Transcript of AE 1316 - The Goss: Bird Photography and Favourite TV Shows

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.

Pete!

Photography.

Yes.

You've done like a crazy year of hunting birds.

I have. Yeah.

Gotta catch em all.

Gotta catch em all. Yeah, Pokemon.

That's it. It's almost like that. I remember getting into..

It's exactly the same!

Yeah, except you just don't get to keep them as slave monsters you get to fight.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's not quite as competitive either, but.

Well, it depends, I imagine.

Well, yeah. The big year stuff. The Australian big years are not quite. I'll explain what that means in a minute. But they're not quite like the American big years that there seems to be a group of people every year. Sometimes it's the same people, but other times the odd people drop in who just say, I'm going to spend a year and try and see, not necessarily photograph, but see as many species of birds in North America as possible.

How do you ever trust people who say we're just..

Oh, just just take my word for it. I'm just going to go around and say, oh, I saw every species. Like, how do you..

How do you know they actually saw it?

One is, there are people who just say you didn't see it if you didn't photograph it.

That's. That would be me.

Yeah.

I'd be like pics or it didn't happen.

That's. So that's one collection. But, but the subset of that is the people who it has to be an authenticated sighting. So.

You'd have witnesses..

There had to have been. Yeah. Basically there had to have been somebody else there who saw it at the same time.

Yeah. Okay.

Umm..

Then what, do you document their name and their contact details?

But, yeah, people will be recording this stuff, and it's actually easier to do that now in the universe of online. So there are online databases where people go out and record. If they go on a, you know, birdwatching day, they'll record every species they saw everywhere they saw them. And so if I claim to have seen a bird in a location, it's very easy to look at that and go, who else was there that day? And did they record the same species?

Do you often get birds where you see them in certain locations? And it would be the kind of thing where if someone else read it on paper, they'd be like..

Okay, fuck off.

Bullshit. Ahh, occasionally.

Because I remember that duck that we saw at, um..

The tufted duck?

Yeah, we saw it..

Tufty..

Werribee, right?

Yeah.

And it's from Japan? Is that where it was from?

It's Europe.

Was it? But it- had it come through Japan?..

Well, it would, it would have, it would have come down through South East Asia.

Yeah. 'Cause I remember that. And you were, you were like, we've got to go to the sewage plant! The sewage plant! I'm like, Okay.

Okay.

I mean, You son of a bitch. And then Dylan, Let's do it.

Yeah.

And so we're out there driving around..

I remember, I remember driving around and you're, you're going because this is the sewage plant. The western treatment plant, as it is officially known, um, is the treatment plant for about between a third and half of Melbourne. So it's huge.

This is where all the sewage goes..

It's like 10% of the area of the suburbs of Melbourne. Um, and and it's, but it's one of the world's great birding sites.

Yeah.

And so..

Please don't eat the birds.

Yeah. Well, exactly. But you. So it's huge. You can you can drive around it all day and never go across the same road again. But when we were driving around, we got there and driving around and you said, How are we ever going to know where it is? And I just said, Trust me, we'll know. And sure enough, we got to a place and you went, Oh, you mean that crowd of 200 people over there? I said, That's where it'll be!

Yeah.

But it was this, wasn't it the first time it had ever been seen..

First time sighted in Australia.

Which is weird, you just wouldn't expect.

And look, there are still some people who are claiming that it was actually a domestic escape.

It was a mirage!

No. Well, there will be some people in Australia who keep tufted ducks.

Really?

Yeah. Possibly.

Possibly. So there's no definitive..

No, no. And there..

They came from this place. This is where there's one missing.

Yeah, yeah.

Little tufted, little Tufty went missing from Werribee South.

Yeah. That's it. Oh, no. It's definitely one from Europe.

Yeah. No. So. But we do get those vagrants and they're always fun. But yeah. So back to the the challenge I had. And it was it was one of those ones where I thought I've got to try. And yeah, putting the thing in the broadest possible context. Um, I ended up with my third round of heart surgery at the end of last year, and one of the challenges with that is become more active, lose a bit of weight and or lose a lot of weight. Uh, but bit is a start.

Where is it? Where'd it go?

Where is it? Where did it go? If only it were that easy!

It's in my butt.

Yeah, exactly. Um, and and so I thought, all right, what's going to motivate me to just to get out and walk more? And so I gave myself a challenge on the 31st of December. I thought, well, next year's a leap year. Why don't I just see if I can photograph 366 species of birds in the year for no other reason that there are 366 days in a leap year. Um, and as a few of my friends said, well, you could have chosen any other year and it would have been easier.

Why don't you just try and do 366 in a normal year?

Yeah, exactly.

Take it to the next level. That's next year..

It's just something to do.

That's next year.

And, and any more than 300, without travelling a lot in Australia, is a challenge. Um..

Why is that?

Well, there just aren't that many species of birds. There's only..

In any specific location..

In any specific location. There's, in a good year, you people would could see 300 species of birds in Victoria.

Okay. So that depends on migration..

No, bit of migration and stuff. But yeah, there are something in the order of 450 species of birds that have been recorded in Victoria, ever.

Yeah. Okay.

Um, which means that a lot don't actually live..

