The Goss 7 - Done.mp3 transcript powered by Sonix—the best automated transcription service in 2020. Easily convert your audio to text with Sonix.

Download the "The Goss 7 - Done.mp3 audio file directly. This mp3 was automatically transcribed by Sonix (https://sonix.ai).

The Goss 7 - Done.mp3 was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the latest audio-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors. Sonix is the best way to convert your audio to text. Our automated transcription algorithms works with many of the popular audio file formats.

G'day you mob. Welcome to this episode of The Goss, right. Every single week I sit down with my dad and I talk about the gossip for the week, what's been going on in the news, what's been going on in the world, usually Australia, but obviously we touch on everything and anything that might come up in these episodes. So today is a really good episode. It is chock-a-block full of different expressions as well. I try and use a lot of expressions when I'm doing these episodes, right. The whole point is to give you guys as much English as possible, but it's also full of heaps and heaps of different news events, news and current affairs events, right. So this week we've had heaps and heaps of rain along the east coast of Australia. There's been flooding in some places. We also talk about Antarctica logging the hottest temperature on record, as well as some of the giant icebergs that are being created that are breaking off the Pine Island glacier at the moment. We get into the National Carp Control Plan. They're trying to control this pest fish in Australia. We also talk about Hosier Lane and how that was painted by some vandals or artists. You know, again, it's up to how you decide to interpret artists and what they do, I guess. We talk about that. And lastly, we talk about Cyclone Uesi, which is about to collide with Lord Howe Island. So anyway, guys, let's get into it. Smack that kookaburra on the bum and let's begin.

Dad, welcome to this episode of The Goss. What's the Goss?

Hey, Pete. Yeah. There's not much happening except we've had fires turn into floods, which is....

That was one of the stories...

... Fairly typical.

... In Chatting About. Yeah, well we can start with that. But anything else been going on on your week? You been smashing out some photography courses.

Yeah. Yeah. Teaching on Wednesday nights.

How's that going?

It's good fun. This course is really just for learning how to use your camera. So it's basic stuff for not so much for beginners, anything from beginning to early, partly serious who just wants to know how to get the most out of the camera.

That's what I think most people don't realise, right. They tend to be... I'm sure the majority of people using cameras are hobbyists. Yeah. And before getting into it, I don't think they, slash me when I did it, appreciate just how complicated photography can be and how involved it is.

Yeah. And I think one of the challenges is that everybody's got a camera in their hand all day, every day these days. And the cameras in phones these days are really good. But people will then go out and spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on what they perceive as being a better camera, but they turn it on to auto and go click. And yes, the quality of the lenses is better and the quality of the sensor is better, but they're not going to get much more out of it if all they're doing is just using it as a point-and-shoot.

That's a difficult thing, though, when starting with those hobbies and you know what I'm like, I get sucked in pretty pretty quickly to things. I mean, I have the... I think the drive and the passion to sort of take it somewhere, at least in the early stages usually. But it's hard to not want to just keep yourself out with the best thing.

Of course.

So what does your advice tend to be for people who are wanting to take up photography for the first time and obviously buy into the gear and the hobby? How do you get started properly? Right, because it is one of those things where it's difficult. You're like, "alright, to get started I have to buy something and it's going to be hundreds of dollars. I'm really pumped up right now. So I think I'm probably going to keep doing this. At least I hope I'm going to keep doing this. And so do I want to buy something again in a year that's going to be twice, three times as expensive, or do I just do that from the beginning?" What is your advice going to be?

Yeah, it's one of those ones. There is no single answer. I get asked a lot. Yeah. People come up to me, "Oh, you're a photographer. What camera should I buy?" And the answer is to... Is that most so-called experts will go and give most so-called beginners the advice for everything, and that is, "It depends." And so...

What do you want? Right.

... It's really a matter of saying what style of photography do you want? What's important to you in terms of is it cost? Are you willing to spend thousands of dollars? Can you afford to spend thousands of dollars? Are you really interested? What style of photography do you... If you're interested in travel photography and you really want something that you can put in your pocket or your handbag or a day pack that you're going to be travelling around in? Or do you want a bunch, two cameras, five lenses and a bunch of accessories, put it in a backpack and carry that around?

And so the answer of what type of camera or what type of kit is really going to depend on the answers to those, as much as anything else. The good thing about photography today, digital photography today, is that all of the major brands produce really good cameras and they produce good cameras even at the low end.

So pretty much can't go wrong.

So you pretty much can't go wrong. There are some traps in terms of if you want to buy something that you can then extend and add accessories to, add new lenses to, and so on. If you're buying into a camera system that is using a sensor that is smaller and you buy lenses that are dedicated to that smaller sensor, then you can't necessarily use those lenses as easily on a full frame camera if you want to upgrade to that, but often going into a full frame camera isn't required these days because the so-called APS-C cameras or micro four thirds cameras are so good that for the majority of people, that's all they're ever going to need.

Especially if you're just taking photos of your family, of tourism.

Exactly.

Whatever it is, you know, doing some serious stuff. But yeah, it is hard to not get sucked into it. I miss doing it. It's one of those things you appreciate so much more the older you get, especially after having a child, how much your days are limited in terms of time.

Exactly.

Like I would love to do so much in terms of hobbies like jujitsu, go to the gym, photography, skateboarding, surfing, travel, but you realise you just can't do it...

"Family first" is really what it amounts to. But then you do things, eventually get to the point where you and I have gone out and done bird photography together and so on. So eventually that sort of starts to happen. But I'm not saying it's going to... You got to wait 30 years for it to happen, but...

I think that's sort of my life. It tends to be getting a big percentage of skill done in a specific area in the first portion of time, so like, you know, the first 20 hours or whatever, you just dedicate to this thing and you get really good returns. But then after that it's a slow grind to keep improving. And so I'm sort of very, you know, what I'm like. I like switching between things because I am addicted to that initial stage of...

Of getting that learning.

