Learn Australian English in this episode of The Goss where we talk about black rhinoceroses, Australia’s desert frogs, and smoke-tainted wine.

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Alright guys, welcome to The Goss. What's going on? What's the goss? What's the news? Today, I sit down with my dad and we talk about what's going on in Australia as well as in other places in the world. The whole point of these episodes, guys, is to get us to talk about a range of different topics, as well as a bunch of different topics that are relevant to your life, that are in the news, that you can hopefully read about, learn about and form your own opinions about these topics and then go off and talk about them in your day to day life. So today we talk about African black rhino numbers on the rise again because conservationists are working hard.

We talk about how wine makers in Australia are salvaging smoke-tainted grapes this year after the worst bushfire season in Australian history. So these grapes have been affected by the smoke from the fires, but Australian winemakers are being very creative in order to save this wine vintage. Then we get on to talk about desert frogs and how there are hundreds of thousands of frogs in the desert and their relationship with water. And we also talk about the Lake Eyre Basin in Australia and why that is such an interesting ecosystem. And then lastly, we talk about the trade in fake orphans in third world countries and sort of the ethics of Western countries like Australia giving money to charities that support this sort of stuff.

Don't forget, if you want the transcripts, if you want the mp3s, if you want the full episode videos and everything like that, make sure to sign up for the premium podcast or the Academy memberships at aussieenglish.com.au, and without any further ado, guys let's get into this episode. Smack the kookaburra on the bum. Let's begin.

So African black rhino numbers are now on the rise. After efforts from conservationists have paid off.

Southern black rhinos, having the northern black rhino gone extinct.

Yeah, well, that's the sad aspect. But numbers have increased by nearly 800 over six years. Yeah, I had no idea that they had that kind of reproductive power. Rhinos man. So annual growth rate of 2.5% from 2012 to 2018 and they've grown from 4800 to 5600. They were nearly driven to extinction by poaching and to save the species, animals are being relocated from now established populations to new areas to increase the species range and also avoid interbreeding.

But they're having trouble; I think they've moved 11 black rhinos to Kenya's Tsavo East National Park from Nairobi, but all 11 died because they were drinking salty water, and a lion killed one. So poachers are targeting these for their horns, obviously, which are demanded in Asia. And the price will remain high whilst the demands there. And poaching, though, is on the decrease. They killed 1300 of them in 2015 and only 900 in 2018. So I guess as numbers increase, where do you put these animals, right? So even if they were to now explode the population, what do you do in terms of where to put them?

Well, there's plenty of place... And now this is speaking without any experience whatsoever, because I've never been to East Africa...

Black rhino conservation.

Or in just the other general environment in East Africa.

But there's plenty of places that they used to be in.

Yeah.

That actually haven't changed. It's not like we have a human population boom that is suddenly building villages and towns in eastern Kenya or in Tanzania and so on that we suddenly go, "Oh, sorry. We're going to move this town out of here and create more open range area food for rhinos." So I think there are plenty of places where they used to be that they could... They will still naturally increase. The challenge we have when poaching is the major form of death is that we don't know what the carrying capacity of that country is for those animals. If we didn't have humans as their... Effectively their only predator, because, yeah, you're going to have a lion that catches the odd one, but that will be a young one.

There's no way a 3 tonne rhino's is going to get taken by a lion. The lion's not even going to try, let alone compete.

Pretty brave lion.

They're going to do a fair bit of damage. But so... We don't know what their carrying capacity is, which means that we don't know whether or not that country will handle them. You've got to assume that it was okay 200 years ago and it probably still is, but we don't know. And that's the big challenge we have. If we're going to reduce poaching, hopefully and ideally, to zero, then what does that mean? And it might not be "Where do we put them?" It might mean that we just put down... It's not like these national parks in East Africa have got great big fences around them and said, "Look, we put your little rhino herd over here. You've got to stay here." They'll go wherever they like.

You don't tell rhinos what to do.

Exactly. It's a pretty good wall that you got to build. Yeah.

Have you been to the zoo?

Rhinos don't very well so putting a river in there is okay. So I think we'll find a way of having that natural population control if it's allowed to happen. But, you know, it's... Again, it's a complex issue because if we then start having... If we double the number of rhinos does that have any effect on humans? And if humans are the ones who directly saying, "We're going to increase the number of rhinos," then they're doing it at the expense of other humans, then you would start to question why. "What's more important, a rhinos life or a human's life?"

It comes back, though, too surely, for finding an economic reason to have the rhinos. So you have to go to these countries and foster the economics of it, whether it's a tourism or even if you were to, say, farm the rhinos, which is probably pretty controversial, but at least then you have a reason to keep them alive and money that can be spent maintaining their populations. And you would imagine if you were farming them, you could just chop the horns off when they're drugged.

One of the early strategies was, for reducing poaching, was rangers were actually removing horns from rhinos so that, you know, people wouldn't be out shooting them because there's no reason to.

But it's pretty annoying, isn't it, because it's almost like putting bigger locks on your doors because there's heaps of thieves and the police just can't be screwed taking care of the thieves. You're kind of like...

Exactly. But that was one of the strategies. And apparently it worked reasonably well. So at least in the early stages, we were allowing those rhinos to get to reproductive age and reproducing rather than killing them off as soon as the horn was big enough. So, you know, there's a bunch of those things that are sitting in the background and challenges for it. What was your original question?

I guess there wasn't one. We were sort of just talking about it. But why are animals like these poached so heavily in Africa? Do you think that it's a combination of things like corruption, you know, the state of the economies over there, as well as this pressure from Southeast Asia, maybe more from Asia?

You know, when you've got one culture that is willing to pay huge amounts of money for a substance, whether it be, you know, taking heroin or cocaine from Columbia...

It is interesting, In American it's cocaine, and in China, it seems to be parts of animals.