Lot of those are migratory. A lot of them are vagrants. Some of them are the one offs, like the tufted duck. You know, if I had tufted duck on the list to see, I'd probably never going to see another one in my life.

Yeah..

The irony is, I've seen lots of tufted ducks on ponds in England.

Yeah. But.

Um.

Yeah. That must be so weird. I see these things all the time. People going..

Oh, it's a life- it's a life time for me. And I go, well, I saw a hundred of those.

Yeah, two years ago. Where you saw them?

Exactly. So it's an Australian lifer. Um, so, yeah, I set that challenge up. Um, assuming that if I got 300, I'd be happy. Um, but 366 was the challenge. Now we're halfway through December, and I'm at.

53. Yeah.

301.

Yeah, 301!

Yeah. So I'm unlikely to. And I've had a couple of trips that I've cancelled in the last couple of weeks, um..

Or got cancelled on.

Weather, and. Yeah, and so on. So and then, you know, the rest of December is a write off. I might get one more trip up to northern Victoria and get maybe a handful, 5 or 6 new species, but um..

Just go to um WA or something..

And somebody said, oh, look, you know, you could you could knock that off easily. I said, I could.

Go to Kakadu!

I could. I could fly to North Queensland for a couple of weeks and fly to Northern Territory for a couple of weeks, or go to south west Western Australia. If I did all three of those, I'd knock off another 100 species easily.

Yeah.

But that would cost me $10,000. And I'd spend a month from home!

And I'd, yeah.

And divorce!

Probably gain weight from all the food and everything..

Yeah, but the divorce would be a lot more expensive than the flights. So.

That's not bad, though. 300.

Yeah, but it's been fun. And, um, and some of it was, you know, it's one of those silly ones where I got a hundred in a couple of weeks at the beginning, the middle of January..

I'm sure that's how it goes, though, right?..

But I could have done 100 in a day.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

You're just like, bang, bang, bang.

If I've just driven to 4 or 5 of the hotspots.

Are these native only?

No. Just birds.

Anything?

Yeah.

Just go to the zoo!

Technically. Yeah. No, technically, that wild populations of birds.

But there's some at the zoo that'll be, the wild..

Oh. There are! Yeah. I actually, I have been to the zoo this year, but I didn't, I didn't photograph any wild birds there. But you can. There's ducks, in particular, during the duck hunting season. The zoo's a great place to go for ducks.

Yeah.

Because they all leave the duck ponds that have been where they've been shot at. Come down to Werribee, the sewage farm and the zoo.

There must be some weird spots, right, that photographers would know about where you wouldn't expect. Like the sewage farm. I never would have. I don't know, when you told me that. Because I remember you had the keys to the place and you would go four wheel driving up there. And I remember, like, how did you get the keys to the sewage plant? Why would you go there? It's a shithole. Literally.

It literally is. In fact, no, it's lots of shithole..

Many shitholes. Yeah. So I guess to explain it to people, it's a whole bunch of different ponds, right? Or dams?

Yeah..

Full of water.

The part that you've got access to, the bird watching, you know, route that you can drive around that we have access to is not the actual sewage plant itself. It's the overflow ponds.

That still smells like shit.

Well, it doesn't smell too bad, but it's the. Effectively, it's the water overflow from the sewerage after it's been treated and done. And so they just let it. They're sitting in settlement ponds for a long time before that water eventually goes out into Port Phillip Bay.

As, so it's done in order to prevent obviously polluting the hell out of the bay. Yeah. Because you would just end up with what algal blooms..

The water just passes through a series of drainage ponds until it ends up out in Port Phillip Bay. But they manage the levels in these ponds so that they can leave water in one for a year.

Yeah.

Or unless it's, you know, we get a huge amount of rain and they start to flood, then they've got to..

Let it out.

... water into the lower ponds and things but..

But yeah, that blew my mind. And then I went there and was like, oh okay. I get it.

Yeah.

It's just so much wildlife there in terms of.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

And reptiles as well. Snakes in particular.

Yeah. Well, that wouldn't surprise me if there's lots of birds and you've got fish and frogs and all sorts of stuff.

Tiger snakes everywhere.

Yeah, great. But yeah. What was the thing that blew my mind was that they had brolgas there, didn't they?

Yeah.

And I always saw these, like, these are like storks. The equivalent of storks in Australia, right. These..

Well, they're cranes.

These birds with long legs.

They're tall. They're about a metre 20 tall.

Yeah, yeah. And I thought I always thought of those birds as being northern Australian, like kakadu. And..

Well that's where the big populations are.

Yeah. But they're, they're down here.

But they used to be, you know, allegedly, you know, 200 years ago.

Yeah.

Um, there were tens of thousands of them across Victoria.

Really? Good grief. They're just easy to shoot.

But. But no, but we've turned a lot of wetlands into farmland over there..

Ah, so we didn't actually eat them.

No.

Because we did that with the swans, didn't we? We just unleashed on them, didn't we?

Yeah.

Because we had Swan Bay right here. And you go there. I mean, it's it's probably recovering a bit. There's loads of black swans that you'll see there from time to time, depending on which part. But apparently back in the day, there were millions of them.

Yes.

And the indigenous people would just go to town.

According to, you know, records that were written by early settlers, early European settlers in around Melbourne. Mhm. Um, the whole part south of the Yarra, which is now the, you know, South Melbourne, Port Melbourne, Albert Park area was just swamp.

