Speaker 1: This episode of Read This includes discussion about Indigenous people
Speaker 1: who are now deceased. Please take care while listening.
Speaker 2: A ba Borghini Babughy.
Speaker 1: That's the music of Sydney acoustic duo The Stiff Jinns,
Speaker 1: Colleen Briggs and Nadi Simpson. They've been writing and performing
Speaker 1: together for over twenty years, and as gorgeous as it is,
Speaker 1: you shouldn't just know Nadi Simpson from the voice she
Speaker 1: sings with on the page. In the written word, she's
Speaker 1: even more impressive. Nadia is a yuwella eye woman from
Speaker 1: Freshwater Country in northwest New South Wales. Her debut novel
Speaker 1: was twenty twenty's Song of the Crocodile and it was
Speaker 1: one of my favorite Australian debuts in years, so moving
Speaker 1: and wise. It somehow managed to be about grief and
Speaker 1: sorrow and intergenerational injustice, but at the same time was
Speaker 1: suffused with joy and love. And there's no other way
Speaker 1: of saying this music. It was crazy talented. Before I
Speaker 1: became editor of The Monthly, I spent a couple of
Speaker 1: years as the artistic director at Sydney Writer's Festival, and
Speaker 1: one of the things that I got to do when
Speaker 1: I was there was asked Nati Simpson to be part
Speaker 1: of our twenty twenty one opening night lineup. She stood
Speaker 1: on that stage at Sydney Town Hall in front of
Speaker 1: a couple of thousand people, and she absolutely blew the
Speaker 1: roof off the place. She talked about the tradition of
Speaker 1: stories in which she placed her own work, and about
Speaker 1: making the leap to conceiving of herself as a writer.
Speaker 1: I was so impressed and such a fan. I even
Speaker 1: forgave her husband George for incessantly telling me I looked
Speaker 1: like Jack Blade. Her second novel, The Bellbird, is out
Speaker 1: now and it doesn't disappoint. It tells several stories, some old,
Speaker 1: some new, that circle around the baby girl born at
Speaker 1: the very end of the eighteenth century to parents Barangaroo
Speaker 1: and Benelong. The two brief life of that child, Dilbam
Speaker 1: or Bell Bird, echoes through to the present day in
Speaker 1: a story about fragility and strength, about mothers and daughters,
Speaker 1: about owning one's own truth, a story about how to
Speaker 1: make art. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read this
Speaker 1: the show about the books we love and the stories
Speaker 1: behind them. This new book began its life with an
Speaker 1: overheard conversation on a train and a half remembered story
Speaker 1: about a little girl the bell bird on a.
Speaker 3: Train in a city Sydney going down to the Circular
Speaker 3: Key and I walked straight on the train and in
Speaker 3: that sort of open vestibule bits and there was these
Speaker 3: ladies having a yarn too loud, too loud they were,
Speaker 3: and it was like all of a sudden, I was
Speaker 3: in the front row of a theater show and they
Speaker 3: were talking about one lady was trying to they were
Speaker 3: moving house, and they was asking a house, the house
Speaker 3: hunting going Oh, we saw one place and it was
Speaker 3: too small. We saw another place and we didn't like
Speaker 3: the backyard. And then we saw another place and there's
Speaker 3: a room where could convert to a games room, and
Speaker 3: they had a pool, and we thought, we'll show the
Speaker 3: kids on the weekend and if they like it, we'll
Speaker 3: put in an offer and then the universe will decide.
Speaker 3: So that and then it was this stopped Redfern. So
Speaker 3: the doors open right while they're talking about the universe,
Speaker 3: and we pulled up at Redfern station and I just
Speaker 3: I remember getting so wild with these women. I'm thinking,
Speaker 3: that's not how that is not how the universe works,
Speaker 3: and getting really worked out and sort of getting frustrated
Speaker 3: and hearing Redfern made me even more wild. It's definitely
Speaker 3: how it's not how this universe works. And then getting
Speaker 3: really angry made me sort of think, well, how do
Speaker 3: you know what? Wait there? Why are you expending on
Speaker 3: your energy getting wild with them? You don't know how
Speaker 3: the universe works. And I honestly couldn't tell you how
Speaker 3: that little bell bird came into my mind. But while
Speaker 3: I was in the grips of feeling so strongly about
Speaker 3: how wrong they were and how I didn't even know,
Speaker 3: the memory of that little baby came into my mind.
