Transcript of AE xxx - The Goss: You'll Never Believe What This Bloke Found in His Wall

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.

Hey.

Cool. Thanks for joining us, guys.

Yeah.

See you. See you soon!

Shortest episode ever.

Shortest episode ever. Now it isn't.

So I was scrolling on um, Facebook, and I sent you this reel of this American guy who was remodelling his childhood.

Oh, yeah.

When he discovered a long lost Christmas gift with his name on it in the wall.

Mhm.

So he pulls out this kind of like, like 50 years prison size thing. Yeah. That was, um, probably the size of what, like a chopping board.

Yeah.

And covered in Daffy Duck um, wrapping paper. And it had been in there for 50 years. And I think the issue or the reason it was there was that his mom had stacked all the presents up in the attic, and one had fallen down the wall cavity and gone down the wall cavity. Yeah. What are the chances, you know, of all the parts of your house to remodel? You just happen to remodel that. And it makes you think, how many times do people remodel houses and there's something that they just don't find because they didn't remodel the part where it was, right.

Yeah.

And it's, it was just a really cool story because he ends up opening it up. And his mom, who's still alive, apparently was like..

I can't remember buying that.

Yeah. And it was, um, Matchbox jets.

Yeah. The Thunder jets?

Yeah. From the 70s, right. But it was cool. It sort of reminded me there's been a few of these stories that I've heard recently. One that I think I sent you to was a a woman skull was found in a wall.

Yeah.

And it turned out that it came from a time in the I think it was the 1800s, right. Where there was a lot of grave robbing going on. People would dig up people that had been buried, I think, for a significant amount of time, and then take the bones and sell them to. I don't know, medical institutes or universities or whatever. And, um, someone had kept the skull and put it put it in the wall, but they ended up finding out who it was, you know, working out..

Oh really?

Who the person was. Yeah. I think they did a DNA analysis on it because they weren't sure it was this person murdered. Yeah. Um, she, you know, was a young..

All of a sudden, was 200 years old.

Yeah, exactly. Well, and that's what they worked out. They put her into the database and they found her great great grandchildren and, um, worked out but yeah. And I think she died in childbirth or something, you know? So obviously she wasn't murdered, but it was this really interesting. I think it was like a cold case that had been, um, they found the head in, like, the 70s or 80s in the wall. And then the police, only, you know, in the last few years decided to upload the genetics once the ancestry. And that was how they found..

The DNA technology has got to the point where you can cross-check things.

Yeah. And there was the other cool story similar to that that I'd heard about was when we were doing whisky, right. And it was, was it Aberlour A'Bunadh

Yeah.

The whisky. Remember that A'Bunadh?

Yeah.

It is really nice Scottish whisky. And they had modelled that whisky on a bottle that they had found.

That's right.

You know, in the wall.

Yeah. When they had smashed down a um, part of the, the um, distillery to expand it, they found this..

They found a found a bottle.

Bottle from the 1800s in the wall. And apparently the funny thing was that the manager was on break and the people who found it decided to open it and start drinking it. And he just managed to save half the bottle when he came back. And then they modelled the A'Bunadh, the whisky, after the taste of of that one. And I thought, I remember that was cool. And you wonder how much stuff is just sitting around in people's walls.

Yeah, and not just walls. I remember when I a couple of times I was doing odd jobs for people, um, and one was ripping up carpet in an old house, um, because people were renovating the place and the in back in those days, they didn't put underlay under carpets, they just used it..

.. the carpet straight onto the..

But they used a whole lot of newspapers.

Ah, yeah.

So you've got these newspapers that are 100 years old and they've been pretty well preserved because they've just been flattened and there's very little oxygen, and there wasn't water or, water damage or anything in there. Um, and and so you're sitting there looking at these 100 year old newspapers.

That'd be so cool. I think I saw something about that again, too, where it was like inside the wall where they opened it up.

Yeah.

And they found those newspapers.

That you used to use them for insulation in walls.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it is cool. The other thing that's sort of similar to this was I was watching a doco recently on, I think it would be in Norway. It's probably anywhere in that Arctic Circle type part of Europe where because of the amount of permafrost and glaciers and ice melt that's happening. In fact, it was people that were studying glaciers. And as the glaciers receded up the mountain, they they discovered all of this ice age material like arrowheads and, um, you know, people's bones.

Clothing.