Yeah.

And it's an adrenaline rush when you put a bit of effort in and you get a really good result. But then as with anything, the better you get, the smaller the improvement is going to be for the same amount of effort.

It's the same with you guys learning English. You know, a lot of the time people ask me what I do once I get to the intermediate plateau and it's kind of like, keep going. Find ways to be motivated. So I think it'll be the same with photography or surfing or skating. If you get to the stage where you're good and you're like, "But I feel like I'm not improving." It's kind of like, whoa, what are you trying to improve that? And how do you motivate yourself or discipline yourself or spark that, you know, interest to just keep pushing and develop habits where it's just a daily thing, right. So that, you know, with a camera and carry it around and just using it.

Something of it is... It almost amounts to, no matter what you want to do, practice, practice, practice. The PPP rule is what counts. But if yeah... When I was a child and starting to learn to play tennis, the way I started to learn to play tennis was just by hitting a ball into a brick wall.

hitting a wall with a ball.

Hitting a wall with a ball occasionally if I was good enough to get it there. But you'll eventually get to the point where you're not going to get much better by doing that. And after all, playing tennis is not about hitting a ball into a wall. It's about playing on a court with somebody at the other end. And so you have to start to practice different sorts of skills in different ways. And the same thing, I suspect, with language learning. Then if all you're doing is going through vocab all the time and practising a bit of grammar, eventually get to the point where, A, that's tedious and B, you reach that intermediate plateau, as you say, and you've got to change the things you do. You've got to do more conversation, you've got to be reading more complex books, papers and magazines and so on...

Well not just that, you're focusing on the stuff that you're going to be using more often than not, right. It doesn't necessarily help you to be learning engineering vocab if you're not an engineer and instead you're a surfer who wants to speak Spanish or something. So you have to work out where do I get the most out of my time? And also what do I enjoy and sort of get those two things to overlap and, you know, realise you're not going to be the best at everything like with photography. I got really into the bird photography like you with the wildlife staff. And so my landscape photography probably sucks if it exists at all because I just don't practice that thing.

And it's different. It's the same thing. If you... I mean we've talked about it before. I learnt French at school. I can probably speak enough French to last for 40 seconds in a conversation with someone before I run out of things to say. But I can still understand it. I can read it and I can understand what people are saying at a very low level. But unless you're going to go in and practice it and do that over and over again, there's no point me being able to read French if I want to travel in France and talk to people. Yeah, I guess I'll be able to read street signs and so on. I'll find a way around, but I can't speak to anybody. Then yeah, that's another thing that I have to practice.

I guess it just comes back to making sure you're motivated. Or your motivations are in the right place so that, you know, you're finding the things you're interested in and using... Following the pursuit of those interests and developing your skills at the same time in whatever it is.

And look, the thing that I talk about a lot with the students when we're looking at how to learn to use your camera is "Take risks. You do the things that you currently find hard. There's no point in practicing things that you find easy."

Yeah.

It's seductive to do that because you get better results instantly, but turn everything to manual and struggle and then work out what the various buttons and settings and menus in those sort of things do.

Repeat things, right, too. I kept going to... There's that place in Queenscliff taking the same photos of seagulls.

The gulls on the on the sandy shore.

Just because it was hard to get a good photo of something so boring. But by going there every single time and focusing on the same animals, the same location, you could kind of... You had to think creatively about how to make it look interesting and make it look nice. And you get... You got to try the same shots many, many times. In different light with different animals and you got to know the location. And so I think it was much better to try and focus on one spot and going there repeatedly. I probably went there like 30 times in several months then to try and go to a new spot every single time, because my skill, at least, in terms of taking photos of seagulls and my beach got pretty good.

But what you're learning is... And I used to... When I was a high school teacher and teaching year twelve students, in fact any students, but particularly year 12 students when they're at the pointy end of their high school education, I used to teach them the one minute self-interview at the end of every class.

Yeah.

What did I learn today? What did I not understand? And what do I want to do before next time? So that you're always reviewing and going back and saying, "That was great. I had a good experience today." And not stopping there by saying, "How do I improve what I'm doing? What's the next risk I need to take? What's the next thing that I need to investigate? What do I need to practice more in order to get better at it?" And it's the same thing, if you take a photograph and you look at it and you go, "Well, that's cool. That's the best photograph I'm ever going to take." Congratulations. Enter it in a competition. But most people are going to take a photograph, particularly early on as hobbyists, and they're going to say, "I don't like this. It's not as good as I wanted it to be." So think about why it isn't what you wanted it to be.

Reflective practice.

Exactly. It's what you have to do to improve. And even if you don't know, trial and error. Go out and change a bunch of things. Now, some of that is harder to translate into language learning.

What if it is... Because it means just have the same conversations, for example, or write about the same things, like try telling people about what you do for work or what you're passionate about and have that conversation with many different people and you'll find that you develop your skills in that, you know, even if you're not looking up new vocab, you're going to create connections in a way that you think about it and talk about it and it comes out effortlessly in the end.

Or try a couple of simple sentences and then add to it.

Yeah.

You know, I'm going for a walk to the beach. Then you can practice that and practice that and practice that. But it's not going to come up in conversation very much. Or even if it does, people are then going to say, "Well then what?" So I'm going to go for a walk to the beach. Why am I going to the beach? How am I going to get to the beach? What am I going to do when I get there? And so you can start to do that in context rather than just making up random conversation or just talking to people. And they'd look at you and go, "What are you talking about?" Have something to say and practice that.

Well that's one of those things that I talk about in terms of growing your islands. You should create islands of the things that define your life, whether it's family, work, hobbies, all of those things, and flesh those out first and foremost before you start worrying about really abstract vocab or subjects, you know, get those big islands of language sorted out and dealt with so that you can switch between them and feel comfortable and then sort of, you know, go out into the smaller ones and develop those as well.

