Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Oh holy do it's Behind the Bastards a podcast where
Speaker 2: I finally learned how to open my podcast. I think
Speaker 2: we figured it out. I think we get it locked down.
Speaker 3: Oh who do we do as a keeper?
Speaker 2: That's a keeper, that's a keeper.
Speaker 3: I think yesterday was Duberger.
Speaker 2: That that that one was. That one was a fuck up.
Speaker 2: It was a disaster, not calamity.
Speaker 3: I just think it would be hard to remember to
Speaker 3: how to do it. And again, you're doing.
Speaker 2: Great, Yeah, because I have to get every syllable right, obviously, Yeah,
Speaker 2: yea do much easier, easy to remember. I can see
Speaker 2: it on T shirts. People are going to be getting
Speaker 2: tattoos of this in like a month.
Speaker 3: Sounds like something you would say if like a fancy
Speaker 3: person corrects you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now speak of things that are going to be
Speaker 2: on T shirts in a month. Look, I don't know
Speaker 2: how that actually leads us into part two. When we
Speaker 2: ended part one, Eliza Fraser and her husband were taken there.
Speaker 2: I have no I don't know, Sophie. I just I
Speaker 2: just transitioned sometimes when I'm speaking, and it just usually
Speaker 2: doesn't work very well. We mostly edit in the ones
Speaker 2: where it did. But that one was a failure. You know,
Speaker 2: I could admit that Jamie.
Speaker 1: Did send me that send me that picture of the
Speaker 1: two of us when we did that one live show
Speaker 1: when we wore each other's shirts with each other's faces
Speaker 1: on it and didn't acknowledge it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was good. That was a good move. But
Speaker 2: you know, it's a visual joke. I tried to do
Speaker 2: too many of those because most people listen to the podcast.
Speaker 3: Well, who do he do? Look, who's a professional podcast?
Speaker 2: All a sudden, that says the guy you hired me
Speaker 2: to do podcast?
Speaker 3: All right?
Speaker 2: Now, speaking of getting hired, Eliza Fraser has kind of
Speaker 2: gotten a job, which is trying not to die while
Speaker 2: living as part of a civilization that survives off the land,
Speaker 2: a thing that she doesn't know how to do, and
Speaker 2: it's not going well.
Speaker 3: She doesn't understand and they don't understand her.
Speaker 2: Right that no one speaks to each other's language, right, right,
Speaker 2: it's not going great. So we should probably peel back
Speaker 2: a bit more to talk about the Bachilla's contacts with
Speaker 2: European civilization outside of Captain Cook and the odd Ausy
Speaker 2: prison escapee. Right, we talked about that last time, their
Speaker 2: first contact. The fact that these prisoners have been like
Speaker 2: coming in like individually for a while and getting adopted
Speaker 2: too often. When we discussed kind of the ethnographies of
Speaker 2: indigenous people being colonized, we sort of dropped like, here's
Speaker 2: what they believed about the world pre contact, and then
Speaker 2: we kind of leave it at that. But again, these
Speaker 2: are not static civilizations, right, no more than you know
Speaker 2: the Europeans themselves were, and they adapted their beliefs many
Speaker 2: times in light of new knowledge about how the world worked.
Speaker 2: As I noted in the last episodes, the natives of
Speaker 2: what was at that point known to the Europeans as
Speaker 2: Indian Head Island and was called Gari by the people
Speaker 2: then and now, they interpreted their first sights of white
Speaker 2: people to be spirits returning from the dead. But whiteness
Speaker 2: symbolized death in every way, right, and so they didn't
Speaker 2: just respond to white people as if they were returning
Speaker 2: deceased relatives. Sometimes that would happen. You'd meet someone in
Speaker 2: like a member of the tribe, would get good vibes
Speaker 2: from them. Basically it'd be like, oh, you know what,
Speaker 2: I think, that's like my dad or whatever, you know,
Speaker 2: my kid or something like that who died recently, But
Speaker 2: that is not the only way they reacted. Death was
Speaker 2: always involved in their reaction, but it wasn't always like, oh,
Speaker 2: this must be a member of the tribe returned. As
Speaker 2: doctor Peter Lower wrote, their whiteness was symbolic of death, mourning,
Speaker 2: and apprehension, and so sometimes people were like, oh, no,
Speaker 2: it's a bad omen that there's white people here, right,
Speaker 2: because that means like the dead, or like it's this
Speaker 2: is this is a dark thing that's happened.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It was always my interpretation, and it's why I'm always
Speaker 3: so nervous right in America.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, yeah, it's really terrible place for you to live.
