# AE 1410 - The Goss: Scotland, Safaris, and the Future of English - Dad’s 2026 Plans Revealed

An episode of [Aussie English](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1089059076), 5 Apr 2026, 33 min.

Audio: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2011718/episodes/18934738-ae-1410-the-goss-scotland-safaris-and-the-future-of-english-dad-s-2026-plans-revealed.mp3

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## Transcript

[0:21] SPEAKER_01: So today I have a guest episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, in Smithson, 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.
[0:38] SPEAKER_01: Okay, and we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right?
[0:42] SPEAKER_01: If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goth.
[0:49] SPEAKER_01: 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.
[1:03] SPEAKER_01: So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills.
[1:07] SPEAKER_01: In order to complement that though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the Academy membership at ozbeenglish.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.
[1:28] SPEAKER_01: Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time, keep practicing, and that is the quickest way to level up your English.
[1:38] SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit, I've been talking a bit.
[1:42] SPEAKER_01: Let's just get into this episode, guys.
[1:44] SPEAKER_01: Smack the bird, and let's get into it.
[1:52] SPEAKER_02: How's it going, Dad?
[1:53] SPEAKER_02: Going well, Pete.
[1:59] SPEAKER_02: Or not remove, depending on your how much you're willing to edit.
[2:04] SPEAKER_02: So you've got um we just did an episode on plans for 2026, and you mentioned I think you had one or two trips for this year.
[2:11] SPEAKER_00: One big one this year, yeah.
[2:13] SPEAKER_00: Um going to Scotland for five weeks.
[2:16] SPEAKER_02: Oh, look out.
[2:18] SPEAKER_02: Why Scotland?
[2:18] SPEAKER_00: Why not?
[2:19] SPEAKER_00: Whiskey.
[2:20] SPEAKER_00: Whiskey.
[2:20] SPEAKER_00: No, we're actually I I may end up well certainly be drinking.
[2:24] SPEAKER_00: May end up.
[2:25] SPEAKER_00: I may end up going to a distillery or two, but that's not that's not the we're not going to the um area that's got our favourite distillery.
[2:33] SPEAKER_00: Isla Yeah.
[2:34] SPEAKER_00: Is the Isle of Isla.
[2:36] SPEAKER_00: Um yes, the Isle of Isla and the Isle of Skye.
[2:39] SPEAKER_00: Um But no, it was yeah, I've only ever been to Scotland once and so has your mother, and we just loved it.
[2:45] SPEAKER_00: And so we thought um go back and do some places that we haven't seen.
[2:50] SPEAKER_00: And I've always had uh Orkney and Shetland, the two groups of islands that are part of Scotland, but north of the for want of a better term, if you can have mainland on an island uh mainland Scotland.
[3:03] SPEAKER_00: Funnily enough, the two main islands, one in Orkney and one in Shetland, are both called mainland.
[3:07] SPEAKER_00: So you go from mainland Scotland to mainland Orkney to mainland Shetland.
[3:12] SPEAKER_02: So what is it about that place that has a pull on you?
[3:15] SPEAKER_02: Um well why do you want to go there?
[3:17] SPEAKER_00: Wildlife.
[3:18] SPEAKER_00: Um so there's lots of birds and you know, dolphins and seals and stuff.
[3:22] SPEAKER_00: Um but also um the history and pre-history.
[3:26] SPEAKER_00: So both Orkney and Shetland have had you know human occupation for thousands of years.
[3:32] SPEAKER_00: And there's these yeah, a lot of old, you know, Iron Age, Bronze Age sites that that um uh are still there, and you can go and walk around the ruins of them and stuff and they're gonna be able to do that.
[3:44] SPEAKER_00: And Viking too, right?
[3:45] SPEAKER_00: You've got the Viking era.
[3:46] SPEAKER_00: And then there's a Viking era as well.
[3:48] SPEAKER_00: So there's there's Viking villages that are you know a thousand years old.
[3:52] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh, and um and they're you know the remnants of those.
[3:57] SPEAKER_00: Um so it's um just somewhere that I've always wanted to go.
[4:00] SPEAKER_02: Well and you're half Scottish, so I guess that's like too.
[4:04] SPEAKER_00: My father was born about as far away from northern Scotland as you can get and still call yourself Scottish, but um but I've got do have relatives.
[4:12] SPEAKER_00: Um you know my um two times great grandparents came from northern Scotland, so yeah it would be good to be.
[4:18] SPEAKER_02: I assume it's pretty mixed in terms of the genetics and everything.
[4:21] SPEAKER_02: You would have all been in the over the last few hundred years at least, or probably even earlier than that, moving around quite a bit.
[4:27] SPEAKER_02: I remember watching like really nerding out on that sort of Bronze Age, Iron Age history with Time Team and then other documentaries um over the last year or so.
[4:36] SPEAKER_02: With your Time Team binge.
[4:38] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I know, finish all 19 seasons in about, I don't know, half a year.