... Or if it's taking, you know, rhino horns and tigers' testicles, then there's a motivation for people to go and do it. And it's not like we have people from Hong Kong travelling to Kenya to shoot these rhinos and taking the horn and travelling back. It's local people in Kenya who are doing it. They have a social-economic motivation to do it. These are people who are extremely poor. And if they can make money by doing something that's illegal, hell, we've got crime here. We have people who will break into houses and steal things...

It's weird, isn't it? Because in Africa, I've heard that a lot of the time the poachers are actually the protectors of the animals when there's money to protect them but when they lose their jobs, they turn to poaching because, hey, I need money to feed my family.

And guess what? I know the animals and where they are!

Yeah, so it's almost like, you know, make sure you pay the police or they'll start robbing you. Yes.

But do you think it's more effective to try and tackle this top-down or bottom-up where...

The only way to work is both.

Yeah. So you try and lift up and give jobs to people in Africa and make it so that they don't have to rely on money from Asia to do this. But then you need to also educate people in Asia and suggest or show them that this... The damage it's doing and the fact that it's probably not helping you maintain an erection to do lines of shredded up...

There is absolutely zero. You might as well shoot your own fingernails because guess what? It's the same shit.

It's really sad. But I hope that we stop it eventually, you know. But I think it is... The tragic thing might be that you need to work out a way of working the rhinos into the economy.

Yeah, you do. And there's a lot of that going on in certainly South Africa... Southern Africa and East Africa, not just the country 'South Africa.'

Yeah.

In those countries where... And it's not just rhinos, it's elephants as well, where part of the solution is to remove the socio-economic motivation for people to commit those crimes. And so there is tourism. Tourism is a huge industry in those areas, particularly in know poor East African countries. Almost the only thing they have going for them is wealthy Western people wanting to pay a lot of money to go and see these animals. So it is in their interest to do that.

Well, until they get a shit load of mines set up to start stripping all of the uranium and iron and whatever else they have there under the soil, right.

Exactly.

I was talking to Kel about this recently and I'm sure it'll interest a lot of the listeners. I don't know how much you know of it, but what do you think it is? I've been sort of beating my head against the wall in terms of the corruption in Brazil, and South America more broadly. We've been watching the TV show Narcos recently. So that's on the Colombian drug war, but the most recent one's on Mexico. And, you know, they started with cannabis and then they started getting into cahoots with the Colombians to move the cocaine through Mexico into America. But sort of more broadly than that, why are these countries so corrupt when America and Canada are arguably, you know, the same age, they've come from very similar cultures that colonised those countries. They've had very similar histories in terms of the colonisation. The same with even Australia and New Zealand.

They've been, you know, indigenous people here. There's lots of resources. How come we end up with countries like Brazil, which is about the same size, if not bigger than America. Probably more fertile and more able to create wealth in the position it is when it's of an even older age than America. What is it? When it has a Western-ish government, why do certain countries like that maintain such high levels of corruption, whereas others don't? Because you can imagine... Sorry to make it such a long question...

It's an easy answer.

Australia wasn't always, you know, as anti-corruption as we are. We still have levels of corruption. But you can imagine a few hundred years ago, we were probably just as corrupt as any other country in the world in terms of having the upper class and the lower class, you know, at heads and the upper class doing whatever they want. The same with Britain, for sure, right, in terms of corruption. I was reading about the first fleet and you learn about so much shit going on behind the scenes. But how did we pull ourselves out of that? And why haven't countries like those in South America maintained that same level with us? In your opinion.

I don't know. You heard it here first! And I know that sounds like a flippant response, but obviously it's a highly complex anthropological question. I'm sure there are probably hundreds of PhDs that have been written by sociologists and anthropologists on this. And I haven't read any of them, so I don't know. And it's a really difficult one to answer. There's... And you can't sort of nail anything, and we talked about this last week so I've done a little bit of thinking about it, but I still haven't come up with an answer, but you can't even look at anything else that you would think might be other than purely socio-economic. Poorer countries tend to be more corrupt...

Yeah.

... On average, if you're a highly wealthy country where every one of your citizens is well-off and there aren't many of them, there's a few. Then there's virtually no corruption. And you could put most of the countries that you've mentioned in there into that category. So when you have a large proportion of the population that are poor, there's more motivation on them to be involved in crime. And therefore, there's more motivation for people who are wealthy to start running crime.

And discriminate against the lower classes, right.

And maybe discriminate against them. But also to manipulate them.

Yeah.

There aren't too many drug lords who are out shooting people in the street. They get other people to do it for them because they pay them a lot of money in comparison to what that person can earn as a cab driver in Bogota, in Colombia...

Do you think some of the biggest issues are that the people in Australia, for instance, you could probably be born to one of the poorest families here, but the government effectively guarantees your right to get educated and you can pull yourself out of that situation.

And you've got access to infrastructure.

Yeah.

You can live in... You can live in the poorest, most isolated place in Australia. There will still be roads in and out. You will still have access to healthcare. In fact, if you need a doctor, they'll fly in for you. There will be schools that you're available for, even if you can't get them. Then there's the old School of the Air, where, you know, back in the old days you'd get on a radio and get your education from... Remotely from a teacher that way. So Australia, and many other countries, have effectively set up well for even the people who are the poorest. In developing countries, what we used to call back in the olden days, 'third world countries.' I never knew or understood what the 'second world' was.

That's what I was going to ask. We've got first word and third. Where's the second?

The second was the sort of step to the first. I think the step was either via corruption or whatever else. But those countries that have a significant proportion of their population being poor, I think there is... That's one element to it. But there's almost nothing else because you could look at... Brazil has a highly sophisticated democratic system. It's one of the only countries in the world like Australia that has compulsory voting. It's got... And so you look at it and go, on that basis, it's not an electoral system. It's not like their democracy doesn't work. But corrupt people tend to get elected. How are they getting elected? It's not the system that's the problem.

Yeah.

You know, there are plenty of countries in the world where there isn't that sort of democracy and corrupt people get into power purely just by demanding it.

Well, I guess the easiest thing is to see how it continues, right? Because you get into a corrupt government, then there's going to be a lot of pressure on you to maintain that corruption.