Speaker 3: Like, ooh, I feel like the vibes are off everywhere.
Speaker 2: Looking in the mirror. Oh no, the go dear God,
Speaker 2: it's me in August of seventeen. I mean, looking in
Speaker 2: the mirror does make you think of your own mortality sometimes.
Speaker 2: But in August of seventeen ninety nine, which is about
Speaker 2: thirty years after Captain Cook's voyage, an English boat called
Speaker 2: the Norfolk put ashore on the Great Sandy Island. Captain
Speaker 2: Matthew Flinders went ashore with a party of men to
Speaker 2: find water and food near a place called Wootomba Creek.
Speaker 2: As was usually the case, Flinders was mixed up and
Speaker 2: believed he'd found Australia and the Highland was just a promontory.
Speaker 2: That's constantly they have no idea where they are. These
Speaker 2: people the maps are shit, they're bad at reading them.
Speaker 2: They're all drunk. Now they're not just drunk, they're heavily armed.
Speaker 2: And while it's a lot of fun to be heavily
Speaker 2: armed and drunk, it's also very dangerous for the people
Speaker 2: around you. And Flinders and his crew were part of
Speaker 2: like the shoot first and never asked questions ever, like
Speaker 2: school of being a colonizer who's drunkenly landed on an island.
Speaker 2: And so when like a group of Nogoulungbara tribes people
Speaker 2: who's like I think they with the people who live
Speaker 2: in the south of Ghari Island, they like come up
Speaker 2: to see these new people have landed, and they do
Speaker 2: what normally happens, like okay, well let's go look at this,
Speaker 2: and Flinders and his crew just start shooting, like they
Speaker 2: just they just start blasting immediately right, They like fire
Speaker 2: a cannon at the tribe for no apparent reason, and
Speaker 2: the tribe runs away, which is a reasonable thing to
Speaker 2: do when someone shoots at you. Now, this we don't
Speaker 2: know if this was, you know, anyone on the island's
Speaker 2: first experience with gunfire, but it's the first recorded one
Speaker 2: we have, And we have a record of this from
Speaker 2: one of their songs, which roughly translated states that one
Speaker 2: of the white men quote two times, held up something
Speaker 2: and made loud noise and smoke Kong kong. I think
Speaker 2: that's how they onum on a pia the sound of gunfire,
Speaker 2: which is you know, not bad perfectly. Yeah. So one
Speaker 2: thing that's so interesting to me about this story is
Speaker 2: that it's a really good example again of how much
Speaker 2: accurate historical information can be passed down through the centuries
Speaker 2: in an oral tradition like this. Because the captain's men
Speaker 2: also reported firing twice. So you have both this song
Speaker 2: and like documentation from the sailors that they shot twice.
Speaker 3: I find them down across history, totally unrelated from one another.
Speaker 2: It's so interesting, yeah, because usually when you're like, well,
Speaker 2: these people have an oral tradition of storytelling, it's discussed
Speaker 2: as like storytelling, it's like myth, but like, no, this
Speaker 2: is no this is not really necessarily less accurate than
Speaker 2: like a fucking newspaper in London at the time, right,
Speaker 2: which is also a lot of times wrong or filled
Speaker 2: with lies, right like. And I'm not saying the songs
Speaker 2: are all like the songs. Clearly, this is people recording
Speaker 2: their history. So people always have an agenda when recording
Speaker 2: their history. But it's also a lot of very very
Speaker 2: accurate grain gets through in the history as a result
Speaker 2: of this, these oral these songs, which I think is
Speaker 2: really interesting.
Speaker 3: I mean, we made up Paul Revere just because of
Speaker 3: name rhymed right right. Song is not always the our
Speaker 3: best way of recording things, right, So it's kind of
Speaker 3: impressive that they're getting the right number of shots down
Speaker 3: through tons.
Speaker 2: It's often very good and so that's all I'm saying.
Speaker 2: It's not that like you shouldn't view you know, these
Speaker 2: oral like stories that the people on Ghari are surely
Speaker 2: is like one hundred percent you know, accurate history all
Speaker 2: the time, but you shouldn't view it as just like mythology,
Speaker 2: right right. This is an attempt at recording history, and
Speaker 2: like all attempts, like herodotus, it's not perfect, but you
Speaker 2: shouldn't see it as like less accurate than herodotus, right.
