Transcript of AE 1342 - Walking With Pete: Weekend Away with the Family

G'day you mob. How's it going? Welcome to this episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I'm doing another one of these Walking With Pete episodes where I'm actually not walking. Instead, I am cooped up inside at the moment and thought I would just do another one of these episodes where we chat about stuff using my microphone. Make it a little nicer. I don't actually know where my other microphone is at the moment for getting out and about and recording, so that's why we're inside.

Anyway, I thought I would share our little family holiday recently. So, we went away to my grandparents farm. My grandparents are still around, they are in their 90s and they own a farm, uh, in regional Australia, in regional Victoria, right near the gold rush country of Bendigo. So, pretty dry woodland type area. They got a farm there with some sheep on it I think, is it called agistment? Is that the word? A gist, a gist. I need to look this up. Agistment sheep farm. How do you- I don't even know how to spell it. Yeah. Agistment. Right.

So, agistment A G I S T M E N T is when you are. Let's look up the definition. It's one of these words I probably said twice in my, in my life. Agistment refers to the practice of keeping livestock on another person's property for grazing, usually for a fee. It's a common arrangement when there's insufficient feed on the owner's land, often used for horses, but can apply to other livestock as well.

Yeah, so my grandparents have a farm. They used to have sheep on it, but obviously when my grandparents got, I think probably into their late 70s, they stopped taking care of the sheep specifically themselves, right. They stopped, um, having them shorn, doing all of the physical stuff with them, like worming them, uh, having their, their hooves, uh, cleaned up and making sure they weren't flyblown. So they get fleeced sort of at the back where their, their private parts are to keep the wool away from that so they don't get flyblown, you know, infected with poo and flies that lay maggots and stuff. It's pretty gross.

But they used to do that all by themselves, and they would hire a shearer to come in. But obviously as they got older, it became a little harder physically for them to do that sort of work. So my grandparents ended up, um, selling their sheep that they would have on the property and shear them, you know, once a year and then sell the wool. And they would allow the neighbour to put his sheep on their property and they pay a certain fee. So they've got an extra 100, 200 sheep on this property that feed on the property and can live there. And the farmer next door can obviously use for meat or shearing or whatever he wants to make, uh, an income. So it's sort of a win win situation.

Anyway, so my grandparents have this farm and it's a beautiful place. We go there. If you've listened to this podcast for a long time, you'll know we go on little holidays there probably once or twice a year. And they've got this log cabin. It was a kit house that they bought in, I think the 70s, and they had like a concrete block poured. And then the business that sold them, the kit house, came in and constructed it with a chimney as well being constructed. And then I think my grandfather and grandmother finished the interior all themselves. So they put all the wood up, um, they furnished it all, they did all the plumbing. And that inside that part, I think. And it's great because there's no electricity.

So it's a pretty cool experience for, I guess, you know, people today where you're so used to having technology around to having, um, all sorts of devices, electricity, lights, heating, all that sort of stuff. When we go to the farm with my family, you've got no electricity. So you have to use either candles, gas lamps or torches and electric battery run lamps so that you can see at night. You have to use the fireplace. So we collect wood. You know, you'll get a chainsaw out, chop down some dead trees, chop the wood up, collect kindling. So the smaller bits of wood, you know, the the sticks and that sort of stuff, you collect that, you line that all up near the house, and then you bring a certain amount of it into the house and put it in the corner near the fireplace.

And every day, if it's cold, you have to start a fire in the morning and sort of keep it going throughout the day to keep the interior of the cabin nice and cosy, nice and warm. And it's I've got so many good memories there because I went there when I was a little kid, probably my entire life. I would have been going there a few times a year, and now I get to pass it on to my kids.

So we went up for three days, about a week and a half ago over the weekend, and it was the first time I'd taken time off private lessons for probably 4 or 5 months. I pretty much have private lessons every single day of the week. And so I hadn't really had a day off in 4 or 5 months with no lessons. And so it was really cool taking them up there.

And so the cool thing that I like about it is there's multiple different rooms. There's a bunk room. So like a bedroom that has bunks, these beds that are stacked on top of one another. You know, they're usually made from wood, wooden frames, wooden structures with mattresses on the bottom. And then there's a top bunk as well.

Kids often stay in there with one parent. So we went up with my sister and her kids, my niece and nephew. They had that room with my mother and my dad, and I had the lounge sort of area with the campfire, not the campfire with the the fireplace.