[4:41] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they're still going, I think.
[4:42] SPEAKER_00: There's just there's little odd bits, but there's not like it's not a weekly thing, but they're still doing special.
[4:48] SPEAKER_02: I think they have like specific they organise a grant, a certain amount of money that they can put together and then they can go to a certain location and do it over a few days.
[4:56] SPEAKER_02: But Time Team is a really good series if you're interested in archaeology, especially in the UK, obviously.
[5:01] SPEAKER_02: Um I don't know if they do Ireland.
[5:03] SPEAKER_02: They probably do if they get into it.
[5:05] SPEAKER_00: I think there's the odd one that they've done in Ireland, but it's mostly in Scotland.
[5:09] SPEAKER_00: It's almost entirely in England, a few places in Scotland and Wales, but But it's just really cool to learn about that history, and it's so because it was obviously pre-writing, right?
[5:19] SPEAKER_02: Like the Romans were the first group to get to the UK that that were literate in terms of writing history down.
[5:25] SPEAKER_02: So prior to that there's just very little understanding of what was going on, and it's just really cool to learn about it.
[5:31] SPEAKER_02: It was funny, I was watching one doco about um I think they found a skeleton of a woman in the UK somewhere from a certain period that would have been Iron Age or Bronze Age, and they did the the bone um isotope analysis and worked out that she was actually from the Balkans or something, or from somewhere like Israel or you know, somewhere crazy.
[5:51] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and it turns out that uh they when they dug in, pun intended, and looked at a lot of different um uh skeletons.
[6:00] SPEAKER_02: Dad's famous.
[6:01] SPEAKER_02: Dad's no unknown call, it's gonna be spam.
[6:04] SPEAKER_00: It's spam, and it is spam just by the phone.
[6:06] SPEAKER_00: Sorry about that.
[6:07] SPEAKER_00: It's a call coming from Madagascar.
[6:09] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[6:10] SPEAKER_02: I love that.
[6:11] SPEAKER_00: No, it's all it's always from Melbourne and it's always the same thing.
[6:14] SPEAKER_00: It's uh you know, yeah, there are grants to you know convert you to another electricity provider.
[6:20] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[6:21] SPEAKER_00: Well, it's not there aren't.
[6:22] SPEAKER_00: Can you just send me money?
[6:23] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it's just you know it's a way around, and I you know, the grumpy old fart in me uh says this is just a a way around the rules of not being able to call, spam call.
[6:36] SPEAKER_00: Um because my phone number is on the do not call list.
[6:39] SPEAKER_00: Uh but there are only there are only two conditions, well two uh groups of people that are allowed to call on the no call list, one of which irritates the hell out of me, and that's charities.
[6:51] SPEAKER_00: They get special permission.
[6:52] SPEAKER_00: Um and the not that I have a problem with charities, but why should they why is a charity any different from a small business?
[7:00] SPEAKER_00: Um but the other one is anything in government business can, um, which is obvious.
[7:06] SPEAKER_00: But um these guys get around it by going, well, you know, there's a you know you can get a hundred dollar grant to um you know change your electricity.
[7:16] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, I've looked it up and the my provider is the cheapest one I can get anyway.
[7:20] SPEAKER_00: So I'm not gonna change, I'm not gonna get the hundred dollars.
[7:22] SPEAKER_00: Get off.
[7:23] SPEAKER_00: Um so yes, there's about one or two phone calls a day with those.
[7:28] SPEAKER_00: And the trouble is you can't block them because they just have robots behind them and it's a different phone number every time.
[7:34] SPEAKER_02: So anyway, back to the story.
[7:36] SPEAKER_00: Back to the story.
[7:37] SPEAKER_02: So they were digging up these um these skeletons and doing this analysis on them throughout Europe, and I think they found they were called the beaker people.
[7:45] SPEAKER_02: Yes.
[7:45] SPEAKER_02: So once they got to the UK, all of a sudden from mainland Europe, this technology of creating beakers, I think they're they're where they put the um cremated remains.
[7:54] SPEAKER_02: They put them in beakers and then bury them instead of burying bodies or or just cremating them and putting them in certain locations.
[7:59] SPEAKER_02: They have a beaker, uh, an actual like vessel made of clay or pottery or whatever that they put them in.
[8:04] SPEAKER_02: But um they showed that there was so much movement of these people from mainland Europe all the way up to the UK, down to Spain, you know, or into towards the Middle East, and that the you know, even if you were born in one location you could move thousands of kilometres, which to me is mind-blowing, because you just assume back then with hunter-gatherer type societies, yeah, you wouldn't expect it.
[8:27] SPEAKER_02: Um, but they showed this woman had come thousands of kilometres and had likely walked it, obviously, through the mainland.
[8:35] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but I mean, you know, not using horses or other things, it would have just taken a trail, it would have been insanely difficult and and dangerous.
[8:42] SPEAKER_02: And I guess it also makes you think these people either spoke multiple languages or it was, you know, relatively intelligible languages that they could use or share or or whatever at the time.