Speaker 2: And the term for this mix of singing and dancing
Speaker 2: and storytelling to preserve history among the people of Ghari
Speaker 2: Island is called a corroboree. That's the term I found
Speaker 2: for it. So yeah, After one of Flinder's men fired
Speaker 2: upon the Nagoulungbara, Peter Lower writes, one of their number, women, Gala,
Speaker 2: who hid in the nearby bushes, watched the whites collecting
Speaker 2: water and killing some wild fowl with their terrible weapons
Speaker 2: returning to the ship. Their heads are like Dingo's tails,
Speaker 2: the corroboree continued, impossible reference to the sailor's plaited hair
Speaker 2: or the kerchiefs they wore as head covering like the
Speaker 2: ceremonial Dingo tail headbands of the adult males of the tribe.
Speaker 2: The paddles are woods or like wood shaped by the fire.
Speaker 2: They're ongoing attempt by the Aboriginal people to relate the
Speaker 2: inexplicable to what could be culturally comprehended is thus most
Speaker 2: apparent in these careful observations. And again like yeah, you
Speaker 2: get like these recordings of how they looked, and they're
Speaker 2: trying to kind of comparing their appearance to like their
Speaker 2: own appearance, right. Like, it's this really the amount of
Speaker 2: like fidelity you get in this attempt of one culture
Speaker 2: to comprehend another in some ways, in a lot of ways,
Speaker 2: much better than the European accounts of the same thing
Speaker 2: I find really interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the European account being like they're basically animals. Now
Speaker 3: you tried to like shoot at them where they ran
Speaker 3: away like animals.
Speaker 2: The Nagoulambara are trying to kind of do their own anthropology.
Speaker 2: They're trying to get in these people's heads to understand
Speaker 2: like why are you doing what you're doing? What are right? Which, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's just really interesting to me. So Flinders returned to
Speaker 2: the island in eighteen o two, which is three years later,
Speaker 2: with a party of scientists to collect plants, and an
Speaker 2: aboriginal person from the mainland named Bongaree like was brought
Speaker 2: with them. So they take this indigenous person from like
Speaker 2: the mainland with them because he can probably talk to
Speaker 2: these guys, and they manage to make some sort of
Speaker 2: friendly contact with the Nagoulungbara, who are understandably nervous because
Speaker 2: the last time they saw this guy he shot at
Speaker 2: them and they could see guns like in the hands
Speaker 2: of men on the island and know what they mean. Now,
Speaker 2: Flinders tried to bribe them with an offering of blubber
Speaker 2: from porpoises, and he's like, well, this is a valuable
Speaker 2: gift by my standards, because like animal fat is useful
Speaker 2: for cooking. But the islanders didn't hunter kill porpoise because
Speaker 2: they to them, the porpoise drive the mullet and whiting
Speaker 2: fish into their nets, so they see them as allies,
Speaker 2: like we work with the Porpoise's really fucked up for
Speaker 2: you to kill them. They're like our friends who help
Speaker 2: us get food. Why did you murder one?
Speaker 3: They're like the fish shepherd, Yeah, he just killed him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he's useful.
Speaker 3: Hey, we killed your friend. Do you want some of this?
Speaker 3: Do you want some of the stuff in their body? Man?
Speaker 2: Why don't these people like this stuff?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: It's it's yeah anyway, So for the next about that's
Speaker 2: like kind of the last well documented contact between the
Speaker 2: Europeans and people on the island for like thirty years
Speaker 2: or so, right, even though there's some ships that semi
Speaker 2: regularly stop and obviously some convicts who find their way.
Speaker 2: This is like when Eliza Fraser lands, they're like last contacts,
Speaker 2: detailed contacts with Europeans that they had stories of were like, yeah,
Speaker 2: they tried to kill us and then they killed one
Speaker 2: of our friends. So it's kind of amazing that they
Speaker 2: treat her and her fellow shipmates so well given that history.
Speaker 3: And it's kind of a less of the white Gods
Speaker 3: descended from the sea and more of a these assholes again,
Speaker 3: yeah type situation.
Speaker 2: And it you know, this is something I don't think
Speaker 2: we have perfect texture on, but it does kind of
Speaker 2: seem like by the time they take her in, they
Speaker 2: have moved on to like, yeah, these probably aren't the
Speaker 2: dead return. These are like some kind of assholes, some
Speaker 2: species of assholes, specific assholes they're clearly willing to be like,
Speaker 2: but maybe not all of them suck. Well, we'll try
Speaker 2: to stop these people from dying, right, So again, we'll
Speaker 2: discuss further how Eliza described them as cruel and vicious,
Speaker 2: But it is also important to note that other survivors
Speaker 2: of this shipwreck talk very differently about this people. Robert
Speaker 2: Darje is often considered the most dependable and reliable source
Speaker 2: of first hand accounts from the Sterling Castle survivors, and
Speaker 2: he described the locals as treating them very hard and stated,
Speaker 2: we had to work severely to get fish in kangaroos.
