage over many others in Europe because the Catholic Church never gave a shit about recording births, deaths and marriages. You know, there might be a few that were recorded, but they didn't do it as systematically.

Whereas the Church of England, when it was created, did it systematically because they wanted to prove that these people were not Catholic. Because the Church of England split off from the Catholic Church...

Yeah.

...It was important to them to demonstrate that, yes, you were born, you were bapti- Nobody recorded births, but you were baptised in the Church of England. You were married in the Church of England. You were buried in a Church of England graveyard. Those were important things to be recorded to prove that you were not Catholic.

And so, you know, the whole England, you know, going back to the middle of the 16th century when the Church of England was created. The parish records are a huge thing, which is not the case in many other European countries. It's much more difficult to trace your ancestry back past civil registration.

In the case of, and I've had many discussions with people, and I've even had some reasonably close relatives say, oh, you know, we came over with, you know, William the Conqueror, that old gag.

Yeah.

And I said, how do you know? Because unless you are related to the aristocracy, none of that was recorded before the creation of the Church of England in Britain. Scotland were very good as well at recording a lot of those things because the Scottish Church, ironically, Scotland was as important to say we're not part of the Church of England and their Catholic churches were recording things very well.

So, you know, that was the sort of reverse psychology in Scotland. But in order to demonstrate that you have older heritage than that, and, you know, if you're before the middle of the 16th century, the only people who recorded that were the aristocracy and royalty because for them, inheritance of property and property marrying other property, families marrying other families, it was important to document.

So, you know, you can, or your mother has, you can trace your ancestry back thirty generations because you have one connection with the aristocracy, which then goes into royalty. And that becomes extremely incestuous, you get that one line and then all of a sudden, you're related to every royal family in Europe because they all intermarried.

The ironic thing is, we probably all can make our way back into aristocracy somehow. It's just whether or not you can actually find...

Yeah, although I- Everything I know about my ancestry would suggest that, no, we were just, you know, agricultural labourers, shit kickers and, you know, fishermen, agriculture labourers.

Yeah.

Not filth...

Serfs.

Doing the good service work and, you know, domestic servants and so on so.

Yeah.

Yes, most people would probably have some relationship back somewhere, but there is also that thing that, you know, the vast majority of people have never been related to the aristocracy. They were the serfs, you know, they were the, you know, the scum out doing the hard work.

It is funny, though. I think that we were- I was looking this up and it's like, if you go back 35 generations and, you know, assuming all your relatives are from the same location, right, so the same country. You are effectively as equally related to every single person in that population.

Yes.

Statistically speaking, like genetically speaking the amount of genetics that would be in you say from, so mum traced back to William the Conqueror, and I think went...

I am many generations before that...

Yeah. So, once you get back there, it's like, yeah, we have one line there. But if you were to pick any other average person up out of France or England at that time, they would probably be equally related to me...

Yeah, of course, because it's actually a diamond shape in terms of relationships. Because, you know, the gag is that you've got twice as many relatives as I have.

And Noah's got twice as many as me.

And Noah's got twice as many as you and so on.

Yeah.

But that only works, as you say, as you go back so many generations. But when you get back to the point of, you multiply, you know, well, I can't do it in my head, but. 2 to the power 20 is a huge number.

Yeah.

And it is probably beyond the population of Britain at that time.

Yeah.

And so, therefore, you are related to every person that ever existed in Britain as an example. And so...

Yeah, that's 2 to the power of 20 is 1,048,576. So, probably would have been about that many people, right.

Yeah. But you go back another four generations. So, which is only 100 years, just over 100 years, then you've suddenly got...

16 million.

...16 million, which is more than the population of Britain at the time, not just England, but Britain. And we're only talking about the British components of us. But yes, you can then say, oh, we go to Europe and blah blah blah. But you end up getting to the point where the population of the world is smaller than the number of relatives, notional relatives you have.