And that's very similar to the skills that I'm teaching people in using a camera. And I remember talking to an AFL footballer years ago and asking him how he got so good with eye-hand coordination with an oval ball. And he said, "I had a ball in my hand from the age of five until the age of twenty. Everywhere I went, I had a ball and I was just throwing it hand to hand. I was bouncing it. I was dropping on the ground and picking it..."

It's must be something basketballers always do.

You watch kids playing basketball in the street or in the school...

Skateboarders.

Skateboarders, they've always got on with them.

You're not going to see it with tennis players.

No. Funnily enough, I've seen tennis players who walk around with a tennis racket and a ball and they're just bouncing the ball off a racket, sometimes off the strings, sometimes off the edge of the racket, sometimes they'll flip it around and hit it off the handle. And that's just practising the... Not the specific skills of the game, but it's just... In the case of the camera, just have the camera in your hand. And so you're doing things... This is getting a bit way off the topic of the news. It's about muscle memory. It's about automating things. And with language, it's you start to learn phrases and the phrase comes up rather than how do I construct a sentence by word, by word and then grammatically put it together. You just learn the phrasing and the clauses that make sense.

Before we get into the news, why do you think it is you've never learnt a language to fluency? Unless you've done it without me knowing.

No, I haven't. Yeah, well, I learnt... I did two languages at school and that's 45 years ago and I learnt enough conversational Spanish to last me for a four week holiday in South America. And most of it, it's just motivation. You've got to have a reason to do it.

I guess I'm asking you from your personal perspective, but also as an Australian, because it tends to be a pattern that we see here with quote unquote, European Australians. Not learning foreign languages.

And I think that is that it comes down to there has to be a reason to do it. You know, in the case of me learning Spanish was because we were going on holiday in South America. And so... And it was very low level conversational. Literally, you know, ordering food in a restaurant or asking directions or having a "Hello, how are you?" sort of conversation. But the motivation to do that was to enhance the quality of the holiday that we were having. For most Australians there's no reason to learn another language because 99 per cent of the people that they are going to encounter and want to have meaningful engagement with speak English as their first language.

And even if they don't, they probably speak English better than you will ever speak their language.

Exactly right. So I think there needs to be those triggers and the motivation. So if you're going to travel to a country that is, you know, got a different language. If you want to do business in a different country, you know, those sorts of things I think are going to be the triggers and that adds to the motivation to do it.

All right. Getting into the news.

News.

So what's been happening? We've had shitloads, bucketloads...

Pissloads

...Of rain. Yeah, it's been raining cats and dogs.

Yeah, that's an interesting expression, isn't it? I have no idea where that one comes from.

You don't know?

No.

I did that on the podcast.

Oh, did you? So what happened was...

Here you go , here's a confession. I didn't watch that podcast.

Listen to it.

Yeah, listen to it.

What happens is, apparently, and I don't know if it's a definite you know, we've studied this and it's definitely the case. But apparently what would happen is that back in in Britain, it would rain a lot in the 15, 16, 1700s up until today. But around that time, every time it had rained, especially, you know, a lot the streets would fill with water and dead cats and dogs would flow down the street as a result. And so I think the joke was that it rained so much dead cats and dogs fell from the sky, but they were already in the street because there was obviously, you know, it was much filthier, there was shed in the street from horses, dead animals, probably dead people, especially if you were around the time of Jack the Ripper.

Or the plague.

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, apparently that's where it comes from. That's the hypothesis.

You learn something every day. We should do this more often. Yeah, it certainly has been raining a lot, whether there are dead cats and dogs floating down the streets or not. But it is one of those things that... Out-of-season heavy rain is not rare in Australia. We do get a lot of summer rain, obviously the further north you go, the more tropical you are, then there's the wet season. We don't have summer and winter in northern Australia. Like most tropical areas, we have wet season and a dry season.

Where does that kind of begin? Is that the Tropic of Capricorn once you go past?

Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, a little bit south of there, even if you go to Brisbane, to Queensland. They have more of a wet season there..?

They have more of a sort of a... Until probably 5 or 10 years ago, they used to have more rain in what we would call summer than winter. But it's been so dry there in southern Queensland. But there's still a lot of rain in the north in the tropics. And obviously our summer, particularly late summer, is our cyclone season or the hurricane season, as it would be called in North America. Typhoon season in Asia or the monsoon season in southern Asia.

So it's all the same thing. It's just that seasonal heavy rain, heavy winds, extreme weather. But yet every 5, 10, 15 years, we'll have at least one major storm. But this one has been ridiculous.

It's been pretty big. It's all the way from what is it, south east Queensland all the way down to the border of Victoria.

Southern New South Wales.

We look at the weather map, the radar map of all the rain. And it's just like the huge storm.

And it sat there for two or three days. It didn't move across in the west to the east.

One of the biggest problems we have, right, is that quite often we're in drought. And then when it breaks, it's all of a sudden and we get bucket loads. And so the problem is that it's not sustained, right. You don't have a lot of rain over a long period of time in these periods. So you might think you might see the numbers and be like, holy crap. We've had hundreds of millimetres of rain, you know, tens of centimetres of rain just in a week. But the problem is that that's not anywhere near as good as the same amount of rain, but less frequently over a month because then it keeps the place wet, right. This comes and goes really quickly just flows into the ocean.

It doesn't sit in the soil. It just... Because the soil gets saturated. And then what happens is that it actually washes a lot of the soil away. So in addition to the problem of having fires in... Particularly in non forested areas where there're brushfires and grass fires is that they're killing off the plants that are binding the soil together. And then we have these huge dust storms as we had during the fire season that we had. And then as soon as you get rain, there's nothing holding the soil there. So it washes the soil away. So environmentally, it's a tragedy as well as... Floods affecting people in in built up areas where people have homes and businesses and farms and so on is bad enough. But when you're losing topsoil, you can't get that back.

Not quickly.

No, it's tens of thousands of years to break down the rocks into new soil.

You know, the craziest thing, though, I guess, is that the Nepean dam in Sydney is a 100% capacity.