And shoes. Yeah. That had, they I think they discovered this, like, walkway path that people had been taking to migrate from one place to place to another and over, you know, thousands of years during the Stone age, people had either died there or misplaced things, or they had been hunting reindeer and they had lost arrows. And so all of these things are now appearing and people are finding them because the ice is melting, is disappearing. Yeah. Which is really cool. It makes you wonder how much is up there and how much, you know, we need to sort of get in there and study before we lose those kinds of things, because they're going to deteriorate.

Yeah, well, as soon as they get air to it, yeah, they're going to deteriorate.

So what kind of presents did you get as a kid, dad? What were the kinds of things that you received? What did you want?

What did I want?

When you were a kid?

I can't remember to be honest what I wanted. Yeah. Probably Lego.

Mhm.

We didn't. We never had Lego when I was a kid. We, there was a cheaper, softer plastic version. There was just bricks and we had that and you could build lots of stuff out of it but didn't have windows or doors or roofing parts or any of that.

It was just literally a set of bricks.

Set of bricks.

Make away. You can make a castle tower. Yeah, make a wall.

And so you could. But so Lego was probably the thing that I would sort of really wanted. But back, back in my day, you could, you just bought sets of bricks.

Mhm.

Um, you know, and there were window parts and you know, things to build, but there weren't kits to build a particular thing.

Like today, yeah.

Which I reckon 99% of Lego now is kits.

Yeah. I'd say if you..

You can still buy a buy a bucket of stuff..

Stuff, yeah.

But that's one thing on a shelf of 100.

Mhm.

So.

Well I think everyone wants to see what could this, what could this thing be?

Getting over..

What is this thing? What is this thing I am going to build.

Yeah.

What is this? Um, you know, I want.

And you get the, you know, the book of detailed, you know, step by step instructions with them and.

Yeah.

And look, they're expensive. I mean, and.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Well, the 50th anniversary. So it was now 5 or 6, six years ago. Um, of the Apollo 11, you know, man landing on the moon.

That's right.

Um, your mum bought me the Apollo 11 rocket ship, Lego. Um, you know, it's like 2000 pieces.

Jeez, that would have been a lot.

It took me a week to build, probably, you know, 6 or 7 hours worth. Do it an hour at a time or something.

Well, those Star Wars ones, right? Where you can build, like the Millennium Falcon or the Star Destroyer, um, ship or whatever. They're like thousands of dollars.

Oh, yeah.

It's like one, two grand, I think, to get those. And they're absolutely massive. Which is weird because you would think they're just plastic moulds.

I know.

Right. Like it's, it's just plastic that's shot into ahh, it's an injection mould, right. And so the, the material itself is not worth much. But I don't know how much..

It's the engineering. It's the designers that they're paying a lot of money to do the engineering. And then they create 100 different types of pieces unique to that particular kit to make up that thing.

And then Star Wars gets their cut as well, which I would imagine is, you know, 20 or 30% on top as well.

Yeah, exactly.

So Lego was the main thing you were after?

Well, that was, that was the one that I can remember. Um.

Did you want Matchbox cars? Bikes?

Well, I used to get Matchbox cars a lot. My my dad had a job where he used to travel half the time. Well, about a third of the time, every 3 or 4 weeks. He was away for a few days. And every time he went away, he would bring us kids, myself and my two sisters. Uh, he would bring us something back. And for me, it was nearly always a Matchbox car.

Yeah.

Um, so I had lots of those. Uh, and, you know, that's the tragic story of my mother, because I, I kept the the boxes and the boxes were pristine. The the cars got played with. Um, but.

How old were you when this was sort of happening, at its pinnacle?

Um, I probably started when I was about 5 or 6 till about 12.

Okay.

And then after that, they they just got put away, boxed up and put away in a in a cupboard in our shed. It was a playroom by then. They, my parents filled in some of the walls and the stuff on the the garage and became a playroom. But my mum decided one day that, you know, we didn't need this box of Matchbox cars. About 100 of them sitting in the in the cupboard that she'd never went to. There was nothing else that she didn't need the space for anything. She just said, oh, I'll give these away to the kids down the road.

You bitch.

And I, I was, I was about 18 at the time, so I, you know, and it was sort of like, you what? Like what?

Betrayed.

Betrayed. Yeah. That's my, that's my one story of things that from my childhood that I just wish that. Not that I necessarily still had, but I wished that they hadn't disappeared. And it was my choice of what to do with them. But now they're worth, you know, 50 to $100 each. If they're pristine with a box.