Yes.

Because you don't want be the one that says, "How about we start doing things the right way?" Because you'll be killed!

You're also probably got there by the fact that you're making a lot of money out of the corruption.

So how did countries like Australia become, or lose, so much of that corruption. Were there things that we did in our past?

Well, we did. If you look at one of your relatives, and of one mine, William Bligh, who was the fifth, I think, governor of New South Wales.

Yay!

There we go! Another one of my books.

He was actually a relative?

Yeah. Not directly, we're related to his wife.

But we're the same race as him! He's English!

We walk on two legs.

That's it.

He effectively got overthrown as the governor.

Didn't he could hide behind his bed and get dragged out?

Yeah. Yeah, allegedly. And you know, who knows? Yeah. In the early 19th century there weren't newspapers.

Victors write the history, right.

Exactly. So you're always going to make the person look worse than they actually were.

Apparently he was dragged kicking and screaming out from under his bed where he'd been hiding.

And look, at the time Government House was not this huge multi-story mansion with a brick wall around it and security guards. It was just a house on a hill...

With a front door.

A front door. So you knock on the door and say, "Come on Will, you're out of here." So he got overthrown and he was one of the more corrupt ones.

Was that the Rum Rebellion? We could probably talk about this later.

Oh, yeah. That's another... That's not news. We can do another episode.

Back in the colony, they were being paid in rum...

Well rum became the currency.

The currency was grog, was booze. And it really wasn't rum as we understand it.

No. Watered down crap.

Yeah... Because you could make it really easily and you could import stuff to make it really easy. Couldn't grow much your own. But so yeah, there was a shift in power. And so it was effectively a military coup.

Yeah. Which is the only one in our history apparently.

It is, yes. And so I think very early on we had that situation of having... Either by stealth, as in just political manoeuvring to get rid of people who are corrupt, or we had in, that one case, where Bligh got thrown out, literally dragged kicking and screaming out of from under his bed and thrown out. And obviously that was when we had, you know, probably 10000 people in Australia. I don't know what the actual numbers were. I would be very surprised if it was more than 25000 in what we now call Australia. So it really was a few people... Wealthy people and a few of the military just saying, "Look, this is ridiculous."

So it's almost like you need it to have happened in the early stages.

You did. And look, I'll be completely political at the moment. How do you get rid of Donald Trump?

Well, just shoot him, right?

Yes. Well, I'm not recommending crime as a solution.

What else do you do?

He didn't get the votes to get into where he got, you know, he manipulated the system.

He got in by manipulating the system. And once you're in, it becomes that... And certainly in the United States... Even in Australia, I think our current prime minister is incompetent.

Yeah.

And that's got nothing to do with which side of politics he sits on.

Well he's just a muppet. He's an idiot.

He is simply unable to make decisions now, when we're in a health crisis around the world. Our country is being run by the premier of Victoria, the premier of New South Wales, because they are just saying, "No, I don't care what Australia says. We're going to do this now," and then the rest of Australia follows suit. And that's a sad place to be in. But our constitution has no way of, as a country, us, getting rid of him. There's only one person in this country that can get rid of the prime minister.

Governor-General.

The Governor-General.

And he's done it once. A bit more history for you guys.

Yeah, we'll do that one day. And I lived through that.

Yeah. You want just drop the names quickly and the nutshell review of what happened?

We'll do another episode on this one. In 1972, a Labour government had been elected, having been out of power for more than a decade, and they got elected on a whole lot of social reform that needed to happen. And their catch-cry was "It's time."

This was Gough Whitlam.

Gough Whitlam, who was the leader of the opposition. He became the prime minister. Within three years he had made a lot of those changes, huge changes that... Many of which like Medicare, you know, universal healthcare for Australia.

Was he the one who brought through free tertiary education for your generation?

For my generation...

Dad and mum went through university without paying a dime.

Well I was on scholarship, so I would've got it anyway. But yeah, my generation went through... Anybody who had the... And it was competitive. So it wasn't that everybody went to university, which it effectively is now. But if you had the scores to get into what were effectively capped numbers in any course, you could go for free. And so that came in. He got us out of the Vietnam War. There's a whole bunch of those things. In the end he was borrowing a lot of money from overseas to do it. And the opposition went to the Governor-General and said, "We don't believe that... We think this is unstable, economically, and we want to get rid of him." And the Governor-General agreed and sacked the prime minister.

He had permission, right? From the Queen.

He has to actually...By our constitution, the Queen is our head of state.

So the Queen is the one who sacked him.

The Governor-General, who is no longer with us, the Queen still is... But the Queen gave him permission to do it. Now it was his choice. The Queen is never going to say no. She is literally the titular head.

But there's been a few videos going around saying, "Your Majesty, could you please help us in our current predicament and get rid of Scomo? You did it back then. Could you do it now with the most incompetent prime minister, arguably in history?"

So the Governor-General sacked the parliament, or sacked the government, and he installed the leader of the opposition as the interim prime minister and then immediately called an election.

And what was the line from Gough Whitlam?

"May God save Australia." No, it was actually, "May God save the Queen, because nothing will save the Governor-General." And in fact, he was right. The Governor-General became a pariah in our society very quickly.

And that was a shit decision.

It was.

Yeah. Anyway, back to corruption. I guess it is one of those things. You need the people to rise up and change it, right.

You do. And look, there's... We spent some time in Ecuador a few years ago on a holiday and speaking to people in Ecuador, they were very proud of their current, and I don't think he still is. I have to look it up. Their current president to the point where they changed the constitution... Ecuador used to have this rule that I think it was two sessions, but it was ten years. You couldn't be president for more than ten years. So this guy was previously president. He went. He went often...

Yeah, he was already very wealthy. So that in itself helps that you don't need to be corrupt if you're already a squillionaire. And he went off to the United States and he worked in the IT sector and blah, blah, blah. And he came back to Ecuador and Ecuadorians, effectively by popular vote, changed the constitution. They held a referendum, they changed the constitution to change the law so that he could come back as president and he did.