[8:52] SPEAKER_02: So I don't know, I find that stuff really fascinating and and what we think we know about them is so so limited to you know a few things that we find in their in the archaeological digs.
[9:04] SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I would be that'd be one of the biggest reasons I think for me to go to the UK.
[9:08] SPEAKER_02: It'd be like I want to go to these sites, see them, feel them, experience them as someone who has heritage there and think these are my people.
[9:17] SPEAKER_02: But the other thing that's crazy from going through those time team episodes is that like different humans and different species of human, you know, have like includ including Neandertals and Erectus, um Homo erectus, have lived on that island, the UK, for over a million years, but then been wiped out during uh glaciation.
[9:37] SPEAKER_02: So when you've had ice ages, the ice caps have expanded.
[9:40] SPEAKER_02: Too cold and covered it.
[9:42] SPEAKER_02: Multiple kilometres of ice have covered the UK, and then they retreat again.
[9:46] SPEAKER_02: And so I think apparently modern humans have only lived in the UK for uh eight thousand years or so.
[9:51] SPEAKER_02: Something like that, eight to ten thousand years, yeah.
[9:53] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because it was covered in ice previous to that.
[9:55] SPEAKER_02: But then before that, there were a few hundred thousand years earlier than that, there were other hominids and Neanderthals, and then a million years ago they have evidence of other humans living there and hunting as well, and you're just like, isn't that crazy that it's been colonized multiple times by different waves of different humans?
[10:11] SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, I can imagine going to Well, it's not hard to get to.
[10:14] SPEAKER_00: I think that's the other thing too, is that it's you know, even now it's only what is it, twenty something kilometers across the city.
[10:21] SPEAKER_00: Well, during glaciation that would have been good.
[10:23] SPEAKER_00: And it would have been, yeah, exactly.
[10:29] SPEAKER_02: But yeah, it's it's weird.
[10:31] SPEAKER_02: I always envy people who live in Europe, and espe especially the UK, just because of the amount of archaeological stuff they've done and that you can see and learn about.
[10:40] SPEAKER_02: That you can just go digging anywhere and effectively go through hundreds of thousands of years worth of history.
[10:45] SPEAKER_02: Whereas in Australia, I mean, potentially you could find tens of thousands of years worth of history with indigenous people, but because they didn't have any uh metal um, you know, they didn't have any bronze or iron or any kind of metallurgy, exactly, you don't really find many uh archaeological things that have maintain themselves through thousands of people.
[11:05] SPEAKER_00: Aboriginals also didn't keep much.
[11:08] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
[11:08] SPEAKER_00: So even when they had settlements, yeah, um they didn't you know they didn't keep objects as such.
[11:15] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so um but yeah, I know my um aunt and uncle um lived in Winchester in Hampshire in southern England.
[11:25] SPEAKER_00: And I remember my aunt telling me a story when I was over there visiting her, and I only met her once, um, and um she was saying that the people next door to them um were digging a swimming pool and found skeletal remains and weapons of Oliver Cromwell's army from the civil war in England, which was in the 17th century.
[11:48] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[11:49] SPEAKER_02: Well, the number of times you watch something like Time Team and they'll have started an archaeological dig for that program because someone was doing digging a garden bed or doing something in their backyard, and then all of a sudden they have to stop.
[12:02] SPEAKER_02: I think they do legally, right?
[12:03] SPEAKER_00: If they come across the find human remains.
[12:06] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, or even some of these archaeological archaeological uh artifacts um like coins and everything like that.
[12:13] SPEAKER_02: You have to um let people know that you found them and hand them in and tell them about it.
[12:18] SPEAKER_00: And give them the option access to them for digging it out.
[12:20] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[12:21] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[12:21] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I mean that in my case of my aunts, uh my aunt and uncle, the um their address probably gave it away because they lived in Oliver's Battery Crescent in Winchester, which is Oliver as in Cromwell battery as in Fort.
[12:36] SPEAKER_02: Jeez, that's nuts.
[12:37] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that I guess that that part of it is so foreign to me.
[12:40] SPEAKER_02: That's one of those big differences where Australia, for us at least as as European Australians who recently, you know, arrived in the country, you don't have the same kind of like deep um historical attachment to the land the same way that I feel like Europeans would be.
[12:57] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
[12:58] SPEAKER_02: And that's the thing I envy Indigenous Australians.
[13:00] SPEAKER_00: And that's the irony, is that you know it's an uh it's a standing sort of gag is how do you tell the difference between an Australian and a European?
[13:07] SPEAKER_00: And that is um uh a European thinks a hundred miles or a hundred kilometres is a long way, and Australian thinks a hundred years is a long time, unless you're an Indigenous Australian um because they've got you know the oldest continuous population of people um in the world, and that's you sort of think, yeah, it's it's ironic that you know we our country is only a hundred and twenty-five years old.
