Transcript of AE 1061 - The Goss: Fraser Island is Renamed K'Gari

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

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

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

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

Dad, dad, what's going on?

Hey, Pete...

What's the goss'?

What is going on?

How are you going?

I'm going well, yeah. The sun's out. What's going- Today was supposed to be pissing with rain all day, and it rained for five minutes this morning and the sun's been out, so.

Wasn't that meant to be the forecast for the entire week...

It was and then- Look, the low-pressure system that's sitting over the, you know, western side of Bass Strait got stalled, which does happen at this time of the year and it went north, which happens. So, that explained why we got delayed, but it was supposed to keep being stalled and sit over the top of us. But it's apparently buggered off, though.

Not complaining.

No, I was- I had a plan a week ago that I was going to go out and do some walking in the local wildlife sanctuary and do some photography. And I cancelled that today because I thought, no, it's going to be pissing with rain all day, so I'm not going to bother I'll do something else.

Have they still got wallabies there?

They do. And there's actually an eastern grey kangaroo that's been seen there now, too, so.

Why don't you just like, have random people who just capture these animals around Australia and then drive to Ocean Grove and chuck them over the fence.

...It's big enough that it will have had a long term- Black wallaby, the swamp wallaby population.

Yeah.

But there's also a couple of, there have been a couple of redneck wallabies which used to be indigenous to this area, and I suspect they probably don't have a big enough area for them to have a viable population. But there's a couple of them there that have been there for a while. I haven't seen them recently, but.

Awesome.

Yeah.

Get a decent dose of macropods.

Yeah, exactly. And mostly birds. And it's wildflower time, too. There's lots of little orchids and flowers and stuff around. So, I was going to do a month of macro photography, whether that was once a month or thirty times a month. But apparently now it's going to be thirty because I didn't do it on the 1st, so. For those of you who are watching this later, it is when we are recording this, it's the 1st of October, so.

Yeah, it'll probably come out in December...

Probably come out in December, but you know. So, what happened to macro month? Didn't do it.

You've got to stay up to date. So, I've got a story here about K'Gari or...

K'Gari.

...Previously known as- Yeah, K'Gari, sorry. Previously known as Fraser Island.

Fraser Island.

So, the world's largest sand island is returning to its first Australian origins, with Fraser Island being renamed K'Gari or K'Gari, K'Gari. It's very difficult to work this out. I had to see the actual phonetic spelling because it's K-'-G-A-R-I.

Yeah, and that actually- I read the story as well before you sent it. And I have this, and I'd love to, and I will do it. I'll make a little project of mine one day to, you know, next time I'm having a chat to an indigenous person as to actually ask them how we determine spelling using the Latin alphabet of indigenous language. Because if the word is Gurri and K'Gari...

They have here pronounced and then in, you know, quotation marks K'Gari or K'Gari.

So, why isn't it just spelt G-U-R-R-I...

Well, I would be...

...I mean, no way being negative about it because clearly at some stage Indigenous people have decided this is how we use the Latin language to actually use the subtlety. Because I suspect and you'll know, being multilingual, I'm not, that subtlety in pronunciation of language is often lost to people who are not native speakers of that language.

Yeah, yeah.

And yeah, Kel can't tell the difference between bread and brad, which you and I hear that as going back...

Yeah. Night and day.

And she can't hear it. And that's she just simply can't because the same phonetic sound that we have would be pronounced exactly the same in Portuguese, and so she would hear it as the same thing. And I suspect what's happening here is that there is a subtlety in the pronunciation of this word that the "K'G" means there is a different consonant sound from just putting a G there.

And yet for us, it's just K'Gari.

Yeah. Well, I would imagine that it would have been one of those early anthropologists that probably wrote this down and at the time that they would have been interacting with the people here from K'Gari, which was Fraser Island. They wouldn't have had the international phonetic alphabet at the time, so they would have been trying to describe the sounds that they heard using just the, you know, English alphabet.

But yeah, that's what I was about to say, I would like, I prefer to hear this from an indigenous person saying the actual words so that I could get an idea of how it actually sounded instead of having to try and use just English letters to represent it, because you're almost certainly incorrect.

Oh yeah. Well, exactly.

So, anyway, the World Heritage Committee has already signed off on the renaming, and the state government is finalising the paperwork after a naming ceremony was held on the island last Sunday, although this would have been a few Sundays ago now. Environment Minister Meaghan Scanlon...

No, it was last Sunday. No, this is a week and a half old. So, yeah.

Two Sundays ago. Meaghan Scanlon, who attended the ceremony, said reverting the historic name was an important step in the culture of Queensland. Quote what a lot of people don't understand or don't realise is the term Fraser Island is really quite offensive to a lot of the traditional owners.

And rightly so, too.

For many years, they have been advocating for the name change, so it was a significant moment. This was one of those things that I was totally oblivious to. So, apparently, Fraser Island was named after...