And it was only for a little time, wasn't it? To fix a few things.

He came back and then he said, "Right. I'm done."

"Tapping out, guys."

He made some amazing social decisions and so on. And I would talk about that another time. This is about Australia, not Ecuador. Hello to all my Ecuadorian friends. But in discussing that with people around Ecuador, and they were very happy to talk about their politics at the time, because it was working for them. They said that being the president of Ecuador is one of the riskiest jobs that you can possibly imagine, because more than half of them in the history of Ecuadorian politics, more than half of them have been unseated, either by being assassinated or by being sacked. So in that case, if we don't like what the president said, we just shoot him. There are many countries that that happens in.

I'd like to have a leader who doesn't want to be there, you know?

Oh, yeah.

Has the skills to be there, but ultimately doesn't want to stay there.

And you don't want a lifetime-leader.

This is a big problem with the Roman Empire, right. Is that, quite often, the best emperors that they had were the ones that didn't really want the job or didn't want to maintain it, right. And they were like, "Alright, I'm going to hand it over after a certain time." The worst ones were the ones that were hunted it. Yeah.

Next story I had, and we can probably turn this into two episodes because we're at an hour and 20 minutes. I've got a lot of good stories and I want to go through these. Winemakers have gotten really creative in Australia and they're salvaging smoke tainted grapes after the Australian bushfires. Did you see this story?

Yeah. What a ripping story.

Yeah, so disastrous wine vintage from 2019, 2020. It's been horrible because the wine grapes have been tainted by smoke from the huge amount of bushfires which have happened around a lot of the places that grow wine. So we've had many wine vines, you know, completely burnt out. And those that weren't were smoke-tainted. And the smoke affected wine tastes like an ashtray, effectively, for obvious reasons. So we had a winemaker named Mr Kozned, who's trialling three different techniques.

So he's been harvesting a few small batches of grapes and he has these three sort of methods of harvesting. Hand-picking, chilling and whole-bunch pressing, which quickly removes the smoke infused skins. Then he has pressing, leaving the skins on for a long time, which ends up being the worst case scenario. And the other one was machine harvesting. So the samples were all tested by a sensory panel to detect smoke taint. And the panel met weekly and sniffed something like 300 samples and mark them on a scale of one to ten. And they helped determine the best method. And the first method was the best one. Hand-harvesting wine, white wine grapes, you know, chilling them and then whole-bunch pressing them. The only problem was that you're down 50% of your production, in terms of how quickly you can do it.

But 50% or no percent?

That's the trade off.

Yeah, the trade off is we can either just throw... Just churn these grapes back into the soil or we can try and get the best we can out of it.

So yeah, it's pretty cool. But... And it was interesting; in New South Wales, the Sydney distillery, or a Sydney distillery, bought something like 50 tonnes of tainted grapes from growers to turn them... The smoky grapes into smoky spirits.

Brandy.

The innovation that's going on... Yeah. So 80% of the Hunter Valley's grape crop was smoke-affected. And no one else in the world has ever done this, where they've bought it. And yeah, this distillery was thinking, "Well, we do it with rum and whisky. Why aren't we doing it with these grapes?" So it was really cool. How does Australia's wine compared to the rest of the world? And why do Aussies love their wines so much?

Well, I can't explain why we love our wine except the fact that it tastes good. But yeah, we've come from a primarily European heritage. English are not terribly big on wines, historically. They are now, like many countries around the world, people drink wine, but they don't grow grapes in in England. It's too cold.

They used to. There was a period, right?

There was, yeah.

During the... What was i? It was in the last thousand years or so, right. There was a period of warming where we're growing, where grapes could be grown in the south.

It's just too cold now. May well come back with climate change.

It's pretty cool.

So yeah, Britons have never really been big winemakers. They might be wine consumers, but they were typically buying it from France. They're at war with France for, you know, 50% of their time, off and on, for hundreds of years. So you couldn't do that and then they'd buy it from Spain or Portugal or wherever. But Europe, in itself, which is the home of winemaking. A lot of our heritage, cultural heritage, has come from Europe. So people have brought wine drinking and wine making out with them.

And the different varietals.

The whole number of different varietals, and Australian climate and soils is very similar, certainly climate is very similar to Mediterranean. European Mediterranean climate. And so it's made for growing grapes. We have a huge grape growing areas.

I went to Dan Murphy's and I was like, "If I really like the Spanish reserva red wines what do you recommend me trying out that's from here in Australia?" And she's like, "Oh, man, there's heaps here because the land here, where we have a lot of the wineries, is very similar to that of Spain." Blew my mind.

Yeah. So there's that. And we also now have a huge number of new grape varieties being tried, again. Because we're... Back in the olden days you drank white wine, you'd drink Moselle, a German sweet wine, or you'd drink Riesling, a German not-so-sweet wine. You drank red, you drank cabernet sauvignon or you drank Shiraz. And the red wine industry is still completely dominated by Shiraz and cabernet sauvignon, with a bit of merlot thrown in, but there are a whole lot of other varieties that are coming up.

Here's a question for you. Where do you reckon the name 'Shiraz' originates?

Is it Middle East?

Where?

Turkey?

No. Close.

Where?

Further south.

Israel?

It's Iran.

Iran?

Yeah. So Shiraz is actually from Iran.

Yeah.

The wine variety anyway. Yeah. And I remember always thinking, "Why the hell does Shiraz have a Z on the end of it? Is that like Spanish or something?" Had some Iranian students who told me that so...

I'd shoot for Farsi.

Exactly. Exactly. Although they would say 'Iranian.'

Or Persian.

Persian, sorry. Yeah, Persian. You're right. All right. Yeah. So it is a huge thing, though.

It is a huge thing.

Why are Australian wines so appreciated overseas? Because it seems like we have a very good reputation.

Because we make lots of it. We make some very good ones.

They've got a lot to choose from.

They have.