So the main room, there's a fold out couch. I slept on that, my dad slept on another couch behind me. And my wife and two kids, Noah and Joey, they stayed in my grandparents bedroom. And so I absolutely love this kind of setup now because one, I don't have kids in the bed kicking the crap, the crap out of me. Their little feet tend to end up, you know, kicking me and doing all sorts of stuff all the time. Um, when you're in bed and they pop in there in the mornings or whatever.

Anyway, so I get to have this fold out bed right in front of the fire. And it is just another thing sleeping in front of an open fire in a fireplace, hearing the wood crackle, um, and having this nice warmth coming off that fire near your feet. You know, it's absolutely phenomenal. If you haven't experienced it, try and find a way at some point to get an Airbnb or to go away on a holiday somewhere where you can have a either a campfire outside and you sleep with a sleeping bag or something, or a fireplace inside a room where you can sleep near it because it is next level romance type, you know, vibes. I'll have to take my wife up there sometime by herself though. Yeah, how to organise that with such small kids?

So anyway, it was really, really cool. And the kids had a blast. They had an absolute amazing weekend away. You know, they had the time of their lives. They had so much fun. They love looking for lizards and bugs and all sorts of stuff. So my son and I and Joey, my daughter, we go out there and lift up rocks and look for things, you know, what, bugs are there. Sometimes you find scorpions, uh, little skinks, these small lizards. There's quite a few slaters and millipedes and other beetles and all sorts of stuff.

And so it's really fun doing that. I grew up doing that when I was a little kid. And occasionally there's venomous snakes, which you've got to be careful about. Um, I think you would have heard an episode a while back where we went up on a trip and we found an eastern brown snake, a baby one which is one of the second deadliest snake in the world. So, yeah, that was, um, that was quite an experience.

Fortunately, it was in winter, I think, and it was really cold and the thing wasn't moving. So I put it in a container and we ended up taking it across the road on the other side of the farm to forest land and letting it go. I don't, I don't like killing snakes and it's illegal. But they also have an important role in the environment, but they're just very dangerous. So you've got to be very careful.

So anyway, yeah, we went up and quite often what we do during the day is walk around, you know, we find things to do on the farm. So there may be certain bits of work that need to be done, you know, gardening, collecting wood, uh, cleaning up areas outside, around near the cabin, um, you know, cutting the grass, all sorts of stuff like that. It was really dry at the moment. So the grass wasn't really a problem.

Um, you get to see loads of animals, so you get to see loads of kangaroos and things. The cabin sort of sits on a hill and overlooks a valley, and there's like a dam, a small dam at the bottom of the the hill.

And every single morning the kangaroos seem to come over the hills below near that dam, and you'll see them eating there. And there are a few mornings where we saw little joeys, little baby kangaroos with their mothers, you know, in their pouches, jumping out of the pouches. Eating in front of the, um, in front of the cabin. And there's all these glass windows at the front of the cabin. So you can actually see everything out there. It's a beautiful view, so it's really cool watching that and then going for walks.

And my kids this time. It's so funny watching the parallels between when I was a kid on the farm and what they now do as kids on the farm. Sorry, my cats just, just going crazy. Get out of here, Peaches. Bugger off. Just doing zoomies around the bedroom.

So, what was I saying? Yeah. It's similar. Watching what they did and comparing it to what I did. So we went up there and we walk around, you know, just go for fun walks and see what we see, what animals or what rocks we can lift up. We might throw some stones into the dams, we might skip some stones and practice, you know, stone skipping across the water in the dams.

And there's loads of bones from animals. So quite often you'll find dead kangaroos or dead sheep that have, you know, probably been dead for many months. And they're just white bones sitting on the surface. And my kids were just collecting those the entire time with their cousins. They just, every day they were like, Let's go find bones! We gotta find some skulls! We gotta find some bones! And I'm just like, it's so morbid.

But then when I was thinking back to when I was a kid, I was doing exactly the same thing. I was like, Let's go find some bones. Let's, you know, it's really. I don't know why. It's it's such a funny thing to get into.

So we did that and Noah, Noah went berserk. He ended up finding so many different bones, um, from kangaroos. I think we went down to the front of the property near where the main road is. And I have a feeling we've got some cheeky neighbours that go for a drive with rifles, you know, and they shoot kangaroos. I think you can do it with a licence. I don't know whether or not they were legally doing it, but there were a few times where you would find multiple dead kangaroo bones in a single area. And I think that would be very uncommon, right.

Like there was one place at the front of the property where we found within about 20m there were three dead kangaroos. Um, there were just the bones left over their their skeletons, all in within 20m of one another. And it was like, uh, what are the chances that all of these guys just died at exactly the same time in the exactly the same place? I'm more than certain someone's been coming past and shooting them off the main road.