And hasn't been for decades.

Yeah, exactly. So that tends to be one of the problems we have a lot of these dams dotted throughout at least the east coast of Australia collecting water that we use for drinking water or tap water. But quite often they tend to get pretty low. Right, especially during these droughts, sometimes even empty, I think from memory in Victoria. And but yeah, once we get out of the drought, quite often they fill all the way up.

And if you get more rain, all you can do is release it from the dam. It's just going to come over the wall.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The next story that I had was some of the stuff that's been going on in Antarctica.

So we had the hottest day on record...

Hottest recorded temperature registered ever. 65 Fahrenheit. About 2.5 degrees.

Was it... No, it was 18.3 Celsius at Esperanza, Argentina's meteorological agency did that down in the Antarctic. And we smashed the previous record, which was almost a degree lower. 17.5 Celsius in 2015, so it's going up and up. I know it's crazy. I can't imagine wearing a T-shirt in Antarctica. No, that was what I thought. I'm like, "I go outside when it's 18 degrees with a t-shirt."

Yeah, exactly.

And I guess beyond that, there's been a massive glacier shedding event that I saw on the Pine Island Glacier, which is... It's on that... What would you call the part that juts out from Antarctica that looks like a tentacle?

Antarctic Peninsula.

Yeah. So it's 300 square kilometres and it's just broken off in the last 10 days.

The biggest iceberg ever recorded.

I don't know about biggest ever, but there's one that's been... 11,000 square kilometres that came off in 2000 of the Ross Ice Shelf. But why is this a bad thing, dad? Seeing more of these large glaciers?

Well, there's the firstly, there's the... And this is the original problem that was identified with climate change and global warming was sea level rising. And that was partly about expansion of water, but also about melting of ice sheets.

And when you say ice sheets, it's not just the stuff over the top of the water, right?

It's not. It's glaciers over the continent and glaciers over Greenland and over the sea in the Arctic, because, of course, as you know, there's no land over the North Pole.

And hasn't that just started melting ice during summer?

So we're losing lots of ice. Now, obviously, from a generic point of view, you'd look at that and go, "Well, does it really matter if we get a bunch of ice breaks off a glacier and floats out to sea in a place where nobody lives?" Yeah, the effect of that is probably not going to be huge in global environmental context, but it's the indicator of what's... Why it's happening, which is the problem.

Well also the cascading effect, right. Because those ice caps actually reflect a shitload of light which prevents the earth from heating up more. And so if all of a sudden you would get rid of the ice on Greenland and Antarctica, you would have land that would then absorb light and more heat.

Yeah, it would heat up even more.

That probably won't happen for thousands of years at least. I think according to scientists, that'll be, you know, 5000 years before Antarctica completely melts at the rate that it's melting currently. But if it were, there are these two videos that I watched on YouTube by a guy... I'd forgotten his name, but he did these two videos. I'll try to remember to link them. What if Greenland melted and what if Antarctica melted? And it was a really interesting one showing the effects of what that would do to the rest of the world. But what blew my mind was, you know, we think of Greenland as being fucking massive. Although maps tend to over-exaggerate a ton.

We've got the rectangular projection there.

Yeah. So if Greenland melted, the sea level would rise six metres. And if Antarctica melted, it would be ten times that at 60 metres. So we'd be screwed. We'd be boned right here. Right here.

We're about 10 metres above sea level here.

So check those videos out.

We are at home here. Here, you're about four metres, three metres above sea level in this house.

I know.

Yeah, but there's a sand dune there that will last for about a month.

It's far out. But was this something you ever expected to hear about happening in your lifetime when you were younger? Thinking about Antarctica melting?

I think I've spoken about it previously. That first time I went to New Zealand was in the 1970s and going to visit the glaciers on the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand and, you know, drive in there, catch a bus or a drive in and you'd go to the visitor centre and you could walk a couple of hundred metres to the face of the glacier. And now you go to the visitor centre and they put you in a bus and you'd got to drive kilometres to get to the face of the glacier. So that's in a period of 40, 45 years where we've got this shrinking of glaciers in cool, temperate zones. So the same thing has happened, and it's been well documented photographically in, say, the Canadian Rockies, where famous glaciers that have been photographed, and they're tourist attractions and things almost don't exist anymore. When you go to the viewing point that people use 50 years ago, they just you know, there's nothing there. The glacier has shrunk back up the valley and it's disappeared. So you don't think of those things when for hundreds of years they were the same. And then all of a sudden in 30, 40, 50 years, these things have just completely disappeared.

Yeah, I saw, I think it was in Iceland, they had a funeral for a glacier recently.

Yes.

Because it had completely melted all the way back to where its source was and you know, there's nothing left. So, yeah, sad time, sad times. The next one, next story that I sort of came across was the National Carp Control Plan. I don't know... That was coming up about an issue... The issue that was in the news was the fact that there's 15 million dollars of funding for this plan but I don't think they've released the information about how it's going to happen to the public.

I certainly haven't seen it yet.

But the idea, which was interesting and I thought we could talk about carp and how they got to Australia was that they're going to release this virus, the herpes virus. What is it here? The Cyprinid herpesvirus 3. Yeah, the cyprinid herpesvirus 3. They're going to release into the waterways. I think we have four different kinds of carp that got to Australia from the 1850s to 70s. We don't really know when they got brought over here. I think the first record of someone buying them was 1907. But what's the biggest problem with carp in Australia?

Well there are a large river fish.

The gold goldfields on steroids.

Yeah. Large river fish brought over from Europe and Asia. And they out-compete native fish and they're very good at eating and growing quickly and they reproduce early in their lifespan and they keep reproducing and they live a long time. So there are certainly river ways now that, well, certainly 10 years ago, that the only fishy would ever catch in them would be carp, and people would say, "Alright, well it's a fish, but they're not really edible. Yes, you can eat them, but they don't taste very nice." And so even apart from just the environmental issue where you say all of our native species of fish are disappearing, from a recreational or commercial fishery, there's virtually nothing left.