Don't talk, you know. Don't look up..

5 to $10,000 worth it.

Yeah. Oh my God. But that was like the feeling I think I got when you guys found our old Lego and were putting it all together to let, um, your grandchildren play with it now. Like the nostalgia and the. I actually remember playing with these, you know, and putting them together and like, there's one that you've got that is like a medieval castle type thing with a draw bridge and all this stuff. And I remember putting that together on Nana and Grandpa's living room floor.

Yeah.

They had like, green felt carpet and I was lying there. I remember you got it for either Christmas or something, and I took it there the next day. And then, you know, I was staying there for a day or so and I spent like an hour or two just putting it together. But yeah, the fact that there's so much enjoyment that I get now of watching my kids play with that stuff, and part of me would be like, God, it would be a tragedy to lose that or have it have have it been given away or something in the past. But at the same time, I'm like, I also want the kids to be able to play with it. Like I wouldn't want it to just be sitting in the closet somewhere and never be never be used again. The same with these. I've got bug magazines, these magazines from when I was probably nine, ten, 11. There was a series that came out, weekly series..

And you get a kit to build a bug with every magazine.

With that or not. But it had definitely had something with it. But you would. The magazine was filled with really cool information about bugs.

Yeah.

And, um, Noah and Joey, my kids have recently gone hard in terms of, like, looking for bugs.

And where are they today?

Yeah, well, they're at the insect..

The insect exhibition at the museum.

The museum, right. Yeah. Enjoying that, they've just. I didn't see that coming. How obsessed they would be with trying to find bugs. And I guess it's kind of like them playing Pokemon before they could use..

The adventure part of it. It's not necessarily the interest in the animal itself. It's the adventure of going out and looking and..

But it's the dopamine hit, too, of lifting up a rock and not knowing what's going to be there.

There's a slider!

Oh my god! It was so funny. Joey came home from Day-care the other day with, um, a slider that she'd obviously had her hand for hours, and I'm just like this poor fucking bug. It's just been..

That guys, sweaty girl's little hand. And she's just like, it's my baby!

And I was like, what's his name? And I think she was like.

Break it, break it!

Break it?

Yeah I don't..

Who knows.

The name is Break It.

Yeah.

Anyway, so.

Don't argue with a three year old.

She'd been, um, she was playing with him. I thought they were going to be afraid of bugs and not like them, but, yeah, they're obsessed. And now they just. All they want to do is go outside looking for bugs and pretty much put him in a jar.

And then we give him Noah for Christmas?

A bug catcher.

Bug catcher. And what did Joey say? I want one!

I know. But yeah, it is. It is so funny how much kids I think humans in particular. But kids, well, kids in particular, but humans in general just love that dopamine of collecting and and that also kind of gambling thing of lifting something up, not knowing what's going to be there and seeing it and getting that reward, that dopamine hit. And so I feel like that's what they're probably getting.

Oh, hey, we, um, we as human beings, as, you know, children, human beings have had that, um, exploited by, uh, commercial enterprises for as long as I can remember, in fact, way before me. Um, you know, for me, it was football cards. You know, you go out and buy what at the time was $0.02 worth of bubble gum. It had cost you $0.10 or $0.15 for this thing, but it came with two football cards.

Yeah.

And there were like 200 of them that you could collect, but it was just random as to which ones you got, and you just kept going back for this hit of, have I got a new one? Have I got a new one?

Well, and our kids were getting that, right, with the Woollies and.

Well, at least they were free giveaway.

Yeah.

Free in a sense that you had to shop at Woollies to get your free stuff.

Yes.

And you had to. And it was you got one for every $30 you spent.

But yes, one packet. But they were definitely loving that. And it was funny how they would get more and more frustrated the more their collection grew.

Of course you do, because it's harder to fill the gaps.

Yeah, it was harder to get. Yeah, exactly. Every time, Oh, I've already got these, I'm like, what am I going to do, mate? That's how probability works.

Yeah, exactly.

What do you want me to do? But it was the same for me growing up. When we were at primary school, I was obsessed with Pokemon cards. We had tazos, these little plastic circles.

That were these..

They came in chip packets.

Yeah. And you used to. They were a, that was a swapping thing too. Was. Yeah.

Well, there was some sort of a game where I think you would stack them up and hit them with a large plastic.

Yeah. And the thing turned over the right way.