Speaker 3: So it was those ladies, Redfern and Dilbilm the bell
Speaker 3: Bird all happened at once. That's when I realized what
Speaker 3: I wanted to write.
Speaker 1: I think, maybe I would like to start with the
Speaker 1: the things you learned from some of the crocodile that
Speaker 1: from the start with the bell Bird you knew that
Speaker 1: you wanted to do differently or you wanted to build them.
Speaker 3: I wrote a list of things I was not going
Speaker 3: to do for this book, and so then did not
Speaker 3: write a thing for a year because I you know,
Speaker 3: it was all up in my head. I was talking
Speaker 3: with somebody about this a matter of minutes ago. The
Speaker 3: more you think about it, the more you constrict yourself
Speaker 3: and the feeling. It's about feeling writing feeling.
Speaker 2: So I did.
Speaker 3: I had a page of things I didn't want to do,
Speaker 3: which were, you know, things like I didn't want long
Speaker 3: flowing sentences, and I didn't want creator beings and all
Speaker 3: the things that I'm probably good at, you know, trying
Speaker 3: to think my way through what I wanted to be
Speaker 3: rather than being who I am. And once I broke
Speaker 3: every one of those rules, once it became you know,
Speaker 3: I got to write something here call I've gone long
Speaker 3: enough not writing. I need to start. And I started
Speaker 3: breaking my rules. And that was the beginning point for
Speaker 3: an evolving story that was a negotiation between who I
Speaker 3: wanted to be and what I actually was. And you know,
Speaker 3: the Bell Bird was a kind of spilling out of
Speaker 3: who I wanted to be and what I didn't want
Speaker 3: to do and where I actually was. That's the best
Speaker 3: way for me to talk about it.
Speaker 1: Did you have a similar list before song under Crocodile
Speaker 1: or for that? It was much more organic?
Speaker 3: It was organic what I was trying to prove to
Speaker 3: myself there was that I could do more than just music.
Speaker 3: I was trying to prove to myself I was more
Speaker 3: than a musician. And of course I got to a
Speaker 3: stage in Song of the Crocodile where I was stuck,
Speaker 3: and beautiful Grace Lucas Pennington, who was helping me through
Speaker 3: the black and white experience, asked me to bring forward
Speaker 3: my musicality because I could. I was stuck on something
Speaker 3: and I said, it's not working. You know, I'm getting
Speaker 3: so frustrated. She said, Nadi, what if I was to
Speaker 3: say to you as the music in this stanza? And
Speaker 3: I thought, that's not a restriction anymore. I can. Actually,
Speaker 3: she's asking me to bring forward who I am, So,
Speaker 3: you know, it's sort of like history repeating. I made
Speaker 3: the hurdle at the beginning of the second book and
Speaker 3: jumped over it myself and worked out that, you know,
Speaker 3: just don't don't restrict yourself because of a creative idea
Speaker 3: needs to flow. Yeah, and the point for thinking and
Speaker 3: constructing things will come later, usually with an editor, and
Speaker 3: they will help you get over yourself.
Speaker 1: Get so like trust yourself as well, like not just
Speaker 1: get over yourself but give over to your own instincts,
Speaker 1: give over to your own individual qualities that you bring
Speaker 1: to the story, to the writing, because it sounds like
Speaker 1: you in different ways. Both times were caught up in
Speaker 1: an idea of what you should be doing or what
Speaker 1: it should look like to be a writer, rather than
Speaker 1: what felt natural to you.
Speaker 3: Yes, and also this kind of idea of what is
Speaker 3: valuable to bring forward to somebody. I'm still trying to
Speaker 3: work out what it is I can give in a
Speaker 3: written form, because for me music, you know, I know
Speaker 3: that I want to share a feeling, and then I
Speaker 3: think when I pick up a pen on sharing a thought,
Speaker 3: and I struggle with, well, what's the tangible walk away?
Speaker 3: My hands are moving, feeling, grabbing thing that I can
Speaker 3: give to somebody. And I still haven't worked out the
Speaker 3: language of the exchange in a book because it's so
Speaker 3: insular and so singular. Even though I do it to
Speaker 3: make somebody feel I still haven't quite figured out how
Speaker 3: to channel creative thought through my body into another body.