[13:32] SPEAKER_00: Um we've only had European settlement here since you know the late 18th century.
[13:40] SPEAKER_00: Um yet we've had people here for sixty thousand years.
[13:43] SPEAKER_02: Well, the saddest thing about it, this is the thing I guess that frustrates me about well, not just Indigenous Australian um culture, history or whatever, is that there's just no written down stories.
[13:54] SPEAKER_02: No.
[13:54] SPEAKER_02: So you can't really get to their stories are all songs and oral.
[13:58] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, but I mean like you don't really get to know any of these characters.
[14:02] SPEAKER_02: There must have been so many interesting stories and people and characters and all sorts of events that happened in the past over whatever 60,000 years that Indigenous people were in Australia, and you have zero that that weren't either more recent handed down orally, in which case you're sort of like, how true are they?
[14:18] SPEAKER_02: How accurate are they?
[14:19] SPEAKER_02: Because they're obviously based on someone's memory to pass it down each time, or they're more recently written down after colonization, but through the eyes or lens of a westerner or a European who's not going to describe things objectively.
[14:32] SPEAKER_02: And certainly not going to understand them either.
[14:34] SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
[14:34] SPEAKER_02: So I feel like that's even if they're trying to be objective.
[14:37] SPEAKER_02: The more you learn about like deep history, it's sort of like the tragedy of it is just not like anytime you watch those docos with Time Team digging up bones, you're like, that was a human that lived a life.
[14:48] SPEAKER_02: Had children probably, had loved ones.
[14:50] SPEAKER_02: What was their day-to-day life like?
[14:52] SPEAKER_02: What were the drama?
[14:53] SPEAKER_02: What were the things they were worried about?
[14:54] SPEAKER_02: What did they do?
[14:54] SPEAKER_02: What are they what were they scared of?
[14:56] SPEAKER_02: What were they not scared of?
[14:58] SPEAKER_02: There are so many questions that you're sort of like you they're close enough to touch, but you can't really see anything, get anything deep from it.
[15:05] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I know, and that's the um the challenge with with any of those, you know, whether it be just general history or family history, of you know, when I wrote you know my family history.
[15:16] SPEAKER_00: Um one of the things I was trying to do in there is to put the stories around the people, not about the people.
[15:23] SPEAKER_00: So, you know, where do they come from and how do they get here and those sort of things, rather than you know, James William Jackson was born on this date in this suburb in this town.
[15:31] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[15:32] SPEAKER_00: Just he married this person.
[15:34] SPEAKER_00: And sometimes that's all you know when you go back 150 years or more, that's all you know.
[15:38] SPEAKER_00: But you want to know why, right?
[15:40] SPEAKER_00: What made you make these choices, make these decisions, decide to do this?
[15:44] SPEAKER_00: And the thing with you know Europeans and you know not all Asians and Africans and you know Americans um migrating to Australia, you you you gotta look at and go, what was the reason?
[15:56] SPEAKER_00: Why did people choose to come here?
[15:58] SPEAKER_00: Now a lot of early Australian settlement with Europeans people didn't have a choice.
[16:02] SPEAKER_00: They were convicts, they were sent here as prisoners.
[16:06] SPEAKER_00: Um but the majority of m immigrants to Australia have come here for you know, to make a better life.
[16:12] SPEAKER_00: So what was their life like where they came from and what was the motivation and what sort of like I can't imagine what it was like a hundred and fifty years and now a hundred and seventy years ago when my first relatives arrived in Australia.
[16:25] SPEAKER_00: The and my great-great grandfather, um he came to Australia with his wife and first child, um and never spoke to his parents again.
[16:38] SPEAKER_00: In fact, his father died before he got here.
[16:41] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[16:41] SPEAKER_00: But he wouldn't have known about that for probably six to twelve months.
[16:45] SPEAKER_00: Because he would have arrived and then probably not written home immediately, but written home it would have taken three or four months for those letters to get home.
[16:53] SPEAKER_00: On a ship, yeah, and then another three or four months to get the letter back going, Oh, by the way, your father died.
[16:59] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I was thinking about that the other day.
[17:00] SPEAKER_02: I'm like, unless someone was dying of a disease incredibly slowly, there must have been so many times where I assume even if you just lived a few tens of kilometres away, you would have only really found out about it th through letters, through mail, or maybe if someone had taken a horse or a cart to see you as quickly as possible.
[17:19] SPEAKER_02: But there must have been so many times where family members were just like, oh, they're dead, and it was days ago, weeks ago, months ago, and and oh, I guess that's it.
[17:28] SPEAKER_02: And how did you view that?
[17:29] SPEAKER_02: I mean it would have been tragic and sad, but is that sort of like, well, that's just what happens?
[17:33] SPEAKER_02: Like what other options are there?
[17:36] SPEAKER_00: We've we're fortunate, um as you know, as family historians and just social historians in general, we're fortunate that a lot of that um family records and things were recorded in letters.