So, those notional relatives have got to start to double and triple and quadruple up is that you get these multiple things. And that's the same, you know, when your mother was doing this research into the royal families and relationships to royal families, it all comes through one person.

Yeah.

And it all goes back to a small number of people in the end. But all you're looking at is the royals. And so, you know, it's- Your hit, your- In the grand scheme of things when you go back thousands of years, it's a diamond shaped ancestral tree because we always think of ancestral trees as just this constantly expanding upwards, but it doesn't work that way.

Well, yeah, it is interesting when you see those sorts of TV shows and they go back in time and see one ancestor and your kind of like, if you just look around everyone's your ancestor, you know, like. You went back to, you know, a thousand years ago or whatever, and you start looking around, you're like, this was my great, great, great... Grandfather.

And you're like, yeah, but you could probably point at any other man here in this community, and it would be the same story, right. Like...

Yeah, probably.

...If he's from the same town.

Yeah. But, you know, and look in the end, for me, I only go back five generations in this, and that's because I can document, apart from one person, I can document all of the other people in that generation legitimately. The one I have that is questionable, I'm 99% sure it is the right person, but I've got no absolute documentary proof that it is.

And that's one of the challenges that you have is that the further back you go, the less information you have and the less reliable the information that you do have is. So, I haven't bothered to try it. And there are some where I can go back 11 generations, but it's pointless for me to do that and try and talk about them because, yes, I know this person was born and they had a child.

That's it. And so, who cares about that? So, what I've tried to do in the book is to talk about, you know, say, my great grandparents or great, great grandparents is, where were they born? What did they do? How did they get together? What did their children do? Rather than just, you know, do this giant family tree with, you know, a whole lot of branches of just dates and places on it.

Have you heard of the TV show omniscient from Brazil? You probably haven't.

No. I tend not to try and keep up with Brazilian television. Not that I try not to. I just don't do it.

There'll probably be a shitload of Brazilian listeners, so many right now. Like maybe, you know...

Of course there will.

...Listening and being like, I love that show. So, this show is effectively they're living in a society where 24-7 there's a surveillance drone, a small little mosquito looking drone that follows the person around and watches them. And so, it's effectively eradicated crime.

But the premise of the whole show is that someone gets obviously murdered, and because the drone footage didn't see that murder or didn't identify it as a crime, it's not a murder. And so, they have to unwind that. But I was thinking, I'm mentioning this for a reason, but I kind of jumped ahead to this because I just looked it up.

Does it blow your mind how if we go back to your generation or even your parents' generation, you know, like if your parents were still here prior to, say, the 90s, the sum total of evidence of their existence in this planet, on this planet, in this world could have probably fit in a briefcase, right, in terms of photos or documents. And I mean, volume-wise, the sum total of my evidence can probably fit on this device right here...

Yes.

...In front of my face, my phone.

But does it blow your mind today that so much of Noah's Life, for example, is documented now from the beginning? And just how much- When he's my age, he's probably going to have access to some kind of digital library of his life, effectively, where he'll be able to flick through, probably almost to a daily basis, you know, probably- There'll probably be gaps...

The question is going to be, who is going to curate this stuff? Not just for Noah, but for millions of children in the world who are living in a socio-economic situation that enables them to A) have access to the technology now. And B) have access to the technology in the future that will be able to collect it and collate it and so on.

Who's going to be curating that stuff to the point where Noah is ever going to want to, and I'm using Noah as the example, but ever going to be even capable of going back and going, show me what I was doing on the 15th of August in 2024?

Well, I imagine, though, it would probably be a similar thing to Facebook of the Facebook memories. How they just randomly show you shit that happened on this day from, you know, last year, two years ago, ten years ago. Where you could just get on this database and it'd be like, here's what you were doing four years ago, or here's what you were doing, you know...

But that's my point is that Facebook is curated.

Yeah.