But because we make... Because we have such huge growing areas in Australia, it means that we can produce good quality wine in bulk, which means it's cheap to sell. So it's cheap to sell overseas. The irony is you can go to America. You can go to Britain. You can go to Canada. You can buy a good bottle of Australian wine over the counter cheaper than you can buy it in Australia, unless you go to a restaurant, in which case it's four times the price.

Why is that?

Well, because it's considered to be exotic.

No, no, no. Why is it cheaper there?

Well, because we pay, even in Australia, we pay a huge tax on alcohol.

On our own as well.

On our own. And many countries don't pay tax on alcohol and they pay a lot less duty on bringing foreign goods into the country. So, yeah, I remember being in San Diego years ago and went out to a restaurant with some friends who were Canadians and later said, "Oh, look, some Australian wines on the menu. Why don't we have one?"

And you're like, "God, no, don't! It's going to be too expensive!"

I went, "You are kidding me!" There was a bottle of wine there that was 400 dollars to buy in this restaurant. And I looked and said, "I know I can buy that bottle of wine in Australia for about 45 to 50 dollars. On sale, 29.99." And it was because it was not.. A lot of our wines now are... We sell, send the labels, and we send bulk containers and they bottle them over there. Mostly because we don't put corks in wine now. We use screw caps in a lot of places, particularly in America. If it doesn't have a cork in it, people look and go, "This is cheap, cheap rubbish." So they like to cork their own bottles. But yeah. So I think those, where they actually send the bottles over there, are much more expensive.

So desert frogs resurface after months, and sometimes years underground waiting for the rain. I love this story because I think a lot of people see the Australian desert and think it's pretty barren of wildlife, of nature, of organisms. So frogs, people would probably be interested to know, exist across the entire continent of Australia, right. Even in some of the driest parts. So frogs are one of the most common species in an arid desert. There are places where there are hundreds of thousands of frogs living under the ground at any one time, but they're rarely seen. And the interesting thing I found was that they can live up to 20 years, but they may only surface something like 3 or 4 times throughout their entire life. So they're effectively dormant, hibernating...

Yeah, exactly. Waiting for water to come through. And how do you think they know when to come up?

It'll be a change in humidity in the soil.

It's the tapping of the rain on the... Apparently the vibrations from the rain hitting the soil. So yeah, 50 millimetres of rain recently fell in Stirt National Park and hundreds of frogs began to emerge from the sand, waiting for their opportunity to surface and mate. And yeah, it's a long time between drinks. I thought I would I would share that expression.

It is. Yeah, it's a good one. And look, I think that's something...

What's the other use of that, by the way? It can be literally for drinks, or it can be talking about sex. So they obviously have to move fast, and the interesting thing was when they come up...

They have sex and then bury themselves again.

Yeah, but they... The babies... When the mate, they lay eggs. And then those tadpoles have to become adults, and then potentially mate before the water dries up and then go back underground to hopefully wait for maybe another five to 10 years before the next rain comes.

Yeah. And they shed their outer layer of skin and it dries and effectively becomes a sort of a cocoon around them, that means that they... Rest of their water doesn't evaporate.

Yeah.

What's going on biologically there. How do they slow themselves down?

Almost all animals can do that. We have that... Everything from mammals that hibernate through to other reptiles and frogs and things that... Aestivation, rather than hibernating. Effectively just shutting their physiology down to a bare minimum.

Because you would imagine they would have to stop cell division, they would have to really slow their metabolism down. But it seems astonishing that they have...

And mammals can't do that...

... Evolved to do it.

... Because we are, you know, what's euphemistically known as warm blooded, which means that we've got to... We maintain our body temperature at a certain temperature the whole time. And that requires a huge amount of energy to do that. Just to maintain a body temperature is more than 50% of the energy that we take in. And whereas if you're so-called 'cold blooded' animals like reptiles and amphibians, you don't need to do that. And so you can really shut your physiology down because you don't have to spend a huge amount of energy and effort just to keep yourself alive, which just means maintaining your body temperature.

There are some crazy stories. I remember watching a doco... I don't know if it was a Burmese python. It might have been a boa constrictor or something. And it was a massive python, whatever it was. And I remember it was slithering into this puddle or a pond of water. Just waited for days, for weeks, for months. And then finally a deer came up and it just grabbed it, killed it, ate it, and just went back into sitting there and just digested it. And apparently it only eats once or twice a year. And it's just like...

If you don't have to maintain your body temperature, there's not much else that you need to do. You're not moving.

What a shitty existence.

They aren't choosing to do it. It's just what they do. I know, I know.

But imagine that. You're like... Wake up one day, you know, you've been given the gift of consciousness and it turns out you're a frog that lives underground, asleep for five to ten years at a time.

A long time between drinks. Which is an interesting sort of Segway into the difference between Australian deserts and many other places in the world, particularly America. You know, the United States and Central America have got lots of desert, but their deserts... And people often look at Australian deserts and go, "where are your succulents, where you cacti?" We don't have them because we have such intermittent rain... In American deserts ,they will have rain every year, rain every few months. It's seasonal. And so having plants, in particular that can store water, succulent plants that can store water, makes sense. In Australia, they will have places that don't have rain for ten years.

Well this is why it's so characterised by droughts and floods, right?

It is. Yeah. And so if it doesn't rain for 10 years, no point being a succulent. You simply cannot hold enough water to last you 10 years.

You'd have to have pretty deep roots.

And then for half of each year, your temperature is going to be in the 40s, if not 50 degrees Celsius. And then during night-time you can freeze... And again, freezing is not a good thing to do if you're holding a lot of water because you have cells explode. So we just simply don't have those sort of deserts where you've got plant life around that is large succulents. We have these little scrubby things that people will often just generically call 'saltbush,' often because they are surviving around areas that are salty. And the reason they are around areas that are salty is because there are areas that get... There are low areas that get intermittent water. And when that water evaporates out, it leaves salt behind. So there's salt tolerant things. They're not there because the desert contains salt. They're there because the places that the water selects have salt.

Well, that's why spinifex... You'll find these plants in the Australian outback tend to have very small leaves. Small surface area...