So anyway, yeah, we were collecting all these bones and bringing them back to the cabin and getting photos with them. And then God, my son brought them all home, and now they're just sitting in the garage. I've got this bag full of kangaroo bones sitting in the garage that I don't even know what I'm going to do with. I'll probably have to sneak them into the bin at some point because he'll forget about them.

So anyway, it was a lot of fun doing that. Um, we found some skinks. The other thing that was really cool is when I was looking for bugs. Um, I have to find this species that I have to tell you about, so. Yeah. Here it is. Delena cancerides. Delena cancerides. So I will. I'll spell it out for you. Delena is the genus name D E L E N A. Cancerides. C A N C E R I D E S. Delena or Delena. Cancerides.

This is a really unique huntsman spider. And when I was looking for bugs and lizards and all sorts of stuff under rocks, I lifted up a stump and I found probably about 20 of these Huntsman's all living together underneath this stump. And they just went everywhere, you know. And they're these beautiful, like, pale, kind of orange body and leg spiders with white and brown striped abdomens.

One actually ended up climbing on my hand and I was just like, Oh, what's that? They seem really sort of docile and friendly in that they're not like trying to attack you the whole time. They were just trying to run away.

But the reason I'm mentioning them is I was thinking like, why the hell were there 20 of the same spider living under a rock here? Like, that's so weird. Spiders are usually solitary, right? Yeah.

They usually don't live with one another. They'll just eat each other, you know? Or they'll might come together when they're when they're breeding, but usually they stay away from each other.

So anyway, I looked it up because I was like, what? What's going on here? And they're a social spider, which is incredibly rare. Apparently it's something like, you know, less than 0.1% of spiders are social. So, you know, 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 spiders might be social spider species.

So these are the communal huntsman, flat huntsman or social huntsman. And it's been introduced to New Zealand. It's native to Australia. And the species is known for movies like Napoleon and the movie Arachnophobia. It's in the, the movie Arachnophobia.

And so it's a highly unusual spider because they're a social species that even share their prey, so they might kill something and they don't mind if other spiders around them that are relatives or the same species share the food with them, which is just so, so weird. Um, they're often found under loose bark, and in colonies of up to 300, there can be 300. Wow.

So, yeah, it's it was just such a weird thing to find. And there's such a unique spider, so I thought I had to share that, so. Yeah. Found those. I showed the kids. Those that blew their mind. Um, my wife would not come and see those spiders. She hates spiders.

And then what else do we do? That was it. We played a lot of board games in the cabin, too. Um, that was, again, something I grew up doing when I was a kid. You know, there would be different kinds of board games from monopoly, where you'd play card games like Uno and other things as well, and you would just do that into the night. So the kids were doing that with my mum quite a lot and just living it up, laughing, doing lots of drawing as well. Uh, and, and yeah, just playing with each other and having fun.

So it was a great time. It was a great weekend away and it's just yeah, it's really cool now, being an adult with kids and watching them experience the same sort of things that you experienced when you were a kid and enjoying it the same way.

I think that's one of those things that I didn't really appreciate when I was younger until I had children. And once you've had kids, you kind of think, God, I want to show them all these things that I did when I was a kid that I liked. But quite often they don't like them, you know. Like you'll, you'll have had something you really love when you're a kid and you'll show them and they'll be like, Yeah, not really into it.

But sometimes they absolutely love it. They absolutely love it. So it was just such a blast going up to the farm, having such a good time and seeing both of them have so much fun up there as well and enjoy it so much, just like I did with my sister when I was a kid.

Um, so yeah, it was a really good weekend away, and I just wanted to share that story with you guys and ask you, you know, where do you guys go on holidays? And what sort of trips did you do when you were a kid that you really enjoyed?

You'll have to send me some messages and tell me, you know, send me a message on Instagram or on Facebook or via email. And tell me about the places that you used to go when you were a kid, you know. What did you do with your siblings or with your parents that are fond memories that you now look back on and think, God, I love the fact that we got to do that.

So yeah. Anyway, hope you enjoyed this episode guys. Again, I will try and do more of these more frequently, if you enjoy them. Let me know if you like these and you want more of them. If you want the transcripts for these episodes so you can read and listen at the same time, go and check out the Premium Podcast. You can get the premium podcast membership at AussieEnglish.com.au/podcast. The link will be in the description. And besides that, I hope you guys have a ripper of a week and I'll see you next time. Tooroo!