One of the interesting things I found is that a lot of these rivers, like the Murray River, for example, where it's probably the closest place we'd go, that's a significant river system that's been affected by carp. They are incredibly muddy, cloudy, watered waterways. And that's not the natural state. They should be clear like the Yarra River you would see in Melbourne today, you know, back in the day before, probably industrialisation more so than the carp there, the river would've been clear, but now it's full of mud and silt and dirt. And the problem with the carp, I think, is that they suck and feed on the bottom, right. So they dig out everything. And I think, yeah, I was looking up some of the stats on them. So a female carp in its lifetime I think can produce between 80000 and 1.5 million eggs. And so the idea was that if you get rid of a thousand females, that's about a billion eggs out of the system. So I don't know what they're going to do in terms of releasing the virus, because it's kind of a temporary solution. Right. You kind of have to have more of a plan than just we're going to, you know, commit biological warfare on something because there'll be a small proportion that are immune to the virus.

I thought we could talk about rabbits in this as well.

And we yeah, we talked a little bit about it when we're talking about viruses a couple of weeks ago. But yes, when you're putting a disease into the environment to try and get rid of one or two or three... A few species, then clearly you've got to identify that it's only going to affect those species and is not going to have any sort of side effects on native species because it's sort of defeating the point really if it's going to wipe out the things you want to retain.

They kill all fish.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we get we can poison the rivers. That'll work perfectly well, but yeah. We'll never be able to use them again for anything.

Well we're doing a pretty good job of it at the moment. Just sucking all the water out.

Well yeah, that's a different story that we can talk about another time. So, but because you're putting a pathogenic disease into the system, it means that you're automatically going to have some animals that are resistant to it and you're lucky to have mutation of those viruses anyway. So they may become more effective or less effective over time. The chances that they're going to become less effective just by the natural evolution of the virus and also the resistance of the animals that are there.

And on a side note, this is why it's so important for doctors to understand evolutionary theory, right. Because... And this is one of those things that always blew my mind when you'd hear about a fundamentalist religious doctor who doesn't believe in science or biology or evolution, or at least doesn't consider it, and yet is a medical practitioner, because in order to understand how bacteria and viruses change, which are obviously a big issue if you're a doctor because people get sick from infection.

Exactly.

You need to understand how they mutate and how they evolve, right. And so that's why it's such a big a big problem when you don't pair those things together and think about biology and medicine. And that might have been the problem with the rabbits, right. We released this virus...

Well, myxomatosis was released decades ago and it worked very well. It killed a significant proportion of the rabbits, sort of 80, 90%.

Including my pet rabbit, Pete. I had a pet rabbit named Peter. We moved down here and the poor thing got myxomatosis and died.

But over time, that myxomatosis strain became less effective.

So now rabbits are at an all time high.

They are. But I... And there are other reasons for that, too. But the thing that I think a lot of population control biologists are now realising that if you're going to put those artificial, you know, disease based controls in that they are an initial hit, that then gives you an opportunity to have some different strategies that simply wouldn't work the volume of them. If you're talking about getting rid of hundreds of millions of carp out of the, say, the Murray-Darling Basin, the major river system in Australia, you simply couldn't do it by physical means. Yeah, but if you can knock off a significant proportion of them and stop the breeding at least for a few years, then it gives you the opportunity of taking some other actions, more likely to be effective.

Especially during a drought, right. You need these things to all kind of align to make life as easy as possible and to do as much damage as possible all at once. Why do you think we haven't come up with something to deal with the cane toads? I mean I haven't looked into this. Maybe we have, but they seem to be one of the worst in terms of numbers. I don't know if they're anywhere near as bad as rabbits in terms of impact to other species, but the cane toads, as you'll probably know, have spread all throughout Australia and there are billions in northern Australia.

Yeah, and look, there again, they are a biological control. Yeah. They were originally brought into Australia to control the cane beetle. The irony is that they don't eat cane beetles. So somebody made that mistake.

Well, they can't climb cane. The beetles are living at the top of a cane plant. But the frogs are at the bottom.

So and then... Because they had no natural predators, because they're also toxic, they're... All amphibians have got toxins in their skin. But some have much more than others.

Is that all of them? I didn't realise they all do.

All do, but most of them are so light on that you can't tell. But yeah, poison dart frogs, as they're called, the tiny little South American frogs that live in bromeliads in rainforests. They are those... Yeah, they're really bright colours, the most beautiful frogs in the world. But they're really bright colours because they're saying, piss off, you're going to die if you eat me.

So it's crazy in terms of evolution, those things, right, where you have species that evolve to be so conspicuous because it's a kind of fuck you to anyone coming out like, "Notice me, please notice me so that you don't eat me. Because if you eat me, you're screwed. I'm screwed, but you're also screwed." So it selects for animals being able to easily see those things right.

Some animals have already evolved, at least cultural evolution. Behavioural evolution in Australia in terms cane toads. There are birds now that will attack cane toads. But because the poison is only in their skin...

it's in the backs.

It's got these glands, but they now turn the cane toads over and attack the belly skin. But don't eat the skin. They only eat the organs inside.

When they showed recently that water rats, rikali, the native water rats were doing the same thing, eating them from below. But it'll be interesting to see how Australia adapts, especially with a lot of these animals because you would imagine that they're effectively here for good. And you know, in thinking about the lifetime of us individually or even as a species, they're probably going to be in the state that they're in. But if you think out hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, these guys are going to evolve into different species. One of the things I would love to see as an evolutionary biologist is the world a few million years from now...

And see what's happened to the existing ecosystems...