Yeah.

And, and people said it was the Kakadu of the South.

Wow.

That's gone. Yeah. But as soon as we, as soon as few Europeans started to, to settle in the area..

Especially around the river. Yeah.

They just drained all that. And they wanted to manage the water flow in the river.

Yeah.

So that it would be as navigable because the Yarra wasn't navigable.

Well, it used to be clear. Had platypus.

Yeah.

You know, had all these amazing animals.

But you couldn't. There was a huge, um, sort of cascading waterfall in the right, which is now right in the middle of the city.

Ah okay.

And so that all got blown up.

Yeah.

Um, so that you could actually pass boats up the Yarra into and past the city.

I would kill to have seen what it would have looked like prior to European colonisation, or at least initially, before it had been impacted significantly by Westerners living right there. And in particular, sorry, what I would kill for is to see what it was like when there was a land bridge between Victoria and Tasmania.

Oh yeah, the Bass Strait.

Good God, when the Yarra River went all the way through Port Phillip Bay as a, I guess, a grassy area.

Yeah.

And there used to be loads of kangaroos that lived there, apparently. And you know. Yeah.

Well, that's Port Phillip Bay, or what we now call Port Phillip Bay, was just flood plain.

Yeah, yeah. And they went through The Heads.

Yeah.

And then I imagine it went to the east, probably off into the, I presume the water somewhere.

I actually don't know.

Yeah. Would it have gone west or east?

I would think west.

It wouldn't have gone into Tasmania. There's probably if you can look at a map you would probably see where it drained out.

Oh yeah. Yeah. You can look at the oceanographic map. There'll be, the channel will still be there.

But I would love to have seen it. And I always wonder, like, what were the indigenous people doing? Did they migrate from Victoria to Tasmania or were they just permanently..

Ah they were living seasonally.

Yeah.

Moving up and down.

Apparently they were. What was the, um, name of that megafauna species? That was like a huge wombat.

Diprotodon.

Diprotodon. Apparently there were loads of them living on those plains between Victoria and Tasmania. And, um, I think I wrote a short story that was included in one of the Aussie English courses about this. I'm not sure if I did or not, but where it was like thinking about what it would have been like as the indigenous people who went there to hunt Diprotodon, um, that were migratory animals when the land bridge was slowly disappearing, and you wonder, how quickly would it have been? Would they have had stories from their ancestors, even their grandparents, you know, people that they'd met in their lives saying, there used to be so many more or, you know, the land bridge? It used to be so much wider here. There used to be so much more land.

Yeah.

You know, and for some reason now there's way less.

You know, from memory in my geological training was in the 70s. So that's a long time ago to remember. But from memory it was about a thousand years.

Okay.

That it took from the full land bridge to..

Nothing.

Bass Strait.

Yeah. Wow. Okay. So 50m effectively, right. Because that's about how deep it gets.

Yeah.

So about 50m..

50 to 100m.

Yeah. Of um of rising sea level. Yeah. But yeah, those sorts of events I always when I look back on, on history, I always wish that I could see what it was like firsthand. Did people notice? Did they not notice? Were there stories that they heard? Because you hear about these stories all the time that indigenous people have handed down for thousands upon thousands of years, that then get later discovered to have been accurate?

Yeah.

Like there was one. There's one story in Australia about, um, I think they found a certain type of palm or tree in the middle of the desert somewhere, and they're like scientists or, you know, Westerners were like, how the hell did it get here? And there was a story about it being taken as seeds from a certain location to there. And I think they when they did the studies on it, they found this is pretty accurate. This sounds like, you know, it's pretty exact. And they dated it to like 5000 years ago. And you're like, it's mind blowing that a story can have been handed down for that long and still be accurate, because you imagine Chinese Whispers, which is this game you can play where you have people in a circle and someone has to say something and one person's ear and they pass it on, and the last person has to say it, and you got to see if it's the equivalent of what was originally said. Yeah. And that always when we play that game as kids that always used to change.

Oh you get to the fourth person and it's gone.

Yeah. And so it always blows my mind when you hear about these sorts of stories that are handed down that are actually relatively accurate even after many generations.

And obviously there are a lot of those sort of things where maybe not thousands of years, but certainly multiple generations, like hundreds of years.

Yeah.

Where that sort of oral history will occur. But there's also likely to be, um, myths about things.

Well, that's what the Yowie is meant to be. The Diprotodon or something, right. The yowies. The mythical creatures.

Yeah. Like that. That one of the. I think it's Palm Valley in, um, just outside Alice Springs.

Possibly. Yeah.

But it might be that, you know, the local people there, the indigenous people there went. People carried them here?

Yeah.

Thousands of years ago. And then that became the story.

Yeah.

And somebody just made that up as a likely explanation.

Yeah. Yeah.

And because those, um, small groups of indigenous people used to trade and migrate a lot between areas, they would have known not necessarily from first hand experience, but they would have known that those trees occur thousand kilometres away, a long way away, and said, well, somebody brought them here.

Yeah.

And then that became, you know, oh, you know, great great great uncle Bill did it, you know.

Yeah. Well, and that would be the killer thing to be able to know about a lot of these things. Is that, is it just by chance that someone worked out that that must be the logical explanation?