Facebook is a database that... Yeah. Yeah. But when I- When you upload something to Facebook or Instagram or any of the other social media or the web in general, there's a date and time stamp, a location stamp and that sort of stuff, you know, who posted it. So, that's relevant. But at the moment, most of that digital information about Noah as an example sits on your phone.

Yeah.

It might sit on your computer or some of it. Where is it going to end up to the point where Noah can actually get access to it?

Well, I would imagine it would eventually just get connected to the cloud, right. And the cloud would be through a website where you could just go. Who knows?

...You dump a terabyte of information up there, and then how does that get...?

Yeah.

...Tagged, curated, that sort of thing? It's- It'll all be there, and you're right. It is very different. I don't even think about my childhood, you know, everything that I know about me or everything that you could know about me other than asking me would sit in a shoebox. So, a couple of photo albums and a few documents and...

...It's not much different from me as well, right?

No.

...The first- I mean, I don't think you've got video of you as a child, right?

No.

I think the first video I have is when we went to Fraser Island and my Uncle Paul had a video camera there with him, right?

Yeah.

...I would be like 13, 12-13...

Yeah, that's 2000, so.

...Whereas Noah has video of him effectively, at least every week, I would imagine from the day he was born, you know. And so, I guess that was my point. It blows my mind how quickly this has changed, but also how, you know. What's it going to be like in the future?

Are we going to end up with these drones that just follow us around and record every single moment of every single day that you could potentially- Whether or not it's used for crime or whatever you could just look up, you know, it's just nuts. And it's always one of those things, the reason I guess I mentioned this is because it is- You see these things about your ancestors, right.

Like in your book and you think, fuck, this person, all that's left of this person is a handful of documents and maybe a photo or two, especially if they're from the 1800s. And that wasn't that long ago. And yet they lived an entire life, right. Like you find out they died at the age of 80 or whatever, and you're like, I'm not even 35, and I have shit loads of photos and videos and stories.

And there's a, you know, I'm a person, I have all this history behind me, but it's almost tragic that there are so many people that you would just never know anything about and that nothing of them remains effectively.

Yeah, but also this is not just incidental stuff, too, that somebody in your circumstances, a good example of, you know, I could drop dead tomorrow and your children could go back in two, five, ten years and look at 100 episodes of The Goss' and go...

Dad just talking shit.

...This is what my dad and his dad were talking about. You know, this is- So, there is a, not just a record that says they existed, and they lived here and they did this job, but there is just- It's living data.

Well, and I think that's the deeper thing to it. I would love to be able to consume content like The Goss', even if it was a handful of episodes of your father speaking or even your mother speaking, or let alone your other ancestors to really know about-

To get a glimpse of what their days were like, what they were worried about, what they found interesting, their facial expressions, you know, what turned them on, what did they think of wildlife, of politics, of those sorts of things. So, it is one of those things where I'm glad that my son will have access to this content for me and you.

But it is this tragedy that I've always sort of thought about with ancestors, you know, it's just like all you have are your memories. And imagine what it was like, you know, in the 1800s or prior to the camera being made where you didn't even have photos, right...

No, exactly.

...And that was- All you may have had was a possession that they had...

Unless you were rich and famous, you had a painting and that was it.

And even then, that doesn't necessarily represent what the person actually looked like 100%.

No. No, exactly.

So, it is a really interesting, I don't know, kind of thought. But yeah, I'm always on the side of, it's really unfortunate that we don't have more.

Yeah, no- And that's funnily enough, that was part of the, you know, was the major part of the motivation for me writing this book as if I don't- And not just talking about me, but, you know, because hopefully I'm around long enough for your children to actually ask me some of the things they might want to know.

Just keep getting that prostate checked, dad and you'll be fine.

Yeah, exactly. It was more, you know, my parents and grandparents and so on of writing what I know about them and what I can document. Because without doing that, nobody- There's stuff in here that nobody else knows, because they're conversations that I had with my parents or there's documentation that I've collected and can put a story together around how they met as an example.

And so, if I don't record that, it's gone...