Eliza Fraser.

...The wife of Captain James Fraser, Eliza Fraser, who was aboard, I think, the Stirling Castle ship...

That's it.

...When it struck a reef hundreds of kilometres north of K'Gari. So, they end up launching a boat and landing on K'Gari, and 11 survivors split into two groups, Eliza and her husband in the second group and attempted to trek south, surviving on pandanus and berries until they reached hook point.

Eliza later claimed she was captured by the Badtjala, her husband either died from starvation or from his injuries. Many other survivors of the same shipwreck later disputed Eliza's claims of capture and ill treatment. So, apparently, she was, I don't know, ended up falling in with the Badtjala people...

Yes.

...And then they've obviously, you know, given her enough food and water and taken care of her, whether or not they captured her or, you know, she just stuck around with them, and they were like, here, have some food and water, no issue. But then later, she's effectively just shat on them, right. And being like these horrible people captured me and forced me into living here and blah blah blah.

I haven't read her actual story, the memoirs that she wrote from this time, but I've read a few people who are reporting on it.

Yeah.

And it reads like a 19th century mills and boon romance novel, allegedly. And clearly, she has fantasised the entire story, whether that is a subliminal fantasy that she has interpreted all of the things that went on through, you know, what we would expect as a middle to upper-class European woman, you know, being stranded in this situation, which must have been extremely traumatic for her.

Terrifying. Yeah.

And her husbands died, and she's left with these native people that she can't communicate with. But all the other sailors who ended up in the other group who equally got taken on by another group of the Badtjala people... (both talking) ...Both sides came and rescued us and they looked after us, and, you know, eventually...

No issues.

...And, you know, so she just made the whole lot up. And that's the objection that the local people have had all the time, is that- And because not only that, but once her story got out, it then generated a effectively- It wasn't quite a massacre, but it was effectively an extermination of those people on the island. Not all of them were killed, but it was, we've got to get rid of people on this island.

Well, what difference does it make when they're on the island or on the mainland? But...

Yeah.

...And so, that's where the local people there have all for the entire time have objected to the use of the term Fraser Island for this place. Because they say, this does not represent the indigenous owners of the land.

Well, even worse than that, it was, you know, there's this person who, for all intents and purposes, was a bad actor, right. You know, did everything for herself and threw shade at the indigenous people where it wasn't warranted. And they end up having to live on an island that they've been on for probably thousands of years, and it gets named after this, you know, piece of shit person who's just crapped...

Not only that, but they were killed and taken away from the island.

Yeah, exactly. So, they're just like- That blew my mind. At first, I was like, why are they changing Fraser Island's name? You know, because I had absolutely no idea about the back story and I'm like, oh my God, it's taken this long.

The National Park- National Parks of Queensland changed the name of the national park, which is the majority of the island...

Yeah.

...To K'Gari. Earlier this year, I think it was sort of March or April that they changed the name. So, the actual formal changing of the name of the island has sort of followed from that, which is a good thing, I reckon.

Yeah. Well...

We should... Given the irony that we have so many places in Australia that use indigenous names.

More and more do this. Yeah.

Yeah, you look at it and go, why aren't we reverting to the indigenous names when they are known, and they have been in continuous use all the way along? Pronunciation aside, but, you know, I think that's a good thing that we're actually using the, you know, original names for these places.

Yeah.

Particularly a place where this is such a famous place, it's a World Heritage area and we only have two or three of them in Australia. It's a World Heritage Area, I mean, you've been there. It's an amazing place. It's...

Well, you describe it. I went there with you. What? I would have been 12?

It was 2000.

Yeah, okay. So, I would have been 12, 13 years old and we ended up in a four-wheel driving trip there. And this is the one of the places in Australia where you will find the most purebred dingoes in the wild because they're obviously stranded on this island.

Arguably the only ones that are left because they're isolated on the island. Everywhere else in Australia, there's intermingling, and for a long time it had been illegal to have dogs on the island.

Yeah, as a result.

Yeah. There hasn't been a long-term interbreeding of dingoes and, you know, human created breeds of dogs, so.

Well, and this- Was this before any children had died on the island as a result of the dingoes that we went there.

I think there might have been a couple, but, you know, there have been a lot more since because I think the population of dingoes has increased, the number of visitors there has increased...

Yeah.

...And so, you throw those two things together, then the interactions between humans and dingoes is going to increase...

Well, I think people aren't just- They're just not aware.

...Scavengers...

Yeah.

...They're scavengers.

People aren't aware of the fact that these are wild dogs and that they're going to be opportunistic. And if they find, you know, a child on their own, that's a toddler or something or a baby. There's a story that was on, I don't know if it was a current affair or not, you know, 60 Minutes or something.

But it was one of these couples that had gone there and left their baby in the caravan and, although their tent and the dingoes just open the tent and were pulling the baby out of the tent when they got there and were like, whoa, what the hell are you doing?