Speaker 1: In terms of different expressions of creativity. How much this
Speaker 1: is someone who's clearly not a musician asking this question
Speaker 1: so may be revealing deep reserves of ignorance. I'm sure
Speaker 1: i am, But it feels to me like there's something
Speaker 1: weirdly more of a tangible object in words on a
Speaker 1: page than there is in a piece of music. There's
Speaker 1: something about something printed on paper that feels like it
Speaker 1: belongs to a different tradition where you're held to account
Speaker 1: on it for much longer.
Speaker 3: It's there, solid, and it doesn't disappear, it doesn't kind
Speaker 3: of go into the ether that it doesn't exist as
Speaker 3: a memory.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like a great piece of music. You're like, I
Speaker 1: was in the room and saw that performed and it
Speaker 1: was the most beautiful thing, and I can't quite capture
Speaker 1: in words, but I have a muscle memory of what
Speaker 1: it was to be there. A good book that connects
Speaker 1: with you. You can go back and pick it up, open
Speaker 1: the page. Yes, you change, you approach it differently, but
Speaker 1: it's still the proof of it is there.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I heard somebody talk about the performative artifact, and
Speaker 3: that has a really loaded implications for me, being part
Speaker 3: of a community that has suffered at the hands of
Speaker 3: an archive, and also this idea of a performance versus
Speaker 3: practice and all these things.
Speaker 1: So all this.
Speaker 3: Stuff is swirling around me. I'm trying to find a
Speaker 3: way for I would initially say the river of but
Speaker 3: you know, bell Bird is really the wave of the
Speaker 3: wave of the tangible, and how that anchors you and
Speaker 3: holds you in a place where maybe you want to
Speaker 3: keep flowing out and in with greater things. You know,
Speaker 3: I'm trying to sort of work out how to talk
Speaker 3: about how can you be that little bit of sand
Speaker 3: that moves with the tide or the rip, knowing that
Speaker 3: you know, you got this big book here that is
Speaker 3: asking you to also be that gathered moment. So when
Speaker 3: I got my twelve copies of Bell Bird, and I
Speaker 3: thought my dad was one of eleven, I thought, oh
Speaker 3: I could give I could have one at home and
Speaker 3: then give one to all his siblings. But then actually
Speaker 3: that is not the right gift. Even though it's everything
Speaker 3: that I it's all the ways I have grown thanks
Speaker 3: to them, the bestowing of a book is actually a
Speaker 3: kind of not the right way to show how they've
Speaker 3: affected me. And you know, I think Michael about I
Speaker 3: didn't want to say, oh, here's this book because I
Speaker 3: didn't want to. I didn't want to give my aunties
Speaker 3: and uncles in Waga a book because I didn't want
Speaker 3: it to be confronting for them. But then you know,
Speaker 3: my cousin, said her Nan, whose dad's sister, the eldest
Speaker 3: of the eleven, bought the audio book. She's gone too now.
Speaker 3: They would lay on her bed and listen to me
Speaker 3: and my words because I read the audio book, and
Speaker 3: you know, Auntie, Georgina and Nikola would sit on the
Speaker 3: bed and they'd listen to a little bit, and then
Speaker 3: they'd go and do something else. And I think actually
Speaker 3: that my words were part of their relationship. That's the
Speaker 3: beauty for me. And you know, as people disappear and
Speaker 3: dissolve and move into other realities or whatever, the book
Speaker 3: is not the thing. The words around who we are
Speaker 3: is a beautiful offering.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Whereas with Song of the Crocodile, you know, it's
Speaker 1: very much around your family's country. The bill Bird is
Speaker 1: set in and deeply concerned with the country you were
Speaker 1: born in and have lived most of your life in,
Speaker 1: but not your ancestral country.
Speaker 3: It's the salt the salt water shadow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's clearly a place in country that's shaped. You
Speaker 1: explain to me the difference between that and ancestral country
Speaker 1: in terms of what you own because there are like
Speaker 1: for lots of people, they're going to be like, well,
Speaker 1: you were born me, You've lived your life there, why
Speaker 1: can't you tell the story of that place in the
Speaker 1: same way.
Speaker 3: For me, it was very I was part of the
Speaker 3: list of things I didn't want to do that I
Speaker 3: actually kept was. I wanted to use a story as
Speaker 3: a way to uphold somebody else's sovereignty. Just as you know,
Speaker 3: I'm fresh water woman, and I'm informed and colored by that,
Speaker 3: and I know the value that that has in my life.