Do you ever feel... Do you ever feel like that tragedy of, oh, my grandfather was such a cool- Pete, you would have loved this guy. And your kind of like, it's just such a shame if we can't reach across the generations and get these two people to sit down and chat to one another, you're like, it's geologically speaking, it's such a short amount of time.

But at the same time, it's a insurmountable barrier, there was no way that you were ever going to be able to communicate with your great, great, great grandfather. But there are people that were in the middle that knew both of you, right. Like my grandfather knows his grandfather, would have met his grandparents, but they would have been born in the mid-1800s, right.

So, it is just- It's one of those things where I'm like, It's so funny. All humans have- There's no real difference, right. Throughout the most recent 10, 20, 100 generations, we were all effectively the same personality, the same sort of people we are today.

There was no, you know, we used to have three legs and, you know, hated honey, you know, but. But you just never have the chance. Like, imagine how cool it would have been to have understood what Julius Caesar was going through, right, like before he was murdered.

You know, because he was just a human being like everyone else. So, I always have those kinds of thoughts and I'm just like, oh, fuck, you know, it would have been so good to have some kind of connection with so many people, even from only 100 years ago.

Yeah, well, it's that- I mean, remember when Facebook and MySpace for...(mumbling)

Yeah.

Remember that. When they first came out and these sort of, what we would now call memes. But today's version of what a meme is, it's actually not what the original thing was, but these memes going around of as in behavioural memes of, you know, here's 20 questions introduce yourself. And, you know, one of those questions is often, who would you like to meet?

Yeah.

And I always used to partly facetiously, but, you know, partly in reality, say, my great, great grandchildren.

Yeah.

So, you'd go forward, you wouldn't go backwards.

Yeah. Well, yeah. But at the same thing. It works the same way that, you know, I would like to go back and talk to my great grandparents or great, great grandparents. But I also liked to be able to meet, and not just because I want to live to 150, but I would also like to meet my great, great grandchildren to just to see what their life is like.

Yeah, what problems have you guys got?

I don't need to live that long, but I'd like to jump forward 100 years.

Have we got flying cars yet?

Yeah, exactly.

I think I would probably go forward if I could choose, as opposed to backwards. And I think that's probably because we understand what's happened in the past, right. We have a somewhat of an idea of what people have gone through and what people had, didn't have, their struggles. But the future is still yet to be written, and so...

To me, the going backwards, I would much rather go back. And yes, I would like to have met my father's father, but only because I didn't. And so...

That's it, you did end up being a short combo and, you know, this guy's a dickhead. Like...

Yeah, well, he was a congregational minister and a minister in the Congregational Church, so I think we would have had some fundamental differences in our view of the world.

You would have either had a lot to talk about or very little to talk about.

Yeah. But I think we also had a lot in common, and you can read the chapter on him to decide whether you think that's true or not. But I would much rather go back and talk to famous people in the past, you know, you mentioned Julius Caesar.

You know, the one person, if you would ask me, who would I like to go back and interview? Was Charles Darwin. I would- That would be one of the great things in life to go back and just interview your scientific hero.

It wouldn't be- I'd be- It would be a Q&A. I'd be like, ask me anything, dude. What do you want to know? Like...

Oh, yeah.

...About everything that's happened since you died. You know, like, I'm happy to answer your questions. He's like, which hero would you have that you would allow to interview you?

Yes.

Because I'm sure he would have a lot more questions for me than I would for him.

Oh, I'm sure he would. Yeah.

Anyway, this is probably a long enough episode, dad.

All right.

Yeah, we didn't get to the news, so we can do that in the next one.

We didn't.

See you, guys.

Bye.

Alrighty, you mob. Thank you so much for listening to or watching this episode of The Goss'. If you would like to watch the video if you're currently listening to it and not watching it, you can do so on the Aussie English Channel on YouTube. You'll be able to subscribe to that, just search "Aussie English" on YouTube.

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