Yeah.

Or is it that it was the actual original story that is the ancestor of the story that's told today, that it is a continued, you know, sharing of stories? My cat is like sniffing dad's neck.

She's leaning up on the back of my head.

They are never as affectionate as they are just before feeding time.

I ain't licking my ear! What are you doing?

Every calorie counts.

I know! Lick the salt off my, silly.

Yeah, it's. Do you ever get. I don't know. I don't know if you would say nostalgic. My cat's really giving dad some cuddles.

Yeah.

Um, but I've been watching Time Team recently. I've talked to you about this a few times. Yeah, I mentioned it today. Time Team is a show from the UK that is about archaeology that they do effectively through throughout the UK. They've been to other places around the world to do sort of special one offs where they've been invited, but quite often it's a team of academics and, you know, archaeologists, workers, and they have three days over a weekend, I imagine, to dig up a certain location and try and get as much information as possible. And so they quite often get invited to small towns or say, someone's bought a small castle.

Somebody thinks there was a Roman palace here.

Let's find out. Is it true? And it's cool because they use a lot of, um, different ways of looking at the land as well as actually obviously digging it up. They use like geophysics. So they have these devices that use like magnetics and, um, radar and stuff to try and penetrate the ground to look under it. And they get images to look at other patterns here. They can get photos from the air looking at crop patterns, you know, um, and they can have someone walk around and just get a load of..

The landscape archaeologist. He's amazing.

Yeah, well, they just..

He just goes and stands on a hill and says, No, it would have been over there. That's..

Yeah, this makes no sense that they would totally have put it here.

Yeah.

And then they obviously have the people digging up the ground. But the stuff that really tickles my fancy watching this show, and it's been around since the 90s. Um, you guys used to watch it when I was younger.

Yeah.

I love the Roman era and earlier. I don't know why I haven't really thought too deeply about it. I don't know if it's just that Rome seems to be such an inherently interesting period of time. And the technology they had, the archaeology related to it, the fact that there was always like warriors, like centurions and all this sort of stuff.

Partly it's, um, I agree with you. I think the Roman stuff is really interesting, but a lot of it is relative wealth, that the Romans were wealthy.

So they had a lot of stuff, so that they could leave, yeah.

And therefore, and not only that, they were very good builders and not just builders of houses, but they built roads and a lot of those roads still exist.

The thing that astonishes me the most is the hypocausts. The hypocausts, which was their heated flooring and walls. So they would build a house that was effectively up on square pillars of flat bricks or tiles, and they would have a fire that would be against the wall of the house somewhere, that would push hot air underneath the house and heat the floors, and they would have hollow bricks up the wall every metre or two in like pillars that would take the hot air up the wall.

Circulating hot air around the house.

It was the kind of technology where it was like, what would you call it? It was, um, you know, heating inside the houses and underneath it that wasn't seen again for over a, what, 1500 years?

Central heating?

Yeah. Central heating for 1500 years, I know wasn't seen again. So it's always really interesting when they dig up some of these villas and they'll find hypocausts where they're like, you know, they had slaves just burning a fire at all times, pumping hot air underneath the the floor and into the walls and everything.

So I think that's it, that the Romans left a lot of evidence of, of the, their lives. Whereas your average little agricultural village in England. People didn't..

After the fact or before it?

But. Well, both. Um, and even at the same time.

Yeah.

Didn't leave much.

Yeah.

Yes, you can. Oh we can dig out here and look, we think there might have been a house here because it looks like there was a couple of posts here.

There's post holes.

And there's a bit of pottery there that somebody might have done, but.

Well, and that's the side of it I think I really find that side of it interesting too, because it's it's so fascinating to think about my history genetically, I guess. My ancestors were the people that lived largely in Great Britain and Western Europe.

Anglo-celtic. And your mother is about 70% Anglo-Celtic.

Yeah.

So.

Yeah. So, and so I find the Iron Age and the Bronze Age and even the prehistoric age is really interesting as well to just think about what languages did they speak? It's always mind blowing when I think about these were the same people, for better or worse than we are today, genetically. Like they're modern humans, but we don't even know what languages they spoke. You know, prior to the Celtic languages that got in there. We don't know how they interact with the environment, you know, besides obviously trying to find shelter, water and hunting and stuff. What did they think of things? We have things like Stonehenge and we just have besides, you know, knowing that it's aligned with the stars a certain way or with the way that the sun sets in, you know, different periods of the year. You sort of like, yeah, but why, what were they doing? Like it was related to death.

Why are you, why are you dragging four ton rocks across half of the, half of the country?

I know. What, and that would be the. That would be the thing I it's almost it's amazing, but it's also almost a tragedy that we will never know, because you would love to just appear there and be like, why? And it's like, Oh, there was just one guy who was like, This would be a fun idea. And you'd be like, Are you serious?

It's really cool rocks! That my..

We just thought, We'll do this and someone in the future is going to be like, What the fuck is this massive circle of rocks? And then we'll be like, lol, it meant nothing! We just got here and got wasted on a yearly basis. It was just fun party time. Yeah, so I find that frustrating when you see you get to watch this series and you learn a lot about these periods in time, but obviously the further back you go, the almost blurrier the picture gets. And it's like they were human. You can see their skeletons, you know, that they lived lives, that they had jewellery, they had possessions, they had interests, they wore clothes, they obviously had relationships. They spoke languages..