[17:49] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[17:50] SPEAKER_00: Um now, you know, text messages are ephemeral.
[17:54] SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, phone calls are not recorded.
[17:57] SPEAKER_02: I keep wondering about Facebook messages.
[17:59] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so that's it.
[17:59] SPEAKER_02: They're gonna be locked up somewhere.
[18:01] SPEAKER_00: They will, but no point in the account.
[18:04] SPEAKER_00: At what point are they gonna be openly accessible?
[18:06] SPEAKER_00: Well, but you would use only your children, you know, in thirty years' time when I'm dead, and your children are going.
[18:13] SPEAKER_00: What why did Nana and Grandpa get married?
[18:16] SPEAKER_00: What can we find out about them?
[18:18] SPEAKER_00: AI.
[18:18] SPEAKER_02: ChatGPT go through all of Ian Smith's messages on Facebook that are now that are now public.
[18:25] SPEAKER_02: Can you let me know?
[18:25] SPEAKER_02: Most of which would have been.
[18:27] SPEAKER_02: I went and photographed this bird.
[18:28] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[18:29] SPEAKER_02: We're coming over at eight, bring beer.
[18:31] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
[18:32] SPEAKER_02: No, but I wonder, yeah, there'll be a lot I feel like there will be a lot of that sort of the private information catalogued and there for you to use some kind of system to go through at some point of people in the past.
[18:46] SPEAKER_02: Like, and I think I would be inherently interested if I found out that my great-great grandfather had uh the equivalent of a Facebook account 200 years ago or whatever, and had been messaging people on a daily basis.
[18:57] SPEAKER_02: I feel like I would be interested to know what was healing talking about.
[19:00] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, what was he what were his issues?
[19:01] SPEAKER_02: Is he like, you know, uh talking about getting beer, hanging out with people, having a whinge about the neighbour, you know, and and to who?
[19:09] SPEAKER_02: How did he speak to the different friends that he had?
[19:11] SPEAKER_02: Who what was the list of people that he was talking to most and why?
[19:14] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[19:15] SPEAKER_02: And then you realise, oh, he's just on marketplace the whole time looking for guitars.
[19:18] SPEAKER_00: Looking for guitars, yeah, or selling his plants.
[19:20] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
[19:21] SPEAKER_00: Um but mostly I suspect they wouldn't have been those things.
[19:25] SPEAKER_00: There was no necessity to it because communicate other than writing letters to people that you didn't see, your communication was face to face.
[19:32] SPEAKER_00: The people that you work with and your neighbours, um in your village, your town, your suburb, the street if you were living in a big city.
[19:39] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, other than you know, we were talking earlier about people moving thousands of kilometres um in a lifetime on foot, um, but most people just lived in their own local area, you know, for generations.
[19:53] SPEAKER_02: So it is it is interesting the more I sort of learn about and think about convicts, the more I sort of feel sorry for them because a lot of them were trumped up charges.
[20:03] SPEAKER_02: Oh no, it was it was just social cleansing.
[20:06] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it was getting rid of the lower class filth from you know southern England and with a reason of like colonizing Australia.
[20:13] SPEAKER_02: Hey, we can get free labour effectively that are s slaves for seven years or more, send them out there so that they have to do it, and they pretty much don't have any recourse or any way back, and then most likely get a track.
[20:23] SPEAKER_00: And there was never an intention initially for it to be um permanent permanent and developing a city or uh you know a long-term thing.
[20:33] SPEAKER_00: It was, hey, the French are hanging around in the South Pacific, we need to get our foot on the ground out just in case um so that we can claim it for you know king and country.
[20:44] SPEAKER_02: But it must have been just so strange, especially some of those younger people, like I think some of the youngest convicts were like eleven or twelve, right, as kids.
[20:51] SPEAKER_02: And they were likely brought out like a like a few years older than Noah or Izzy, my my niece, you know, being just ripped away from their families with no real ability, probably illiterate, so they probably couldn't even write letters and just pr mm likely to never see them again.
[21:06] SPEAKER_02: And though well, yeah, it it just it'd be like sending someone to Mars today.
[21:11] SPEAKER_02: Like it's just it's just insane to think about what that would have meant for both sides and that the sort of trauma that that must have introduced into society.
[21:20] SPEAKER_02: Like you read a lot about um violence and everything.
[21:24] SPEAKER_00: And even the ones who even the people who were transported for there was sort of you know three tiers really.
[21:29] SPEAKER_00: It was seven years, fourteen years or life.
[21:31] SPEAKER_00: But seven years was life for most of them because they were never going to be able to afford to go back.
[21:37] SPEAKER_02: It'd be like us being able to say that.
[21:40] SPEAKER_00: Be a very odd one of them, became wealthy enough to actually travel back to England.
[21:45] SPEAKER_02: But exactly.
[21:47] SPEAKER_02: And so I think there's very few stories, right, of of that initial batch of convicts actually ever making it home and staying there.