And the leaves are really just spiky.

And the leaves have adapted and evolved to contain as much water as possible, right. Have as little amount of surface area is possible, but they have this balance. They have to be able to photosynthesise whilst maintaining water...

Which means you've got to... And photosynthesis means you've got to actually be losing water.

Yeah, it's really cool. But I thought I would use this as a segway to talk about the Lake Eyre Basin. Why is that place so special?

Because it's the lowest point in Australia mainland.

How low is it? A few metres below sea level.

About 45 metres, something like that, below sea level. Don't know, look it up.

It was an inland sea in the past.

Yes, yes. Millions of years ago. So it's a low level basin, which means that it is... That taking out the Murray-Darling system, river system, which is south eastern Australia, that sort of more northern Central Australia. Almost all the rivers drain into it.

Yeah, this is above Adelaide, above Port Augusta in South Australia...

Central South Australia.

Border of New South Wales.

So a lot of those inland rivers in northern New South Wales, in Queensland, in South Australia, in the Northern Territory drain into it. And so if it rains, it very rarely rains, ironically, where lake Eyre is, but it will flood. It will fill up because it's rained in south western Queensland. And so you get these flooding rivers coming down and it's got nowhere else to go. It just effectively creates this little inland sea.

It's astonishing the amount of life that suddenly appears there, right. Because for probably, what, nine out of ten years, it'll just be a dry wasteland with a lot of salt. And then all of a sudden one, you know, summer or whatever, once there's some rain in the north of Australia and Queensland, it drains in and all of a sudden you've got millions of birds, fish, crayfish, all kinds of small crustaceans. Insects, mammals...

And again they pop out really quickly. Well the fish, a lot of them are going to get washed down from river systems.

True.

Others will have eggs that are effectively sitting in aestivation in the salt pan. And that's where most of the invertebrates are, these little crustaceans and insects and things that will just pop out of... Literally pop out of the ground as soon as they get wet.

But I love that relationship between flooding and the desert, that water and the arid environment, and how much it's affected the adaptation of a lot of Australia's wildlife to be able to survive there, that they have to kind of live fast, right. And one of the other...

Reproduce. And then you're gone.

Yeah. One of the other cool stories is that notomies, which is the hopping mouse found in Australia, there's about five different species that are still around. I think about 10, five of which are extinct. But those guys have the most efficient kidneys of any mammal in... They're so efficient that the seeds and plants that they eat contain enough water that these animals never have to drink. And so their kidneys...

Just reabsorb water.

Yeah, they can just reabsorb water. And I think the only time that they ever drink is when they have offspring that urinate in their little nest. The parents will actually drink the urine of the offspring because it's obviously such a gift. Manna from the heavens that they can't give up. But I remember learning about that in just being like, "What?" We have an animal, that's a mammal, that doesn't need a drink and doesn't pee. You know, what a weird life, that'd be like living a life where you'd have to breathe.

It is. It's weird. And look, the other thing about that Lake Eyre Basin is the number of large birds that flock there and breed. Pelicans, Australian pelicans, which we think of as coastal birds... Tens of thousands of them, when there's a flooded Lake Eyre, go there and breed.

And how do they know?

"How do they know?" That was question is that did somebody ring them up, say, "Hey, Fred, get off your perch down in Port Macquarie on the coast of New South Wales and fly up here because shit's happening."

Especially when it's not an annual thing, where you get like "We got this last year. We'll get it this year."

"Oh, hey, it's September. Tick, tick, tick, tock. Let's go."

But do you think they're following the water?

They may. And that might be the thing. They may well just be cruising around that sort of central eastern Australia, following water courses.

And they know as it expands out, they can get more food.

"There's a flood in the Barcoo River, which just follow the Barcoo down as the flood's going." Because they're going ot be there to going for fish, but they're not fishing in Lake Eyre. They're breeding. Primarily they're just breeding. Which there are fish there but they're not coming there to fish. They're coming there to breed. And the only reason they can breed there is because there's fish to feed their young. So it's a really weird one.

Would you recommend people go there if they get the chance?

Well, I've never been there in the flood. I've been to Lake Eyre when it's a salt pan. And it's an impressive sight when...

This is where some of the land speed records have been done with cars, right? It's flat.

By definition, it's flat. Because when you've got a water surface, which is flat, evaporating, the salt becomes flat as well. It's an interesting place to go where you can stand on the shore and the horizon is... 180 degrees, is just a flat white line.

There's some insane photos of sunsets there where it almost looks like the sky just blends into the ground. You're just like, "What the Hell?"

And the mirages there are the most amazing you've ever seen. Because it's when you're there in the heat, it's just, you know, the air is... Because it's white, it's reflecting the heat, you know, so much that it's amazing. But not a place to go if you're not good on your survival skills, though, and you don't want to make a mistake.

There's not much to survive off if you get stuck there.

I know. But we have European tourists every year, and not just Lake Eyre, but one of the most famous stories about, you know, two German tourists who, you know, flew to Darwin or Perth, picked up a four wheel drive and drove it through the centre. And the road to Lake Eyre, it's about... I think it's about 40 kilometres from the main highway. You just drive along this relatively... Not maintained, but relatively well-driven track. So you're not going to necessarily get bogged or whatever. But they actually did. They got bogged when they got to the car park at Lake Eyre and they were fine staying there for a while. But the woman was a marathon runner and she said, Well, I'll go for help." And her partner, husband, just said, "No, I can't." Yeah, he was ill. And she died.

Stay with the car.

Stay in the car. And the irony is, when they had somebody... Eventually they came... Somebody drove in and saw them there and then they put rescue people to come and rescue the guy. They found the woman on the track. It took 30 seconds for somebody to get them out. Lowered the tire pressure in the vehicle and it just drove out of the bog. So you have to know how to drive. But you also have to know how to survive and stay with the vehicle. And that... At those temperatures, when it's over 40 degrees, you need at least a litre of water an hour to survive. How long is it going to take your normal person, let alone a marathon runner, but you know, person to walk 40 kilometres in that temperature? It's going to take you two days. That's 24 kilograms of water you have to carry. And she probably took a water bottle with her.