Yeah, but I don't think we ever play those games. With Pokemon cards. Pokemon cards was meant to be a game, but I think people only ever really collected and traded. They didn't really ever sit down and actually try and play the game. Um, but that was it for me. It was definitely it was like tazos out of those chip packets, and they were like Looney Tunes and the Cheetos characters and even maybe Dragon Balls. They may have been Dragon Ball Z related ones as well. At some point.

It's all beyond me.

And trying to get that whole collection and then Pokemon cards. And what else do we have? Marbles.

Oh, marbles!

I think I was the best at marbles..

Marbles is one of those things that just goes through cycles. I bet your kids they play with marbles, but they use them in things like the plastic kit marble maze that you build a tower, and..

We showed them the game of how we used to play it..

Flipping marbles off your thumb and stuff. Um, yeah, because that was huge when I was a kid at primary school. And then it just sort of disappeared, and I'm sure it went through another cycle or two beforehand. But then when you were the same age as me, when I had them at primary school, you had it, you know, the same thing, and you'd spend all of lunchtime out there with. I had to find it. Yeah. You find a little scrape of sand and you play your.

Yeah. Because I think it's funny too, because I got so many. I think mum would have bought me a packet or two..

And you probably inherited mine. I would have still had them around. I probably gave you mine.

I don't know! But they had. It was so funny. They had. We gave them all different names, right. Like planets.

Oh yeah.

Dragons eyes. Some of them were called sperms because they had like the little..

Sliver of slate..

Inside of it.

Yeah.

Sperms. That's so funny. But yeah, we used to play those games of we would just have our collections, people would have bum bags. But I see I had this purple and black bum bag that was just full, chockers full of..

Yeah. For me, it was a, um, a drawstring bag. My mum made me a, you know, a drawstring bag that you'd carry around, but it was a sort of size of a bum bag. And so it had like a kilogram of glass balls in it.

Yeah. Well, with the game, the way that we played, it would be you'd go out into, um, the yard playing during recess or whatever, and the idea would be that you would take on one other person and you would both be able to, like, one person had to start by throwing their marble.

Yeah. And then you had to flick it out of the ring..

You weren't allowed to, no, it was just anywhere, and you weren't allowed to move from where you started, and you had to try and hit it by throwing yours at it.

Ah, no.

That was how we did it. And so you would it would be this trade off between trying to hit it quite often with this sort of like overhand, kind of like throwing a dart type technique. And you would have to be careful not to throw it in such a way that it landed too close to the one that you're aiming at.

Cause then they'd just walk over..

And they would pick it up and go bonk. And then they win it. If they hit yours, they win.

That was the..

And so we would play that game.

Our, our game was um we used to play it on typically on sand rather than dirt. Um, because dirt was, you know, is too hard and things would roll too much.

Well, that was the idea with our game where..

You draw a circle that would be like half a metre in diameter. Um, and yeah, just a finger circle in the, in the sand. And then somebody would just drop their marble in, and then the second person would have to shoot the marble off their, you know, off their finger with their thumb and try and knock the other marble out of the circle.

Ah, so the sand makes it inherently difficult.

Speaker5:
It makes it inherently difficult. So if you knock the other one out of the circle, it was you won that marble. If yours went out of the circle, the other person won it. If they both ended up in the circle and the other person had a turn. So that was the game that we, and we must have played it for hundreds of hours over a period of a couple of years. And then they just sort of like in hindsight, it was overnight. It probably just sort of weaned out over months, but all of a sudden it was, oh, well, you know, I suppose these trends people just get kids get sick of it. The next thing comes along. But there's Frisbees came along and everybody had a Frisbee, and then Frisbees got banned at school.

Okay.

Um, because kids were either being hit in the face with Frisbees or people would be running around chasing them, trying to catch them and running into trees and, you know.

Speaker4:
But it's funny, there's certain ones that don't, I think Foursquare, right. Or handball.

Speaker5:
Oh, handball.

Speaker4:
I mean Foursquare, that was always there.

Yeah.

Speaker4:
Never got boring.

Speaker5:
No.

Speaker4:
At least as far as I know. I haven't been to primary school in a long time.

Speaker5:
But even at, I used to play it at high school, you know, up against the wall and the thing at high school and not Foursquare, but just..

It just wasn't allowed to bounce twice.

Speaker5:
Handball up to the wall. It was sort of like, you know, hitting the ball, the tennis ball into the wall.