[21:54] SPEAKER_02: Most of them died here, lived here, set up life here, right?
[21:57] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
[21:58] SPEAKER_02: So yeah.
[21:59] SPEAKER_02: Um Anyway, back to plans for future twenty twenty.
[22:02] SPEAKER_00: So you've got the Scotland trip.
[22:03] SPEAKER_00: Scotland, yeah.
[22:04] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[22:05] SPEAKER_00: That's that's this year.
[22:06] SPEAKER_00: So and that's you know that that's really sort of put paid to any other major trips because it's a financial commitment to go away for that long.
[22:16] SPEAKER_02: Are you seeing family over there at all?
[22:17] SPEAKER_00: Or is it just I'm not sure yet.
[22:20] SPEAKER_00: I've got I might drop in depending on what we're doing, we're really just aware or we're landing in London, getting a car and then just driving north.
[22:26] SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
[22:27] SPEAKER_00: Um but um one of your distant cousins through your mother's side um that your mother has been communicating with.
[22:34] SPEAKER_00: Ironically, I was communicating with him about fifteen years ago when I was doing work on your mother's family because.
[22:45] SPEAKER_00: He doesn't return the phone calls, no.
[22:47] SPEAKER_00: So we may go and see him.
[22:48] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, not King Charles, but his other cousins.
[22:51] SPEAKER_00: He he lives just out of out of London.
[22:53] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[22:53] SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, I've I was sort of half thinking about driving down to Winchester and seeing my cousin.
[22:58] SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think that's just going to be too far out of the way now.
[23:02] SPEAKER_02: It's a tiny island.
[23:03] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
[23:03] SPEAKER_02: You're from Australia, it's nothing.
[23:05] SPEAKER_00: It's not even like driving to what Sydney.
[23:07] SPEAKER_00: The other thing is I you know my brother-in-law lives just near the um the place that we'll probably go and see Martin, uh, your mother's sort of fourth or fifth cousin or whatever he is.
[23:19] SPEAKER_00: Um and so may drop in on him, but probably not.
[23:23] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[23:24] SPEAKER_00: And I have no known living relatives in Scotland.
[23:27] SPEAKER_02: There will be relatives there, but none that I'm just doing Ancestry DNA thing, check it out, and then look for your closest hits and just be like, hey, have you got a bed or a couch that I can spend some time?
[23:39] SPEAKER_00: I'm your sixth cousin, allegedly.
[23:42] SPEAKER_02: Oh cool.
[23:43] SPEAKER_02: And what about the trip to Afri Africa?
[23:44] SPEAKER_00: Africa's 2027.
[23:46] SPEAKER_00: Okay.
[23:46] SPEAKER_02: So you've organised that too, you've spent most of my inheritance on that.
[23:49] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, pretty much.
[23:50] SPEAKER_02: Um, it is.
[23:55] SPEAKER_00: But it's also one of those ones where you because the we're going to East Africa, Tanzania, and to Southern Africa, to Botswana, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.
[24:05] SPEAKER_00: And uh because of the type of trips that we want to do there, the safari trips that we want to do in there, you've got to book them more than a year in advance because they they book out so quickly.
[24:18] SPEAKER_02: Sounds like extortion to me, the amount of money it costs.
[24:21] SPEAKER_02: Six figures or something you were saying to get out there and do the whole holiday.
[24:24] SPEAKER_00: To do yeah, but that's that's four separate trips in a six-week period.
[24:29] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[24:30] SPEAKER_00: Uh but yeah, it's not cheap.
[24:31] SPEAKER_00: And you know, the irony is we're not going to Kenya, but you know, Kenya's one of the poorest countries in the world, but it's one of the most expensive places to travel if you want to do that high-end travel.
[24:41] SPEAKER_00: Now, we don't need to stay in you know, five-star hotels and things, but the style of safari that we want to do is small groups, dedicated guides, those sort of things, which means you're uh a lot of moving parts, organisation and you're paying somebody to do the organisation for you.
[25:00] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[25:00] SPEAKER_00: Um but also going to see my I've got a another cousin who lives in um Cape Town, or just out of Cape Town, and her three sons.
[25:09] SPEAKER_00: Um I haven't seen them for 45 years.
[25:13] SPEAKER_00: I only met them once um when they came to Australia.
[25:17] SPEAKER_00: Um so going to see them, and one of her sons is a safari guide.
[25:23] SPEAKER_00: And so he put me onto the company that he works with, yeah, and they're doing the organization for us.
[25:29] SPEAKER_00: You know, we gave them the plan, the rough plan, and they went, right, we can do this, we can do this, we can put you here, we can do that.
[25:34] SPEAKER_00: Um but then you've got to you know pay 25% deposit on it 18 months in advance.
[25:40] SPEAKER_02: Agree.
[25:40] SPEAKER_02: So you're brushing up on your Orsa, Zulu, Swahili.
[25:46] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[25:47] SPEAKER_00: Uh no.