Stay with the car.

Mammals study explains why females live longer. A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has looked into the lifespan in wild mammals and found that females lived substantially longer than males on average. I mean, they looked at 101 species, 60% of the populations' analysed females, they showed that they outlived males. And on average, it was almost 19%, 18.6% longer than male species. The previous estimate was 8%.

No, I haven't read this one yet but the old story used to be people thought it was stress. Stress hormones in the body for males were higher. There's obviously higher risk. Males are riskier in general, and not just in humans, in almost all mammal species. And they also compete for mates, so they're fighting each other. So combine those. And I think the stress hormones one is probably because they're stressed about finding a mate and they're having to fight to keep them.

I think they tie in. But the main takeaway was environmental conditions, obviously, and sex-specific genetic variations. So differences between the genders genetically and so it was interesting.

Something related to stress hormones and behaviour, again.

They were talking about in humans, of people who lived to 110 years old or more, nine out of ten are women.

Yeah.

And yeah, it's consistent since the first consistent birth records were taken in the 18th century. And one example they used was male bighorn sheep. When natural resources are consistently available, there's little difference between the two genders and how long they live. But one location they were looking at had very severe winters and all the males pretty much died much sooner than the females as a result of those environmental conditions suddenly becoming much harsher.

But they'll also probably be out there competing with other males. The females are just going to be around going, "Oh, hey, how are you Betty?" "Alright, Velma. Going good." And the males are going, "Piss off, piss off. This is mine!"

Exactly. So they were using a lot more resources towards sexual competition and growth of a larger body mass and maintenance of that body mass and they might be more sensitive to environmental conditions. So, yeah, it was pretty interesting. And they were saying that in humans it's expected that the extra X chromosome in women is a protective thing. However, that manifests itself, it's protect... It is a protective effect against harmful mutations, potentially, and may be the same in other species. We talk about the wage gap a lot on the news, at times.

The age gap.

With with the idea that women get paid less than men for the same work, which isn't true. You know, that's illegal. But why don't we talk about the age gap? In terms of we have something here that's measurable where we're showing that women live 18% longer than men. Men are dying sooner. And that just gets completely *shh*. Why do we never talk about those sorts of things? Is it just not sexy? Or are men just like, "Ah, whatever,"?

I think it's one of those things where it's probably out of our control at the superficial level. Yes, we could say, well, you know, "we need better healthcare for men," you know, because we know that men are going to die earlier. If we want men to live as long as women, we're going to need better health care for men. Then sitting on top of that. You sit there and go, "Well, why we then artificially saying we're going to give better health care to one group of the population than the other group just because of their physiology?" Which is effectively what it is.

Most of which is actually related to behaviour. So if you don't want to compete for a mate, if you don't want to do this, you don't, you can choose not to. But that's then overriding your testosterone effectively. So it's a really tough one to do. But I think that's probably... It comes down to, "Is this something that we can directly control?" You know, we can directly control wages for people, like it is illegal for people in Australia to be paid less based on gender.

But I think the problem there is that there is still a discrepancy because of biological traits and preferences that the different genders have.

Yeah, and there's... And some of that is purely historical, that... It's not as big a problem now. It's still a problem. But in many cases, men were being artificially selected for jobs by other men. And the higher up you went in an organisation, the more likely you were to be judged than employed by men. And so men were going to be employed in those positions. And it was... Certainly in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, not that I was alive in the 40s, but the 50s and 60s, when a woman got married she couldn't go and work. Very few jobs, other than nursing and teaching, very few jobs were available to women. And there was the hangover from that, which has fortunately disappeared.

But that manifests itself in many different ways...

But those things we can change. But we can't change physiology.

But for example, I know that breast cancer research receives a shitload more money than prostate cancer research, which accounts for many more deaths than breast cancer does, which seems to be one of...

It's one of the old... It's not exactly a gag because it's funny, but, you know, the old... An oncologist will tell you that if men live long enough, they're going to die of prostate cancer because every man over the age of 50 has prostate cancer. It might be a few little cells sitting there that are never going to grow up in the next 30, 40, 50 years. Again, it's one of those ones where you say, "Well, do we take money away from something that kills one in eight women?" Or at least one in eight women get affected by it? Now, one in seven, I believe. And those numbers aren't getting worse. We're just getting better at detecting it.

Not even necessarily taking money away. But we don't talk about those sorts of things... It's interesting when it comes to generating money for health. it's much more left up to sort of the media coverage and people's reaction to it as opposed to the utilitarian "This is where the most good can be done, the most lives can be saved."

And look, again, I don't want to be flippant about it, but breasts are sexy. In the loosest sense of the word, prostates are not.

Well, most people wouldn't even know where or what it is.

Exactly right. Exactly right. So it's easy to raise money for something that is obvious and that we're all aware of than it is for something that, you know, most people don't know anything about.

The very last one here...

There's a last one? This is going to go on forever. I have to teach at 6.30pm tonight.

Sorry. Before we finish up, there was a documentary I was watching on Foreign Correspondents called A Trade in Fake Orphans Is Being Driven by Western Donations. Oh, that's probably the story on it. That's not the documentary's name. But they were effectively showing that in Nepal, a lot of these children from poor and rural communities are being trafficked into the cities to pose as orphans, or the parents are promise that they'll get a really good education. They'll get a really good life. They get taken away from these... Their parents, their families, their villages, and taken to these illegal orphanages, which need orphans because they can't get money to become legal if they don't have them.

And, yeah, it seemed like this really disgusting trade. And I was sort of like, you know, "There are eight million children across the world in orphanages, with 80% of them estimated to have a parent that could care for them." Who's to blame for this, in terms of who... Where does the where does the responsibility lie? Because we have such a huge culture in Western countries like Australia of giving money to foreign organisations that show orphans on the TV or children all the time. That seems to be a button they press a lot. And the more I learn about this, the more I feel like, you know, are we to blame? Is this us causing this problem?