Speaker6:
Yeah, we did that in the uh, what are the courts called, is it not? Um, it's not tennis. What is it called again? Squash.

Speaker5:
Squash court.

Speaker4:
Yeah, the squash court. We used to play it in there where you went. There would be many of us, a few of us, and you would have teams or whatever, and it would be the idea that the ball had to..

Speaker5:
If you'd bounce twice, you lost.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Speaker5:
Yeah. So we used to, we used to play that when I was at high school. When I was a teacher at high school, 15 years later, kids were playing exactly the same game.

Speaker4:
Yeah. Same rules or slightly..

Same rules. Foursquare was the other one. We, the Foursquare, wasn't as popular when I was a kid at school, but it became more popular with kids when I was a teacher..

Speaker4:
You used to move up the positions too, didn't you? It was like dunst.

Yeah,

That was one of them. And then there was like the..

The one, two, three, four positions, where you used to call them.

Right! Oh, my God, I haven't thought about this in so, probably two decades or longer.

Speaker5:
Yeah. And it was if you were in the one position you could, you served, you were the one who hit the ball in so you could control how difficult it was for the next person to hit it.

Speaker4:
That's right. And if you were dunsting..

Speaker5:
If it landed in your square, you had to hit it and sort of.

Speaker4:
Yeah. God, that was, that was so funny. It was one of these games too, that boys played. Girls didn't seem to give a shit about.

Speaker5:
Some of the girls used to play the one up against the wall, the handball against the wall,

Yeah?

But for us they were the funnily enough, they were the athletic girls who, if they weren't doing that, they'd be out playing basketball or netball or whatever.

It was funny, like finishing up with the kids looking for bugs and everything. I came up with the coolest, um, game. I sort of thought of it from Round the Twist. There's a TV show that I grew up watching called Round the Twist.

Round The Twist.

It was filmed down the coast here.

Speaker5:
Aireys Inlet.

Well, that's where the lighthouse was. But yeah, a lot of it was filmed down here. Anyway, there's an episode where they all collect frogs and they, um, have, like, this competition where they have a huge circle. All the frogs get put in the centre of the circle, and they hose them down. And the first frog to get out of the circle is the winner, right? So the kids were finding all these snails, and we kept waking the snails up with water because they were like, I don't want this. This snail that's sort of like half hibernating in a shell because it's warm.

Speaker5:
Sit there for three months.

Speaker4:
Yeah. So I was just like, I'll just put some water in there, kids. They'll wake up. And, um, so they were waking up anyway, I just thought, oh my God, I'm going to blow their little minds and use some chalk to just draw this really big circle.

Speaker5:
Snail races.

Speaker4:
Yeah. And then, like, wet it all down. Put the snails all in the middle. I got Joey to help me paint the shells. Different colours. Yeah. And then they all woke up and started racing. And we were for, like, about, you know, an hour. We're out there going like, Go Blue! Go Blue! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! And it was just, one of these massive ones woke up and pretty much just charged out of the circle whilst all the others were just fiddling around the middle. But it was such a funny little game that we had..

A little flashback from your childhood.

Well, yeah.

Because one of your babysitters was an actor on.

Yeah.

Round The Twist. So she was one of your mum's students at Deakin.

Speaker4:
I know it's a very small world.

Speaker5:
It is.

Speaker4:
Anyway, that's probably enough for this episode, but.

Speaker5:
That's Round The Twist. Yeah.

Speaker4:
I can't even remember what we started by talking about. Just the presents in the wall.

Speaker5:
The presents in the wall. Yeah.

So you guys will have to let us know. What's the.

What's your favourite Christmas present in a wall?

Speaker5:
Yeah. Or what's your favourite Christmas present? Or what's the Christmas present that you would have loved to have got that you never did? Like my Lego.

Speaker4:
I don't think I ever had. I got so many good, cool gifts from you guys, whether it was Legos and, you know, magazines and things about bugs. Looking back, it was all that sort of stuff. Like, I always loved animals and machines and cars and Legos, and it's so funny how that doesn't really seem to change much. Like, our kids are obsessed with exactly the same shit. You could give them the gifts you gave me as a kid and they would be as mind blown receiving them.

Speaker5:
Well, you know, good ideas are generational.

Speaker4:
Yeah. Anyway, thanks for joining us, guys, and we'll see you next time.

Bye!

Tooroo!