Well, you're going to have so many different replicates of the same animals, effectively instantly during a period of time in the world where they've been put everywhere, like in a few hundred years. Yeah, well, like cats and dogs and cows and sheep. All of a sudden if you were to remove humans tomorrow, they're everywhere in the world and they're going to evolve into different things or go extinct. And so, you know, we're going to end up with a few tens of millions of years cats that can fly, cats that can glide. And what are they going to turn into? So, you know, Are there going to be sheep that are carnivores? Well, they're not going to be carnivores, but they're going to be meat eating sheep, you know, that sort of thing. So, yeah, it's interesting. Were rabbits and cane toads a significant threat when you are young?

Rabbits about rabbits certainly have been. The biggest plague of rabbits that we saw in my lifetime occurred in about the 1960s. But that was small in comparison with the plagues that had happened in the late 19th century and again in the 1920s.

And that was the reason for building the rabbit proof fence around WA?

Yeah, that goes around...

To prevent them spraying the crop fields there, right?

Yeah. So and those sort of things were huge. So it was that was well-known. Cane toads: by the time I was studying biology at high school, the problem with cane toads was already understood.

So that was the late 60s, early 70s?

Late 70s. Well early 70s at high school. Yeah. So that was again one of those classic stories of biological control gone wrong. Yep. Before that it was taught as biological control. Here's what something that, you know, an example of biological control.

But the fucked thing about that was with the cane toads is that this guy on a farm decided he was going to use them. And so he went to Hawaii, filled a briefcase with 105 of them and brought them back to Australia and just let them go.

Yeah, it was it wasn't like there was a research scientist behind the thing.

Oh, that's it. And that would have been happening as well earlier on with things like rabbits and foxes and everything else and was released.

Rabbits... And there was two or three goes at introducing rabbits into Australia. But the successful introduction, if you want to call it that, the one that actually had the population viable and took off occurred in the middle of the 19th century, in Whittlesea, in Victoria. You know, an hour's drive away from here. And that was to in order to have a hunting species, you know, because people like shooting rabbits.

And for food.

Well, they like shooting rabbits for food in Europe. But it became a sport and these were wealthy people who decided they wanted to have it for sport.

And it was the same with the fox, I take it. So there would have been those two reasons. You either introduced the animal because it is livestock or can be eaten and you want them around, but you don't want to have to actually pay for the care and upkeep of them yourself, so you just release them into the wild or you release them because they're going to be fun to hunt down and kill like in the case of the fox.

Right. Yeah. Look, the other thing with rabbits, too, is that large birds of prey, in particular wedge-tailed eagles, would have controlled rabbits quite successfully in the natural order of things in Australia. But farmers have always had the assumption that wedge-tailed eagles kill lambs and so they shoot wedge-tailed eagles. And there's no documented evidence that wedge-tailed eagles will catch and eat a healthy lamb.

This is one of those chicken and egg kind of things, right?

You see them eating lambs, but they're either dead or sick and dying in the first place.

The farmers probably thinking, you know, chicken or egg, which one happened first? Did the lamb die and then the eagle came down or did the eagle kill it?

But so yeah, we've had over 100 years from the time that sheep were introduced and then rabbits were introduced into Australia a few decades later, sheep farmers decided they wanted to get rid of eagles. And the irony is that they wouldn't have had a rabbit problem if they'd left the Eagles there because they are probably the biggest environmental disaster, certainly from an agricultural point of view.

Rabbits are. Yeah, I remember doing an episode on them, I think, recently, at least touching on it where they're out of the top 10... Well, out of all introduce species, they're the worst because they were affecting something like 325 different Australian species negatively. Which blew my mind because I was assuming it was going to be something like the cane toad because it's preyed upon by a bunch of species in the north. But I think the rabbits probably spread further throughout the continent and affects a heap of plant species as well as other native species that it out-competes.

Out-competes. And because their burrows, they destroy the ground. So they're the biggest problem in Australia in terms of erosion of agricultural land, which is... Agricultural land is always going to be on the border of problems with erosion because we've taken away a lot of the big trees, historically. Now most modern agricultural farmers these days are keeping trees at least around their property. They're not just felling everything so that they're binding some of the soil, but when rabbits get in there, they are destroying the soil as well and just creating, you know, they dig big holes and then they sink in and collapse and that soil then washes or blows away.

Switching gears. Do you think these bushfires are going to have been a significant cause of extinction in the near future of Australian animals? Because I saw an article recently saying they think 113 different species of animals, just animals are now further threatened.

These were already threatened.

If not critically.

Whether they are... Depending on where you put them in that threatened scale. "Threatened" in itself doesn't have a biological meaning. It's just a collective...

It's relative, right, to what the previous distribution was.

Yeah, those sort of things. So, yes, it certainly is because... Particularly when we've got some species that are already at the edge in terms of their habitat destruction.

Do you have some good examples? Can you name any?

So there's some... Pygmy possums in the in the Alpine areas, for instance.

Why are they threatened?

Well, they're threatened mostly because the environment that they live in is now shrinking. So they end up with small islands.

Well, the problem here is that there's nowhere else for them to go.

That's right.

they're at the top of hills, at the top of the mountains. And so if the climate warms and there's less snow, they can't really go further up if the mountain stops.

But it's also that their habitat is now reduced to little islands with lots of uninhabitable areas between them for those animals.

You want to talk about why they... Just to keep going on the pygmy possums, what is their habitat? Why is it so interesting? And what do they eat? Because they're kind of a cool species.

Yeah, they are. They're mostly living in just the ground dwelling or in little tunnels and things.

What are they called? Rock screes or something?

Rock screes, yeah. And so they live in amongst alpine rock areas. Some of the mountain pygmy possum does.

Yeah.

And so it needs enough of those areas to be able to... They're quite mobile. They move around a lot because they're eating insects mostly.

I don't think they hibernate. So I think the reason they live in these screes is because they get a blanket of snow above the screes during winter and they can maintain their body temperatures and everything underneath in these rocky areas where there's gaps in everything in. The cool thing is that we have a migration of Bogong moths every year during winter to those areas where... The moths are these huge moths full of fat that the indigenous people used to love and eat, right, because it was one of their own only sources of fat. And they live in the rocks screes too. And the possum just goes bananas during winter binging on them.