This is a similar conundrum to the poaching of rhinos, where you've got a motivation for people who are in poverty to get money. If you can, and not even just sell your children as in, "I'm going to sell my child to make money," but, "I can allow my child to be put into this situation so that I can get paid for it." And in many cases, those you know, those orphanages are going to have this sort of shuffling of people through them that are not necessarily ever going to be adopted that down. Well, you're 10 years old now. You're out on the street. See you later. Go back to your parents. I don't even know who your parents were anymore. But go back them.

A lot of them don't get that.

No, I know.

They don't even know. They have their names changed legally, so they can't even find their parents ultimately.

Poverty is to blame. Then there's not a person. It's not a social solution. And so, therefore, the solutions are complex. It's very hard to run down charity, as a concept, as in those who can afford it, helping out those who can't. You know, as a concept, that's something that our society relies on a huge amount.

But it is sad to see that it is being manipulated.

And so I think... And I certainly... I try not to start with the words 'you should' in a sentence, but I certainly do my due diligence on charities that I give money to and sometimes there are very large well-known charities... I'm not going to name them in particular because it would be inappropriate and it's probably going to be libellous, but there are very large charities around the world who earn billions of dollars a year that are effectively manipulating people emotionally to give money based on starving children. Some of them that are doing things, they're raising money for a particular... One very large organisation raised billions of dollars for the tsunami relief. What was that? 10 years ago was something.

That happened in Indonesia...

The Indian Ocean Tsunami. And because of the way they raised money, those funds are put into accounts that have to be used for that. Now, there's nothing more that they can use it for because it's gone. It's finished. It's done. And there are hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in this organisation that they can't use for anything else. And they need to change the constitution of their organisation in order to be able to do it. So even some of the really big well-known ones that you just think, you know, "Who's not going to give money to this group?" You've got to start to look at it...

And, you know, the Australian bushfire one is a good example of that. And I'm not going to run down the New South Wales Rural Fire Service.

Well it's not their fault.

But they have probably half a billion dollars of funds sitting there, going, "What the hell are we going to do with this?" And fortunately, I think they are also in a position where they don't have the constitution set up there. They can effectively give it away to anybody else. Yeah, they can give it back to the government and say, "We'll put it into a fund you can use for this," and so on.

But I think you were right in that there were quite a few that were like, "We want money. We need money to help with our problem. But if you give us too much, we can't we can't give it away. There's nothing that we can do."

I know. So...

Or they can't use it for other things. I think the Red Cross was saying that they got a heap of money and it was, you know, helping, but they're stuck to only use it for the reason they were given the money.

Yeah, exactly. And so do your due diligence on charities. And I think the more esoteric a charity is, the more it needs to be looked at, because there are... There are certainly opportunities for being... There are plenty of scam charities around. And this is not to say that in the case of, you know, children in orphanages who want need to be adopted, they're not scams in the general sense, because those children exist.

That's one of the most fucking offensive things about this process. And I'm not angry necessarily with, you know, these countries or these people or with myself. But it's the fact that there are orphans who do need money, who do need help, and that when you find out about stuff like this, it makes you just want to say, "Well, fuck it, I'm not I'm never donating money again to anyone because I can't trust anyone." Which is a sad thing in and of itself, right?

Yeah. They're creating precedents that, you know, that mean that other good things just don't happen. But look, there are certainly plenty of agencies around the world for orphans to be adopted. But adoption isn't a thing, particularly overseas. Adoption is an expensive thing.

Which it should be. Because you don't someone just flying over...

"Oh, I'll just fly to Kathmandu and give me a kid," and fly home again. It should be a well vetted process, but yeah, it's a tough one.

Well, I want to give a shout out to Kate van Door, who is in this documentary. It was a big thing on her. And she's got an organisation called Forget Me Not. And after she volunteered for these illegal orphanages and discovered all of this, she set up an organised organisation to find the parents of these children and has been helping all of them get reunited. And so it was pretty touching seeing that. But yeah, it is a big thing you're just like, "Oh man." What do you do?

Well, you know, it's that... I have a sort of general principle. And this is again, not a 'you should,' this is an 'I do,' where I don't give to charities who cold call over the phone.

A hundred percent.

And it doesn't matter whether the. I think they are reasonable or not.

Don't contact me that way.

Yeah. And I and I've had arguments... The bizarre thing is... A little piece of advice, if you ever working for a charity and you're doing cold calling and...

Don't ring my dad.

Don't ring me. But but don't argue with the person when they say no. This is my choice. I had a person ring me, and again, won't name the charity but it's a perfectly reasonable charity to be giving money to. And I said, "No. Look, I give money to other charities and, you know, I've given the amount of money that I'm happy to give this year." And she said to me, "Well, we're an important charity. You know, this is... People are dying of this disease. Yeah, we need more money." And I said, "Okay, I'll tell you the five things I give money to you. Tell me which one of those is less important than you." And she said, "Well, that's not the point." And I said, "It's exactly the point." And hung up.

Yeah, but, you know, that's a personal story. But it's one of those things where almost every charity, other than the scams, almost every charity is a genuine charity in the sense of they're doing good things. Some of them, I think, and some of the very large ones, I think spend a huge amount of money on infrastructure and not much of that money gets through to the other end. But sometimes you have to be big in order to do good work, but spend a bit of time on... Where's the money going and what's it actually going to do?

No worries. Thanks so much, Dad for coming on the podcast.

I know. That was a good one, wasn't it?

I know. Lot's in there. Didn't mention covid too much.

Hey, look, we might end up doing this by Skype next week if we're told we're not allowed to leave our homes, which is happening in in Britain. I've got people that I am friends with and YouTube pals and things that are doing YouTube videos saying, "I can't leave my house. So you're stuck with me for the next few weeks sitting in my office."

And that's why I was trying to squeeze two out of this.

We'll do one next week, assuming we're both still alive. It may well be talking through a computer screen.

Fingers crossed. See you guys.

See you.