[25:48] SPEAKER_02: I would love to learn Orsa.
[25:49] SPEAKER_02: That would be such a cool language with the clicks.
[25:51] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
[25:52] SPEAKER_00: I it's it's just you don't have a use for it.
[25:55] SPEAKER_02: There's so many languages like that.
[25:57] SPEAKER_02: People always ask me, why don't you learn this one?
[25:59] SPEAKER_00: Why don't you learn Icelandic?
[26:00] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[26:00] SPEAKER_00: There's probably three people in Victoria that speak Icelandic.
[26:04] SPEAKER_00: And there's nobody in Iceland speaks it.
[26:06] SPEAKER_00: They all speak English.
[26:07] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they all speak English phenomenally.
[26:10] SPEAKER_02: I know.
[26:10] SPEAKER_02: No, Closer would be really cool because of just the clicks and the I find that so interesting.
[26:14] SPEAKER_02: They've actually got heaps and heaps and heaps of sounds in those languages, the click languages.
[26:18] SPEAKER_02: There's like loads and loads of different phonemes.
[26:21] SPEAKER_02: So I feel like it would be interesting.
[26:25] SPEAKER_00: With tones.
[26:26] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, you you learnt you know Mandarin for a couple of years at school and um you know, four different ways of pronouncing the same word, and they all mean completely different things.
[26:35] SPEAKER_02: That poem, sure the sure poem, where there's like every single word is sure.
[26:39] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[26:39] SPEAKER_02: But it's like sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure.
[26:43] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's the high, low, rising, dropping, yeah, yeah.
[26:46] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's pretty much it's pretty funny.
[26:48] SPEAKER_02: Well, in Cantonese is even worse.
[26:49] SPEAKER_02: I've got students who are Cantonese, and you look it up, I think there's somewhere between six and nine accents or tones in Cantonese.
[26:56] SPEAKER_02: Um and I'm like, fuck, how do you hear the the one that rises and then there's the one that rises slightly more?
[27:02] SPEAKER_02: Oh no, and rises and levels out.
[27:04] SPEAKER_02: Oh my god, and this is actually important phonemic information that differentiates between the meanings of words.
[27:11] SPEAKER_00: And the the only the only things and we've mentioned it before is the good on you in Australia.
[27:18] SPEAKER_00: Sarcasm and the And it's a lot of Europeans, and I don't know about Asians or Africans, a lot of Europeans cannot hear the difference between good on you and good on you.
[27:29] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well and I think most Australians don't appreciate how the number of times I have call I have now been teaching English for ten years, and you have conversations with either people who are Australian who don't speak foreign languages or even foreigners learning English, they will almost always say English is super easy, um, foreign languages are hard, English is easy, and you'll just be like, all languages are hard.
[27:52] SPEAKER_02: It depends on what your native language is.
[27:53] SPEAKER_02: How close is it to the language that you're trying to learn?
[27:56] SPEAKER_02: Because the further away it is, like Japanese, Arabic, Mandarin, Chinese for English, super fucking hard.
[28:02] SPEAKER_02: And it's it's it's a directional thing, it's like distance, right?
[28:05] SPEAKER_00: Like um well, Arabic is it's a different um alphabet, but it's a phonetic alphabet that once you learn the sounds.
[28:13] SPEAKER_02: The alphabet is, but the grammar all the same.
[28:15] SPEAKER_02: No, I know all that's different.
[28:17] SPEAKER_00: But with um a a lot of Asian languages where like you know, Japanese, Cantonese, well, Cantonese and Mandarin is the same written language.
[28:26] SPEAKER_02: Well, one's traditional characters and one's been simplified by the bigger.
[28:29] SPEAKER_00: But they're but they're the yeah, there's two different versions of the written language.
[28:32] SPEAKER_00: But you can't look at something and understand how to pronounce the word.
[28:36] SPEAKER_00: Unless you learn the opinion, yeah.
[28:39] SPEAKER_02: I said they should just change the opinion.
[28:40] SPEAKER_02: Stop using the characters.
[28:41] SPEAKER_02: Well, yeah, yeah.
[28:42] SPEAKER_00: How anglocentric can we be?
[28:45] SPEAKER_00: Make it easy for me.
[28:46] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
[28:47] SPEAKER_02: Not the billion Chinese who already understand it.
[28:49] SPEAKER_02: I know, I know.
[28:50] SPEAKER_02: Well, come on, you just gotta be forward thinking.
[28:52] SPEAKER_02: There's been other things that have happened.
[28:54] SPEAKER_00: Then you go to India and there's you know sixty or seventy different dialects.
[28:58] SPEAKER_02: Oh, seven hundred of India.
[29:00] SPEAKER_00: But but but but different dialects that are actually completely different languages.
[29:04] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
[29:05] SPEAKER_00: Not the ones that are just variations on those as well.
[29:07] SPEAKER_02: But I think it's one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world.
[29:10] SPEAKER_02: I didn't realise that most Indians don't speak Hindi.