Yeah, they're too small to hibernate. Yeah. Because you know, just because the small size of the means that their body surface area is really quite large.

They can't store up enough fat.

Yeah. They can't store much fat so they're just going to keep losing heat even if they reduce their activity quite a lot. Yeah. Just keep reducing, losing heat and die. So they have to be active and eat. And so there's... We have, as humans, we've already created problems for them because we've cleared areas in alpine regions. We've got roads going up through them.

Ski runs.

Ski runs. Ironically, we've also done some really cute things of when new roads are getting built in areas where there are mountain pygmy possums, the road builders are actually putting rocks scree tunnels under the road. So instead of just filling them with soil and everything else, they're putting these... Effectively a concrete pipe but filling with rock scree so that it's maintaining pathways between two sides of the road.

So they don't have to cut across the road.

So they don't have to travel across the road, and in winter they simply couldn't because they would die. They'd come out and cross 20, 30, 40 metres of frozen snow.

I guess that they would just hit a wall and be like, "Alright, I guess that's the end."

Yeah, exactly. In fact, they probably wouldn't even try, is what it amounts to.

Yeah.

And they'd run out of food in their spot and they'd go, so... But yeah. When you have fires through those areas and you're wiping out populations of them and breaking up more habitat, then even if the total population of them is large enough with enough genetic diversity to be maintained and survive, the fact that they're broken up into tiny little pockets means you've effectively got tiny little populations, which just are not enough to be able to survive. Sometimes you might end up with one or two males in an area, and if they can't find females because there's not enough of them around, then they're gone.

So yeah, it's sad. I think the Corroboree Frog was another one. There are a whole bunch of these other mammals, different rats. I'm sure there's a bunch of native rats that are in trouble, like the Hastings River mouse, which is one I studied up in the East Coast near Brisbane and Sydney.

But there was some really cute stories too of dropping food. So I think for the mountain pygmy possum, they were dropping biscuits that they'd made from Bogong moths.

That's right, Bogong biscuits.

They smashed up Bogong moths and turn them into biscuits and dropped them for the animals to eat. And also carrots and sweet potatoes for wallabies, rock wallabies in certain areas, too, where they, again, sort of like the pygmy possum, are restricted to areas that are rocky because that's where they live and they nest and they move around and everything. And so there they've got rocky islands in amongst the bush and they obviously had no food when the fires went straight through. So it'll be interesting to see what's going to happen in the near future. I just hope the government gives enough funding to try and help these animals because it is a big sort of smack in the face of like we could lose, you know, potentially 113 species if we don't do something to at least avoid this stuff in the future or help them bounce back or help them prevent, you know, suffering in the future.

And in the end, a lot of that... The long term requirement is just rehabilitation of habitat, which isn't the immediate need, the immediate need is retain the population, so feed them, artificially create places of shelter and so on.

It doesn't matter if you bring the habitat back but they're gone.

Yeah, exactly.

So far out. The next story is Hosier Lane.

Yes.

What did you make of that? And do you want to tell the story?

To give a bit of background, Melbourne is... Melbourne City, the central business district, or the downtown Melbourne for our American friends is well-known for its laneways and arcades. A lot of those arcades were built 130 years ago, 140 years ago. So... And the architecture inside them, even the buildings and the streets have been pulled down and replaced with skyscrapers and things. A lot of those arcades are still in their early colonial architecture is still retained. But the laneways, even the sort of laneways that are just brick walls with a cobbled basalt road running down the middle have been adopted by street artists over the last 10 or 20 years. And there's a lot of them that are now famous tourist places that people come to. And Hosier Lane is probably the most famous where people come just to look at the street art.

I thought I saw that, I think, really pick up during my time there at Melbourne Uni. I mean, I don't know what it was like when you were younger studying in Melbourne.

It sort of started about 30 or 40 years ago, but it was mostly, you know, what I would not define as street art. It was just tagging type graffiti and slogans and those sort of things.

I think social media really made it take off in terms of its presence amongst tourists especially, because you would always see anyone who comes to Melbourne seemed to go to a number of key places. I've forgotten... Where is it? At Brighton Beach or whatever to get the shot in front of that little bathing box the beach that's the Australian flag, but also in Hosier Lane where you can see all the graffiti going down.

Yeah. And so last week a bunch of people went through with spray paint, big spray guns, not just...

Well, they had extinguishers full of paint.

Yeah, and just sprayed over.

Everything.

Yeah, most of it is now covered over.

I didn't realise the rules there were that anyone can go in and paint anything at any time, over the top of anything.

They weren't breaking any law.

Yeah.

And it had been one of those sort of... Just an established practice by street artists that...

Unspoken rule.

... You don't paint over another artist's work, but Hosier Lane became one of those things where it was almost just accepted that you would so that it would just be continually evolving. It would always be new.

It just probably be a dick move to do it. If the person painted that thing the day before or, you know, you just...

Exactly.

Look for the oldest piece, look for the oldest piece and paint over that first.

And given that we've just been talking about bushfires and things, a lot of the very recent art that was going up was art in sort of response to the bushfires. So people painting things of emergency service people, firefighters and state emergency services and things out, you know, putting out bushfires and rescuing people. And there was a lot of that sort of stuff that went up in the last few weeks, all of which has just been covered over. So technically, they've done nothing illegal. They haven't even broken the accepted practice, except that we've now just got a wall of bland paint and...

Well, that was my... My initial thing was like, "Fuck, these guys just destroyed everything," thinking it was illegal and that you needed a permit or something to paint on these walls. But then the more I read into it, it seemed like it was... It's hard. I think the police are trying to decide is this vandalism or is it art? And that comes back to the "What's art?" Yeah. And so is it something really clever where they've just refreshed it? And even though temporarily they've made the place look like a shit heap, you're going to have new art go up almost instantly because now it's effectively... Okay, well it's, you know, you've got a carte blanche to just do whatever you want to go in the lane over the top of anything.