They ate things because we get the animal bones that are left in pits..

And then they do the the isotope analysis on the teeth of some of these skeletons and they work out. Oh, this guy is from, you know, way off in West Europe. And it's like, so wait, how did he end up in Scotland and how did he communicate with people? Did he like, did they all speak the same language? Did he. Did he learn that language at home and came over and it was just a different dialect. Did he have to learn it on the fly? Did he not have to learn it? And it didn't matter. Like I yeah. So that side of it I find endlessly fascinating to think about.

And the social history is really interesting.

Yeah. Well, and there was apparently there was a big period of time. Is it the Beaker people? The people that were buried with beakers and they came over in a very sort of all of a sudden they appeared in the UK or Great Britain.

All over it.

Yeah, from Europe, but they'd come from Europe. And again, you sort of like, why did these people all of a sudden appear in Europe? And not only that, why did this cultural behaviour of being buried with a beaker take place? What, why? You know, like. Yeah. So I don't know those, that side of it. I think that's why I've got so sucked into that series and have been watching all 20 seasons. I'm almost done.

Yeah. What are you going to do next?

Series wise?

Yeah. You've run out of..

Probably start again. I think it's that long that you forget everything at the start..

And Heartland!

Yeah. That's it. Every year a new season comes out and it takes me now about six months to watch. Season 18 has just finished running in Canada. Um, and it'll be out in Australia sometime early to mid next year. So I've just started watching season one again and I'll get through to season 17 by the time 18 gets released.

Funny isn't it, how there's just certain TV shows where I don't know if it's like the writing of them, at least in the case of fictional shows.

Yeah.

Or it's the dynamics between the characters that make them feel like friends, not only friends, but that they have a certain relationship that is enjoyable to just be around.

Yes.

And I have that with Time Team, where..

Oh yeah.

I just like listening to them interact with one another because it's very personable. They make jokes.

And they work together for a long time.

Yeah. And it's it's almost like being there, but just watching.

Yes.

Like a fly on the wall. And so it is so funny, I was thinking the other day, I'm like, it is one of those things where I can just fall asleep to this stuff, and it's just comforting having it in the background. And then when I was on YouTube the other day, there were these there's certain archaeological channels that obviously pay a fee, and they get to publish some of these videos, and they had like Four Hours Of Time Team To Fall Asleep To. I'm like, it's not just me. It's clearly not just me.

Yeah. You can't sort of, you know, fall asleep in a relaxed way to a sort of an action adventure movie, can you? It's that.

Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? And I was watching an episode of Time Team recently where they had a bunch of, um, war vets who had had PTSD from going to Afghanistan and Iraq or whatever, and they were getting involved in a dig. This would have been in like the 2010s. So 2012, 2013, and it was really funny because one of them had actually decided to go and do archaeology at university because he was sitting down with them. Um, Tony Robinson. And he's like, so what are you doing now? And he's like, oh, I'm actually studying archaeology. And he's like, I got into it. And he's like, how did you get into it? Why did you suddenly decide to do that? And he's like, well, it's because of you bastards.

Yeah.

I started watching Time Team and my wife's. My wife was like, why the fuck are you watching archaeological shows? And he was he was like, I just binged eight hours a day for like three months. And it helped me with my PTSD. It just made me feel good. I fell asleep to it and I got into it. And now I want to be an archaeologist like you guys. And it was just really funny because he's like, I thought I was the only one. And then Tony Robinson was like, nah, there's lots of people that are apparently listening to us while they go to sleep or, you know, watch us and just it's relaxing.

Yeah.

And I think it is just that, um, what when you have those types of documentaries or videos on YouTube of people trying to do something that takes a certain level of competency, but you're actually just get to watch the the full process.

Yes.

There is something very relaxing about that, especially if they sort of talk you through what's going on, because you can be a complete noob and have no idea, but you can kind of follow along and understand it. And the curiosity paired with the slow speed at which it sort of takes place is what's. I don't know, appealing. Especially when you're tired and wanting to just fall asleep.

As we're talking about in a previous episode. It's that sort of almost active meditation where you just get engaged in something that it engages you intellectually. It's not particularly challenging in a sense that you've got to be problem solving. It's not like watching a crime TV show where you're constantly going, what's going on here? What's going on here? What's the next thing? Oh, there's a car chase, you know.

Yeah.

Um, where it just sort of potters along. And eventually the answer, whether it's we know nothing or we know a bit more or hey, we found this cool shit is just sort of exposed to you. Um, I think that's that's quite meditative.

Yeah.

And so you can, um. I don't think it causes you to fall asleep, but you can. You can fall asleep without being without it sort of interfering with that process. Whereas..

Yeah.

Other TV shows..

I think for it to be a TV show like that, for you to be able to fall asleep, you probably need some kind of a connection to it as you've watched it many times.

Yeah.

You know, like, I think I had it with Futurama, which is like The Simpsons, but another offshoot of the people who made The Simpsons and other series they have. And I just had such a nostalgic kind of attachment to it from when I was younger, because I think it started in the year 2000. And, um, I remember for years I would just when I was at university, I would just put a few episodes of that on at night and fall asleep to it. And I'd seen them all, you know, a dozen times. So. But it was just.