[29:12] SPEAKER_02: No.
[29:13] SPEAKER_02: Or at least like they don't use it as their lingua franca, they use English.
[29:16] SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
[29:16] SPEAKER_02: And I I remember me having my mind blown.
[29:18] SPEAKER_02: Where I obviously there are loads of Hindi speakers from I think it's around the centre of the country, right?
[29:22] SPEAKER_02: But then if you go north or you go south, a lot of them are like, pfft, I don't speak Hindi.
[29:26] SPEAKER_02: I just speak English and communicate with them using that.
[29:28] SPEAKER_02: And you're like, What?
[29:30] SPEAKER_02: Like that's so bizarre.
[29:31] SPEAKER_02: I know.
[29:32] SPEAKER_02: It'd be like me learning men in Chinese to communicate with New Zealanders or something.
[29:35] SPEAKER_02: I don't know.
[29:37] SPEAKER_02: I feel like, well, not New Zealanders, maybe the French.
[29:39] SPEAKER_02: You'd just be like, isn't that sort of a step too far?
[29:42] SPEAKER_02: Like out of your own.
[29:44] SPEAKER_00: I might have mentioned this one before in another episode.
[29:46] SPEAKER_00: There's a there's a famous episode of the West Wing, that American political drama show from about twenty five years ago.
[29:54] SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
[29:54] SPEAKER_00: Um where the there's sort of this complex diplomacy going on, and the the nobody in the group of American diplomats um and politicians spoke the language of the person who was there, but they found somebody um who was Portuguese who also spoke this language and someone else who spoke Portuguese.
[30:17] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so they had to use all these people.
[30:18] SPEAKER_00: And they were going through this sort of three-way translation, and then the guy that they were trying to talk to eventually just said sorry guys eventually just said, why don't we speak in English?
[30:29] SPEAKER_02: Yes, good gag.
[30:32] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's getting interesting with with ChatGPT and AI and translation tools now.
[30:37] SPEAKER_02: You wonder if it will get to a point where you'll have the is it the Babelfish from um Hitchhiker's Galaxy, yeah, where he just hasn't yeah, and you can just understand everything.
[30:49] SPEAKER_00: And not only that, but we've got you know Google Translate works with images as well.
[30:52] SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
[30:53] SPEAKER_00: So you can just put your you know the camera on your phone over a menu of you know you can go to a Chinese restaurant with it all written in Chinese and put your phone over it, you know, you know, take a photograph of it, and then Google Translate will just give it to you in English.
[31:09] SPEAKER_00: It's just nuts.
[31:10] SPEAKER_02: I wonder how much it'll become a luxury or like uh learning a foreign language at l unless you're migrating to the country.
[31:16] SPEAKER_00: But like you've got to do business or live there.
[31:18] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, obviously it's gonna be a lot easier.
[31:20] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, if you're traveling to Spain for a week, you need to learn Spanish?
[31:25] SPEAKER_02: Just use this device or this AI tool or something and put it in front of my face and just and I've talked to a bunch of my students and friends that have travelled overseas, and they're like, half the time I can just open up Google Translate or AI of some kind and just have it translate between two languages.
[31:39] SPEAKER_02: And I'm just like, fuck, people are gonna stop learning foreign languages.
[31:45] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you can say something in Portuguese and it'll just say it in English to me.
[31:49] SPEAKER_02: It's pretty bizarre.
[31:51] SPEAKER_00: Yeah, anyway.
[31:53] SPEAKER_00: Good chat, Dad.
[31:54] SPEAKER_00: It's getting bit hot up there.
[31:57] SPEAKER_00: It's 36 degrees.
[31:58] SPEAKER_00: It's about it's getting close to 40 degrees here at the moment.
[32:01] SPEAKER_02: It's pretty brutal, guys.
[32:01] SPEAKER_02: We're hanging out upstairs at the end.
[32:04] SPEAKER_00: Because the rest of the family's downstairs in the air conditioning.
[32:07] SPEAKER_00: We don't have whole house air conditioning, we only have air conditioning in one room.
[32:10] SPEAKER_02: So you live like animals.
[32:11] SPEAKER_02: The big living area.
[32:12] SPEAKER_00: Well, you don't have it either.
[32:14] SPEAKER_02: No, we don't.
[32:14] SPEAKER_02: We used to.
[32:15] SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I know.
[32:17] SPEAKER_02: But um getting it piped into every room would probably be a very expensive exercise.
[32:21] SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, we can't do it because uh we could, but No, we we'd have to do it uh under floor, and under floor air conditioning doesn't work very well.
[32:29] SPEAKER_00: No.
[32:30] SPEAKER_00: Because you've got to have a pretty large fan to pump cold air, whereas if you've got cold air running around in your ceiling, it falls into the room.
[32:38] SPEAKER_02: All right, well, thanks anyway for joining us, guys, and we'll see you next time.
[32:41] SPEAKER_02: Thanks.

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