Speaker 3: That's not the only way the world works. I get
Speaker 3: a lot of cultural spiritual zessed from my mob, as
Speaker 3: other people get from theirs, and I live on somebody
Speaker 3: else's sacredness, So how can I use language to uphold
Speaker 3: their sacredness? And that's what really the bell Bird was
Speaker 3: for me, an exercise I don't mean to trivialize it,
Speaker 3: but a practice in living inside somebody else's sacredness and
Speaker 3: making something that honors me but references them. So the
Speaker 3: bell bird references a little baby, a real baby that
Speaker 3: lived for a matter of months in Sydney at the
Speaker 3: time of colonization. I am not culturally connected to that
Speaker 3: baby or her parents. Yet the story of her life
Speaker 3: is foundational for me, a foundational teaching in how to
Speaker 3: be somewhere that belongs to someone else.
Speaker 1: It's a particularly a cute example, and I think you
Speaker 1: handle it really sensitively and really beautifully in the book.
Speaker 1: It's the great power of the book is how important
Speaker 1: that baby, that little girl is, But how much space
Speaker 1: you give her, how much you kind of walk around
Speaker 1: her rather than directly to her. Because what strikes me is,
Speaker 1: as you say, she's a real historical figure. She had
Speaker 1: this brief life. Her parentage was significant in terms of
Speaker 1: the time and the place and the figures. But it
Speaker 1: would be very easy to instrumentalize her as a kind
Speaker 1: of symbol of something rather than as a living, breathing
Speaker 1: human being. How did you get to the human part
Speaker 1: of her?
Speaker 3: I think her breath was sacred, and a sacredness that
Speaker 3: is not open to me. But I love to weave
Speaker 3: words and and I think it is an act of
Speaker 3: respect to play with everything that was around those in
Speaker 3: and outs.
Speaker 1: When we return, Nardi shares why she wants to be
Speaker 1: more like her character she's written in this book and
Speaker 1: reveals why it took decades for the stories from her
Speaker 1: elders to finally make sense to her. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: The engine of this novel is a story in the
Speaker 1: present day, one that follows a young poet and activist
Speaker 1: called Ginny Dilbull. Her name and her power to represent
Speaker 1: the possibility of change echoes the novel's historical tale, even
Speaker 1: as the way she moves through the world is decidedly contemporary.
Speaker 3: Ginny Dilboll is a character in the book that I
Speaker 3: wish I was her. I'm just going to say, I'm
Speaker 3: just going to say it, I really wish I was her.
Speaker 3: And if I had to explain why she's in there,
Speaker 3: she is the promise that that little girl was. You know,
Speaker 3: at the time, that little baby was an inheritor of
Speaker 3: serious cultural business and also the future of what was
Speaker 3: going to happen in this place that we all walk
Speaker 3: around on now. She was going to be the boss
Speaker 3: of what has happened and what will come. And she
Speaker 3: didn't thrive. And so Ginny is my way of bringing
Speaker 3: an idea of a young black girl who has the
Speaker 3: world at her fingertips. That's why she's in the book,
Speaker 3: Ginny Dealbong. You know, she's a poet that makes words
Speaker 3: and sticks them in buildings, and that's the way that
Speaker 3: she colonizes the places that she owns.
Speaker 1: I'm not surprised that you wish you were her. I
Speaker 1: think I'd defy anyone to read it and not wish
Speaker 1: that they were. But you seem pretty genmy to me.
Speaker 1: What are the elements she has that you long for
Speaker 1: in yourself that you don't quite have.
Speaker 3: Well, she was young and she didn't care about what
Speaker 3: she should do or be, which is where we start today.
Speaker 3: There's no way she'd make a list of things she
Speaker 3: wasn't going to be. And I think her youthful fierceness
Speaker 3: is something I never had.
Speaker 1: She does have the power to be made clearer in
Speaker 1: who she is by dickheads instead of them wearing her down,
Speaker 1: Instead of her being broken by them or feeling like
Speaker 1: this isn't a space for me, or I can't write
Speaker 1: my poems, I can't make my art. She instead, in
Speaker 1: the face of dickheads again and again, and it's just like, no,
Speaker 1: that resolves me in who I want to be, And
Speaker 1: that seems pretty admirable.