Well, sometimes familiarity is comforting as well.

Well, I Like the characters. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting how that happens. But anyway, what are we talking about? Bird photography.

Yeah. Well, geez, how did we get onto a Time Team?

We just let it go.

Yeah, that's why people listen.

.. Spiral.

They enjoy it.

.. Listening.

Going off on a tangent..

You idiots! What are you talking about?

I always, I always really feel bad for my virtual assistant, Kate, who has to transcribe these because I imagine her just one falling off to sleep.

Yeah.

And because we talk across each other, it's a conversation. It's not an interview.

The number of times you interrupt me or I interrupt you and I think, God, how's Kate going to transcribe this? Does she leave it? Does she interject? Does she just, like, put all the words in between?

She run commentary as well!

He's a fucking moron.

Idiots!

It's like she'll transcribe this one and she'll send me a message being like, I just heard that bit. Like, you're 100% right. It's a pain in the arse. Don't talk over each other!

It's like the Kelce brothers. I don't know whether you've seen Travis and Jason Kelce, the American footballers.

What's, Taylor Swift?

Taylor Swift's boyfriend Travis. They run one of the world's most popular podcasts. You know it's a TV..

Ah okay.

Or YouTube podcast, effectively.

Yeah.

Uh, and yeah, they'll go for an hour and a half or two hours. Sometimes they have guests, but sometimes it's just them. And because they live in different cities, they're not in the same room often. So it'll be they'll both be in their homes.

Yeah.

Um, so they'll obviously have video screens, but seeing each other and stuff. But they just talk bullshit for two hours.

Yeah.

And you sit there and go, this is just highly entertaining. Yeah.

But I think it's like what we were just talking about, right? With them being able to fall asleep to these, these shows that are really enjoyable because of the relationships in them. And I think this is why people like The Goss, because it's fun to just talk about different topics, but also I think to, you know, not to toot our own horn, but certain personality types are is sort of enjoyable to sort of just hang out and listen to. And I find myself doing this with depends it depends on the, the person. And I'm sure there's different strokes for different folks. So different people enjoy different types of personalities. I'm sure I grate a lot of people. They listen to this podcast and they're like, what the fuck?

What are these fucking idiots doing?

Yeah, but but it is that thing. I noticed that too, where sometimes you just click with the personality of the person you're listening to and you're like, you guys can talk about whatever. And I would just be hanging out.

Oh I think it- also, and look the Kelce brothers too, it's you know obviously they're brothers. They're close. They really like each other. Um and you know you and I get along. We know each other. We love each other. So.

Just don't like each other.

Yeah. No I love you, but I don't like you. Um, but but I think that helps as well. Is that that the sort of familiarity between us rubs off on listeners? I hope.

And I think that was going back to the Time Team.

Yeah.

I think that's the main thing. Tony Robinson seems to have a pretty deep relationship with the people on the show, who have quite often been there for five, ten, 20 years. And so they are constantly kind of like taking the piss or making jokes, and it makes it seem a lot more, um, friendly and inviting, if that makes sense. And I think that's probably if you just had a whole bunch of nerds from universities who didn't really know each other that well, being like, oh, well, this seems to be this, you'd be like.

Yeah. And and sometimes those guest speaker podcasts just don't work for that point of view. They might be good as interviews and getting information across.

Yes.

But they're not necessarily entertaining because there's not necessarily a relationship between the speakers. And so I think that that helps if you if what you want to do is listen to two idiots just shooting the breeze, you know.

Yeah. That's it. Well, that's as these listeners will know, that's kind of the cheat code for these Goss episodes. It's kind of like I get to hang out with you and just talk and boom, content like.

Yeah, exactly.

Hopefully it helps you guys.

Drink a couple of beers and talk rubbish for two hours.

Exactly. And if you guys get to say it helps your English, you know.

Yeah, well, that'll probably hinders it considerably.

Well, the hard part, man, the hardest part is making content that is interesting and keeps people wanting to listen and learn.

Yes.

And that's it's not only the hard part of creating the content, but as a language learner, the hard part is finding that content, right? Because you're kind of like, really? I have to spend as much time as possible with the language and be enjoying the process. And you kind of have to work out, how do I do that?

Yeah. And you? Yeah. And it's, this is this sort of thing is informal education.

Yeah.

We're not teaching anybody anything.

No.

We're just providing exposure.

Vessel.

An exposure.

That's it. I'm naked right now. I'm getting exposed.

Yeah. They might. He's not. Trust me.

Yeah. Not today.

Not today.

Um.

Definitely two beers in, though.

But, yeah, two beers for you. It's not quite two beers for me.

No.

Um, just just to put this in context, I probably weigh 30 kilos more than Pete and have had 30 years more drinking than he has. So.

I started late.

Yeah, you did.

I started late. Yeah. And I still probably. I've always been a lightweight.

Yeah.

Two pot screamer.

Yeah exactly. Well, hey. Cheap date. You know.

That was. I know it was always really funny when I was younger and people were always like, oh, you get drunk so quick, and I'm like, yeah, it cost me fuck all.

Yeah. Two beers and I'm asleep in the front yard.