And look there's a there's a few people, I don't know whether it's the people who are responsible and if they were responsible they're probably not going to identify themselves as such. Yeah, but there's a few people who've been out there saying, well you know this is no different from all the rubbish where everybody every two weeks is painting over somebody else's artwork and you know, they're painting rubbish. It's not art anymore, blah, blah, blah. And that then becomes an argument about what's art. Yeah. You like it? I don't like it.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, right?

So, yeah, but it is a shame when you get that sort of thing happening when... It's a tourist attraction and you can imagine people...

You'd be bummed out if you arrived the day after...

If you had an hour in Melbourne to walk around the streets. And the one thing you want to see is some street art. And you go to the most famous location there and all you see is effectively just some blank walls.

Well, it'd be the same if everyone had just washed the walls.

And look, that happens as well. Ah. I've been to Washington DC twice in the United States over the last few years and the twice that I've been near the Washington Monument has had scaffolding all over it because there was an earthquake there and had cracks in it and it took them five years to mend it. Yeah, and I went there twice during that five year period. So firstly, you couldn't go up the Washington Monument, which is a tourist thing to do. And secondly, you couldn't even take a good photograph of the mall there because you had the Washington Monument was just a great big pile of scaffolding. So that sort of stuff happens all the time. But the beauty of some of those things now in terms of iconic tourist things to go and see and photograph are often when that sort of official reconstruction work or cleaning or whatever is going on. I've seen a lot of places around the world now that put up the scaffolding, but then they put this sheeting over it and they actually have paintings of the original thing on that sheeting. So in the broader landscape, it still looks like it's there, which is pretty cute.

Did you see the stuff in Warrnambool with the wombat sculpture that went up? The wombat painting? I've got it up here on the screen. That was a really funny story because... And it showed a lot of Australians have personality because someone had just, I think, painted it with chalk. I'm not even sure they painted it with paint. And they put this big mural up just under a bridge somewhere. I think they might have done a few of these. And the funny thing was that the guy who lived across the road saw it and he worked for the Warrnambool City Council removing graffiti. And he did the very opposite of what he usually does, instead this time, I think going up with acrylic clear coat or something and preserving it on the wall so that no one could remove it. But then I think that the council and decided to keep it. And the artist was like, "Oh, cheers." And he sort of got famous in the media. So that was a cute story.

Yeah. Yeah, it was sort of... It's one of those things because there's a lot of... And again, and that's the same in many cities. But again, Melbourne is famous for not just Wall Bay Street art, but there's lot of chalk and pastel artists who are just doing sidewalk or pavement painting.

Yeah.

And they're things that are going to last a few days.

And that's the point, right.

And that's what they're doing is it's ephemeral art, that they're doing something that the entertainment value... They're effectively busking. The entertainment value is where they're doing a live piece of artwork. And people can drop a few dollars into the hat or whatever, and you can watch them doing it. And when it washes away, it doesn't matter because they'll be somebody there in a month's time who'll do something else.

Well, I think some of those guys do it on paper where they can take it to and from their location. Just roll it out. And they've, you know, "Here's one I prepared earlier," and then they start filling in the last little bit and it's like, "Oh, look what I've done today! Drop some dollars!"

The last story I had here, before we smash it out and finish up, was the cyclone Uesi, I think it said, "Uesi." U-E-S-I.

I know, a name that you can pronounce.

So that's going over the top of Lord Howe Island, I think this morning. Was it this morning at 5:00 a.m. or is it tomorrow morning?

I can't remember. It was predicted to be some time within this 24 hour period.

Yeah. So that's meant to be 14 metre high waves, 150 mil of rain, 150kmph gale force winds, won't hit the north shore of New South Wales, but there'll be large swells, high tides, strong winds causing significant erosion of the beaches they're worried about. But there'll be a large inland trough causing a lot of rainfall. We went to Lord Howe Island. It was a beautiful place. Have you seen cyclones that far south before?

No.

So is that the first time we've seen one go that far south? Because that's almost parallel to Sydney, right?

Yeah, it is. We see... Well, just north of Sydney, but we see the remnants, the sort of outside tail, if you like, of cyclones affecting the weather. So it's not cyclonic weather that's hitting the coast of New South Wales. Yeah, but we see those, as you've just described it, with super high tides, the winds and the large waves and a lot of rain as well.

I'm used to seeing them smash places like Cairns, or Townsville... Darwin.

The cyclones are hitting northern Queensland. But yeah, cyclone in those latitudes is pretty weird. And the fear in there, certainly from my perspective, the fear in Lord Howe Island is that lagoon in the main popular beach.

Yeah.

Where the population is. That lagoon is facing west.

Yeah.

So it's going to get the brunt of it. So what effect it has on that lagoon is going to be interesting, whether it just... Because it's about the southern most bit of coral.

Yeah. It's a coral reef.

Yeah. And it could get destroyed and if it does we may never get it back. Well the problem with Lord Howe Island is, as we found out when we went there, is that so many of the species there are endemic, right. Only found there, especially the bird species and a lot of which had been wiped out, hunted by us to extinction, but not it's a tiny island. But it's a tiny island, so it wouldn't be too hard to just destroy...

Just to wipe them out.

Yeah, exactly. Anyway, I guess that's about it. But thanks for joining me again.

Always good Pete.

It's good to hear the goss. Yeah. See you next time.

See you.

Bye.

Quickly and accurately convert audio to text with Sonix.

Sonix uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence to convert your mp3 files to text.

Thousands of researchers and podcasters use Sonix to automatically transcribe their audio files (*.mp3). Easily convert your mp3 file to text or docx to make your media content more accessible to listeners.

Sonix is the best online audio transcription software in 2020—it's fast, easy, and affordable.

If you are looking for a great way to convert your mp3 to text, try Sonix today.