Yeah. But, you know, for them, it's just a small animal.

Yeah, well, that's- Why would you not? Yeah, exactly. But there have been some tragic deaths on there. Coming back to Eliza. Yeah, the last thing that sort of put the nail in the coffin for me with her was here. Eliza later secretly married another sea captain, Captain Alexander Green in Sydney, and they both returned to England aboard his ship, The Mediterranean packet.

Controversy followed when she appeared before the Lord Mayor of London to request that a charity appeal to be set up for her three children as she was left penniless after her husband had died (previous husband) not mentioning the fact that her- Not mentioning the fact that she'd been married to Captain Green, or that she'd already received 400 pounds in Sydney by a fund that had been set up to help her and her kids.

And then she sensationalised all the accounts of her experience, which were published in London.

And it's one of those irritating things, this happens quite a lot I've found, and we'll probably talk about this in the next story about, I think it's Tom Wills, right?

Yes.

Where a lot of the time back then in the 1800s, the English, especially those in London, in the media, in the press, went nuts for stories about people interacting with indigenous people.

Yeah, well... (both talking)

...Blew them way out of proportion, you know, I think that William Buckley, who got lost- Who got lost? Who ends up running away as a convict in, I think it's 1803 in- What was he on? Portsea side of the Bay...

...The Mornington Peninsula and ended up on the Bellarine Peninsula...

...Ends up with the one wrong and stays with them for 35 years. And, you know, then finally ends up coming back into Western society and then going back to Great Britain. Tells his story, but I think it gets published in the newspaper and then all these accounts of cannibalism and all this other crap ends up in there. And...

Yeah, and he even said, I didn't say any of this.

Yeah, he was like, what the hell are you talking about? Yeah. And so, it is crazy to see how much these that historians today in particular have to read this and always take it with a grain of salt and be like, a lot of it we have to just kind of take out of it what we can in terms of places, and...

It was the fantasy of the exotic, and this is- You got to remember in the 19th century, this is at the same time as zoos started to appear in Europe.

Yeah.

Originally, they were private zoos. Just, you know, very wealthy people would go out collecting animals or have them collected on their behalf and bring them back, and then they became public zoos. And it was the as I said, the fantasy of the exotic, you know, being able to see and, you know. Can you imagine if you'd grown up in Central London, in the streets of London for your entire life and you go to a zoo and you see an elephant?

Yeah.

It's just- And then the stories around that, you know, the elephant looks fearsome and everything, and gorillas, which are about the most passive animals on Earth, became the King Kong myth. And so, this was all about, you know, fantasising the adventure, and it always had to be dangerous.

And indigenous people always had to be head-hunters and cannibals. There was never any of this, oh, well, they just looked after me, and then a few months later, somebody found me and I went back to civilisation. Whatever that means. It always, you know, there was a temptation, both from the audience and the author to go to the extreme, so.

This is original clickbait.

Yeah, well, exactly.

Well...

How do you want to sell your story? What's your stor- What's the better story here?

Sprinkle some cannibalism in there. Put some cannibalism in there.

What's the better story?

The last thing I guess I wanted to end this episode on was talking about the fact that K'Gari is derived from a dreamtime creation story, and the following comes from Fraser-Tours.com. The name is derived from an Aboriginal dreamtime story about a goddess named K'Gari, who fell in love with the Earth and never wanted to leave. According to the story, the gods set out to find a place for humans to live who had newly been created.

K'Gari, alongside Yindingie, the messenger of the Great God Beeral, was sent down to Earth to find such a place, but K'Gari herself fell so in love she never wanted to leave. She was then changed- She was then changed her-? She was then changed her into- Yeah, that's weird.

Maybe she then changed herself into the Great Sand Island so that she could stay on her beloved Earth forever. Beeral placed lakes, forests, flowers, animals, birds and people there to keep her company. So, pretty touching story, much better one than calling it Fraser Island.

Yeah, exactly. And it is paradise, and the word now means paradise in the local language, so. And it is, it's an incredible place.

Yeah, it's insane. I remember when we went there, there were quite a few of these streams, right, with just crystal clear water that you could kind of lie in and float down.

Yeah.

And, you know, it was just, yeah, really good.

...Water that's been filtered through sand dunes for a thousand years, by the time it pops out again and heads out to sea, so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Insane. Anyway, let's finish up there, guys, and we'll see you next time.

Bye.

Peace!

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.

And if you're watching this and not listening to it, you can check this episode out also on the Aussie English podcast, which you can find via my free Aussie English podcast application on both Android and iPhone. You can download that for free, or you can find it via any other good podcast app that you've got on your phone. Spotify, podcast from iTunes, Stitcher, whatever it is.

I'm your host, Pete. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you have a ripper of a day, and I will see you next time. Peace!