You have to spend hundreds of bucks to get the job done. Who's laughing? Yeah.

Excuse me.

Anyway.

But yes. And look, I was thinking about, you know, onto those sort of TV shows that you get sucked into and why, whether it's documentary style, like Time Team or whether it's the the family drama things or whatever it happens to be, the ones that I get most sucked into are the long term things. I'm I'm always shattered when you get a show that only ran for one season.

And it was great.

And it was great. And then they dump it and..

Fucking Firefly, man.

I know. Oh! God.

Firefly back in the early 2000s and being this great sci fi show. Lots of you guys will not know what it is. Look up.

Find it. It is brilliant.

And, but it was only one season and you were like, God damn it guys!

They did have a follow up movie to close the loop, but.

Yeah.

Um, but yeah, it was, it was that Firefly was really good, but..

Stargate's the kind of thing we..

Yeah, well, Stargate, ten seasons. And they went through it evolved to the point where, you know, obviously characters come and go, you know, as actors move on and do other things and so on. But but it was the same principle all the way along. Um, but you can get you get sucked into the relationships.

Yeah.

Because let's face it, that's the long term things in any of these shows..

Are always about..

Are always the relationships. I mean, I've been your mum and I have been watching this show. It's a Canadian police show. Um, but the individual episodes are about police activity. You know, this crime happened. We're going to solve it.

Yeah, but it's background..

Within an hour, they solve it. But but the the thing that keeps your interest is the relationships between the characters. Um, and then..

That's that's day one on any sort of fictional writing.

Of course it is.

Right. It's like, of course it is really the you think, oh, I'm going to make this sexy. So it's going to be like aliens in the Middle Ages with Egyptian like, you know, oh, man, it's going to be so good. And you're like, really? It comes down to other characters, interesting or not.

Yeah.

And you can you can put it in whatever context you want. If the characters suck, it's going to be boring.

Exactly.

If the relationship sucks. Yeah.

And there's, there are only three stories. This is Ian's philosophy on writing. There are only three stories. There's romance, there's adventure, and there's crime. There's nothing else. Seriously, what else is there?

I don't know.

In terms of just to think about it..

Yeah. I don't know of..

But in terms of just, you know, writing fiction. And there's combinations of those obviously. And so characters have to have and not necessarily romance in the sense of a partnership that is going to, you know, start, fail, go on that classic sort of rom com type thing. But romance in a sense of interactions between people and whether they get attached to each other or dislike each other and so on.

Yeah.

Um, so there's that and then there's the adventure of I'm going to go from A to B, I have a goal, and am I going to get there? And what hurdles do I have to jump over. And then there's the crime one, which is something happened and I need to solve it. Every story is a combination of those.

Yeah.

And if you're writing a story, you need to have at least two of those in it, I think, to make it interesting. And a lot of TV shows don't. And that's why they fail.

Yeah.

Um, I use, you know, my prime example. And I only came to mind yesterday as it appeared on my. I think it was Netflix. Netflix or Amazon or something appeared in the Your Next View and Lost came up, that TV show.

Dad's like, yes! Finally!

This is the worst show that has ever been made for television. After halfway through the first season, the first half of the first season was fantastic.

I can't even remember the first. I mean, I remember the..

It's a plane crash!

I remember the initial part was good.

On the deserted island.

I don't remember because, is there five seasons?

Something like that.

And I don't remember..

Halfway through the first season, it lost the plot because. Because again, you've got..

Unintended.

Yeah. Romance was always going to work in a sense that you've got a bunch of people who are stuck together so you can work out relationships between them and what happens. Adventure. Get off the island. Well, if you can't get off the island because that's the end of the show, then you've got to create all these hurdles along the way. Crime. Somebody does something wrong, and we've got to work it out. They ran dry of two of those. The adventure and the crime part of the really early. So they kept like a polar bear appears on this tropical island.

It would have been one of those things where that in and of it, in and of itself wouldn't have been a problem if they'd actually followed it up and explained it. But they just like, let that..

That, that dinosaur! And like..

I didn't even remember watching it and seeing it that long. Yeah.

And but but that's that's a prime. And lots of people love it. Lots of people say this is the best show ever.

I'm watching the most recent thing made by that guy called From, and I actually really enjoy it. And it's a similar thing where I think part of the reason I enjoy it is that there's just so much shit that happens that you're sort of like, what? And then you're hoping it gets explained. So you just hope he's learnt from lessons in the past and he ends up. And it's one of those things where it's like, if you had this in a documentary type thing, you'd be like, this makes no fucking sense. I'm not watching this. It's not possible. But because they set up the rules in the show of like, these things happen and everything, you're kind of like, you allow it and you're sort of like..

Oh yeah. I'm all for that, I don't mind. Um, I don't mind stretching..

Reality.

And reality if you set the premise and you create your own reality. But when you break your own premise..

You also like, finish it. Explain it. Why was there a fucking polar bear on the island? No.

Because we needed another.

Yeah, yeah.

Antagonist. And we've run out of our own internal antagonists because there are only so many of the characters on there that are arseholes. So once you've run out of them.

We need something from outside. We need something else to be the danger that we've got to get over. That's the adventure stuff.