Speaker 3: Yes, And she is alone and doing that. Wow, you know,
Speaker 3: I need fifty people around me to make me feel
Speaker 3: brave enough to do the thing that I want. She's
Speaker 3: by herself. She is a you know, I want to say,
Speaker 3: a flick or a feather oscillating in the everywhere and
Speaker 3: doing a thing without connection. That's powerful. That's strength to
Speaker 3: be isolated, maybe and alone and small in the greatness
Speaker 3: and still have the courage to do what you want. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the things I particularly love in this book
Speaker 1: is how you write about and capture time. It moves
Speaker 1: between two timelines and there's this and that, but actually
Speaker 1: it doesn't. That's not the relationship you have with time
Speaker 1: in this book, And that's not the relationship that the
Speaker 1: story you're telling has with time. It loops back on itself.
Speaker 1: It's not this, then this, then this. Can you talk
Speaker 1: about how you got the idea of time right for
Speaker 1: the purpose of the book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it'd be one of those things I reckon, Michael,
Speaker 3: if I thought about I'd completely muck up. And it's
Speaker 3: also helped by having these ageless eels and grandfather Wales
Speaker 3: who are really just reflections of people. I know. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I know, I know, great Whale. I've been taught by
Speaker 3: that man, another fellow who passed away while I was
Speaker 3: writing very important. You and Man South Coast and New
Speaker 3: South Wales. Uncle Max Harrison, he is the great whale.
Speaker 3: He's gone into he's whale dreaming. But while he was
Speaker 3: on land he was sharing all those learnings with me.
Speaker 3: And so those people are timeless. So if you're lucky
Speaker 3: to experience that ageless and it's not mystical and magical,
Speaker 3: but it's ancient and ageless in a really complex, tangible way.
Speaker 1: I think when I interviewed Melissa Lukashenko about Eden Glassie,
Speaker 1: she used the phrase aboriginal realism. Well, she's magic realism.
Speaker 1: That's not describing what's going on here. This is aboriginal realism.
Speaker 3: Well, you know, it misses the point when people sort
Speaker 3: of say that those creator beings are a release. Actually
Speaker 3: they're the they're the structure. It's beautiful to be able
Speaker 3: to work within that. And you know, I have the
Speaker 3: same thing about fiction. What people call fiction is our
Speaker 3: reference section. You know, that's the way our stories are,
Speaker 3: the way we need to be. You can't negotiate, so
Speaker 3: then we get to play with those kind of things
Speaker 3: as well. But I don't know if I thought about time,
Speaker 3: I'd get it wrong. It's just that I know, I
Speaker 3: sit next to ageless people and get to have their
Speaker 3: wisdom soak into me, and it's as modern as you
Speaker 3: can get.
Speaker 1: I think part of what I so love about that
Speaker 1: is you sit next to you, don't you know, you
Speaker 1: don't come after, you don't have a debt to This
Speaker 1: is not something from the part. The whole point of
Speaker 1: that agelessness and the timelessness is you sit alongside and
Speaker 1: next to you, you're sharing those stories. You're telling them,
Speaker 1: you're hearing them.
Speaker 3: We're so lucky, you know. And that old man too,
Speaker 3: He used to tell a story, Uncle Max, about when
Speaker 3: he was taken by his masters, he calls them, when
Speaker 3: he was a young boy. He's taken on a journey
Speaker 3: with his masters, and he was told to go and
Speaker 3: fill the billy with water and come back and bring
Speaker 3: it back. And he would tell this story a lot,
Speaker 3: and I never actually got it. He said he'd fill
Speaker 3: the billy, take it back to his old pop, who
Speaker 3: would kick it over and say no, go again. And
Speaker 3: he'd do this, you know a few times, and he said,
Speaker 3: I couldn't understand why he kept kicking the water out.
Speaker 3: He asked me to go and fill the billy, and
Speaker 3: I did it, and he said And so I went
Speaker 3: down to the edge of the water, and I thought,
Speaker 3: what's this old man trying to teach me? And I
Speaker 3: just started playing with the water. And then after a while,
Speaker 3: I thought, I'm just going to try it one more time.
Speaker 3: I filled the billy and I put it next to him.
Speaker 3: He said, good. And that's how he told the story.
Speaker 3: And he would tell it the same way every time.
Speaker 3: I thought, what is going I don't get it. I
Speaker 3: don't get it. Maybe he's missing a bit or something.