Yeah, really. But I think. And you would have me if in like, loving the show, if you explained it like it doesn't have to be something that's like, oh, this could happen in real life, but it's like, at least explain the thing. Why? How did the polar bear end up there? Why? What was the reason? You know, it was important enough to mention..

But also what are the consequences of it? That's one of the things that I know people talk about in Lord of the Rings.

Yeah.

This is the greatest fantasy adventure ever. Now, no. Shit's boring. Because.

I'll have to edit that bit out.

Yeah.

And the podcast?

And the podcast just died! But, but. And lots of people love it because they like the world building and they get sucked into that, and that's fine. But for me, I want an adventure that is problem solving and things that happen have consequences.

This is so much of what I heard from South Park. You would. I'm sure you don't like South Park.

I do. I like I like South Park.

The. I remember watching a video on YouTube.

South Park just because it's so anti-establishment.

Yeah. More recently, it's actually gotten a lot better because it's public commentary. But, um, the I think Trey Parker and I've forgotten the other guy's name who write it, though, did a class for a university where they were talking about good story writing, and I remember it stuck with me ever since. He's like, they should just no, they should not be any. And then it shouldn't be. This happens and then this happens and then this happens. It should be this happens therefore this happens.

Exactly.

Therefore this happens. Therefore this happens.

And things loop back.

Yeah.

The decisions you make and the actions you take and the directions you go on will have consequences. Some of those will be good and help you. Some of them will be hurdles.

And unforeseen.

All fiction writing, the adventure part of fiction writing is you just keep putting hurdles in front of the protagonists.

And this is why Game of Thrones was so good, right? Because they had, one, no one was safe. So you didn't have plot armour for, you know, certain characters, like they will always be here. You will never have to worry about them.

Yes, exactly.

The other thing was there were always these consequences. It was almost always if someone does something now that helps them, there's going to be some side..

Someone is going to come back.

Or consequence that we don't understand.

Exactly.

That will later on you'll be like, oh, you just fucked yourself. Which is so true. When you look at history, you know, quite often, especially in, um, you know, the Middle Ages or whatever. In Europe, with these different kingdoms fighting with one another, you would have to make allies with certain groups or, you know, do certain things you necessarily didn't want to do. And then as a result, there were certain things that later on they would be like, well, the son of that guy has come back and he's like, hey, fuck you, dude, I'm taking your kingdom. You know, and you're getting hanged, you know, like. So they're always the best shows. Funnily enough. I think that people like that idea of consequences. And I think whether or not they consciously realise certain shows haven't put them in there, they get a they get a sense of this.

That's this is the sort of crime equivalent, you know, the bad crime writing equivalent of that is the, I call it the Agatha Christie style of nobody can ever work out what was going on based on what is written in the book.

Ah, so she doesn't give you enough clues.

But it all gets exposed in the last chapter.

Yeah.

You get every one of the antagonists together in the room. And then the expert just tells you..

Pieces together something that was un-pieceable together.

But all the clues are there.

Yeah.

But you could never put them together yourself.

Yeah.

And so I just find that just tedious.

But that's almost that subversion thing. This was like when Game of Thrones at the end of the show went to shit.

Oh.

Was because quite often the decisions they were making as writers were like nonsensical and just out of left field..

.. Down rabbit holes.

How do we surprise the viewer as much as possible and..

You just wipe everybody out.

You don't have to know. But it was like, you know, just getting people to do things that they otherwise weren't set up to do, you know? And you were just like, what the fuck?

Yeah, just the left field stuff.

Yeah. Just like you don't have to just. You shouldn't. Your goal shouldn't be. Just how do we shock the hell out of the audience? Because quite often the payoff is that it makes sense and the consequences have happened. Yeah.

And look, the you know, that's that sort of Marvel style fantasy adventure things too. I remember one of my favourite ones of those movies was the original Thor.

Yeah.

And the first hour and a half of the movie, you go, this is really cool. And then the last 20 minutes of it is just a battle between Thor and can't remember the name, the the antagonist in the Loki thing.

Is it Loki? Yeah.

And and 20 minutes of CGI action. And at the end, Thor just goes, wait a minute. I'm better than he is. I can kill him now. And he just killed him. Why did he do that in the first 20s?

I think one, that's where you end up getting people being like. Seriously?

Yeah.

It just makes no sense.

No.

Anyway, bird photography.

Yeah. Bird photography.

So how many do you reckon you're going to get in the rest of the year? You've got a few weeks left?

If I. If I do a trip for a couple of days or 3 or 4 days up into north west Victoria, I'll probably get about another 5 or 6.

Okay. So you're hoping to get around 300.

301 if I, if I do nothing. 301 is a it's..

Pretty good?

Yeah. So I'll do a book and that'll be the end of it.

Yeah.

The book won't be published, but it will be. One copy will be made for me. Nobody else will be interested.

You just sit there in a dark room.

Yeah, look what I did! Yeah. Except the book will just be a photographic one. It won't be the story of doing it. It'll just be a.

Yeah.

Here's the, here's the, here's the favourite pictures. You know, pick 70 or 80 of the favourite pictures.

Well, it's definitely cool to think you did that within a one year, right? Short time period. Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us guys. Hopefully you enjoyed this rambling.

Yeah, I have no idea what we were talking about this time.

See ya!

Bye!