Speaker 3: And he passed away and I was thinking about it,
Speaker 3: and then I actually understood what he was trying to
Speaker 3: teachers that don't just take You need to go and
Speaker 3: into a rap and dream and think that was the
Speaker 3: water that the old fellow wanted. But I think back
Speaker 3: for the amount of years that I never understood that story,
Speaker 3: and it was just waiting for me. It was waiting
Speaker 3: for me in the future, my future me to understand
Speaker 3: what the teaching was. And so it took you know,
Speaker 3: I knew him for twenty years. He passed away three
Speaker 3: years ago. I only understood it a year ago what
Speaker 3: he was teaching me. But it was waiting for me
Speaker 3: in the future. It was about, you know, when he
Speaker 3: was a little boy seventy years earlier.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's all all on a continuum, but also at
Speaker 1: the same time heating into itself. How has I mean
Speaker 1: talk about the list of rules you had for yourself
Speaker 1: on the second book and your idea about the kind
Speaker 1: of writer you were, But how has having had readers
Speaker 1: changed the kind of writer you are?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 1: That sense people coming back to you with, oh, you
Speaker 1: know what, here's what I took from your book, or
Speaker 1: here's what it meant to me, or here's what it
Speaker 1: awoke in me. Has that surprised you? And has that
Speaker 1: changed the way you approach story?
Speaker 3: I feel very it's not grateful, there's some other level
Speaker 3: of grateful when people come up and say that they've
Speaker 3: read the book, or they've thought about things, or I
Speaker 3: get a bit shame. You know, I sit in the
Speaker 3: shame because I'm so grateful, and that's how I interact
Speaker 3: with it. It's just like I am very humble about that.
Speaker 3: But that's where I stay. I'll tell you when I
Speaker 3: think about audiences while I make it, because I put
Speaker 3: all my energy and hope of a connection in the
Speaker 3: making of it. When I do it, when I ask
Speaker 3: them to unwrap the present. When they got the present,
Speaker 3: that's up to them. By the time the last full
Speaker 3: stop my work's done, then that's your fellow's business. You
Speaker 3: can own that and that's yours.
Speaker 1: Nadie Simpson, thank you so much for your time.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Michael.
Speaker 1: The Bell Bird is available at all Good bookstores now
Speaker 1: and if you're googling to find it it is b
Speaker 1: E L B U R D Bell Bird. You can
Speaker 1: listen to the audio book, which is equally gorgeous. Before
Speaker 1: we go, I wanted to tell you what I've been
Speaker 1: reading this week and a plug for two new crime novels,
Speaker 1: one from an old favorite and another from an Australian
Speaker 1: author who if you haven't started reading, you should start now.
Speaker 1: Ian Rankin's latest John Reabers book is out now. Fans
Speaker 1: of the series will have been reading him for decades
Speaker 1: like I have. The new books called Midnight and Blue
Speaker 1: and it's an absolute cracker. And I wanted to also
Speaker 1: mention Christian White, whose new novel The Ledge has one
Speaker 1: of the best twists in a crime novel you read
Speaker 1: this year. White is absolutely terrific storyteller. He's Melbourne based
Speaker 1: and his well worth a read. You can find both
Speaker 1: those books and all the others we mentioned at your
Speaker 1: favorite independent bookstore. That's it for this week's show. If
Speaker 1: you enjoyed it, please tell your friends about it and
Speaker 1: rate and review us. It helps a lot. Next week,
Speaker 1: I'm read this I chat with legendary Australian writer Tim
Speaker 1: Winton about his new book Juice.
Speaker 4: In this moment on the Knife's edge, as we are,
Speaker 4: I'm asking myself, I'm asking my culture, and I think
Speaker 4: I'm asking lawmakers and the people who inhabit the sea
Speaker 4: suites who seem to have such an inordinate influence over
Speaker 4: our lawmakers. Do you have the juice to make the
Speaker 4: hard decisions, to make the right decisions? Are you on
Speaker 4: the side of life or are you on the side
Speaker 4: of the money.
Speaker 1: Read This is a Schwarz Media production and it's made
Speaker 1: possible thanks to the generous support of our sponsors at
Speaker 1: ar Group. The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames.
Speaker 1: Mixing is by Travis Evans, with original compositions by Zalton Fetcher.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, See you next week.