Speaker 2: But it's also clear he understood that this hardness was
Speaker 2: a product of the difficulty of survival on the island,
Speaker 2: and added, I cannot call them a cruel people. So like, yeah,
Speaker 2: they we had to work. It's difficult, but like they
Speaker 2: weren't mean this is just the only way to live there.
Speaker 3: Fucking doarj Dargy, great last name. It does sound like
Speaker 3: somebody I used to get ship faced with. Yeah, Dargy Dargy.
Speaker 2: You might compare Eliza's situation in this to like a
Speaker 2: post apocalyptic story where some Instagram influencer flees the city
Speaker 2: and finds refuge in an off grid farm and they're
Speaker 2: like taken care of, but like they have to learn
Speaker 2: how to work, right. It's it is kind of like
Speaker 2: this that sort of situation. Right, This is like a
Speaker 2: middle class person who's now having to learn how to
Speaker 2: live off the land, and she seems to have taken
Speaker 2: grave offens to this. Peter Lower notes in his excellent
Speaker 2: History of the Island. It was later reported that Missus
Speaker 2: Fraser was compelled to dragon wood for the fires and
Speaker 2: fetch water with as much cruelty as the Gins themselves.
Speaker 2: This is from like a piece of reporting at the
Speaker 2: time that's obviously a on the like on the slur spectrum.
Speaker 3: Right Gins themselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that seems bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And as she herself claim, she was constantly beaten
Speaker 2: when incapable of carrying the heavy loads they put upon me. Now,
Speaker 2: Lauer does go into some detail about how hideously traumatic
Speaker 2: the crew's experiences before this had been, and when they
Speaker 2: came upon the Bachola it was late winter, the most
Speaker 2: meager season of the year, which means that not only
Speaker 2: were Eliza and Ufellow's starving, but everyone kind of was.
Speaker 2: The shipwrecked survivors had gone through a shipwreck, so they
Speaker 2: were ill. They're not good for a lot of work initially,
Speaker 2: which means they're being supported by the resources of people
Speaker 2: who are hungry themselves. When interviewed later, surviving Islanders described
Speaker 2: the shipwreck survivors as being incapable of foraging, quote at
Speaker 2: which even small children were expert. So like, even our
Speaker 2: little kids are better at living than you, guys, Like,
Speaker 2: what the fuck is wrong with you? And their incompetence
Speaker 2: was galling enough that it may have provoked VI.
Speaker 3: She just would have been so easy for them to
Speaker 3: if they were even to die, if they were as
Speaker 3: cruel as like any aspect of this universe asks us
Speaker 3: to believe, it would have been so easy for them
Speaker 3: to just kill them like they they are not useful
Speaker 3: to them.
Speaker 2: You know, they're not helping, they're not making anyone's life
Speaker 2: better right now. Robert Darje also came to expect uh yeah,
Speaker 2: And this is what I find Diars interesting because like
Speaker 2: he's not like sugarcoating the situation. He's like, you know,
Speaker 2: I did face hostility from some of them. Some of
Speaker 2: them even like tried to do violence to me, and
Speaker 2: I think it was because the last time they met
Speaker 2: Europeans they'd been shot. Quote. I believe that the reason
Speaker 2: some had such a hatred of me was that soldiers
Speaker 2: had wounded them. I observed lost his leg had a
Speaker 2: desperate hatred of me, and he tried to kill me
Speaker 2: three or four times.
Speaker 3: Yeah, man, the guy a leg off. But the guy, yeah.
Speaker 3: Did they were they armed at this point?
Speaker 2: Yes? They still they have some sort of arms. It's
Speaker 2: unclear to me how well they're able to use them.
Speaker 2: There are reports that they had guns, but obviously I
Speaker 2: don't know how much powder they got away with. I
Speaker 2: don't know how damaged the weapons were by the water
Speaker 2: and the shipwreck, so they may not have been and
Speaker 2: super usable, right, got it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, And it's
Speaker 2: interesting to me that, like again, like these shipwrecks also
Speaker 2: are not a monolith. You know, you've got Eliza who's
Speaker 2: gonna tell these fucked up stories, and you got Dars.
Speaker 2: She's like, yeah, this guy tried to kill me, but
Speaker 2: he had his leg blown off by a cannon, So
Speaker 2: like I get it, you know, like, yeah, I'd probably
Speaker 2: be pretty pissed for.
Speaker 3: Literally no reason. Like they were doing our favorite pastime
Speaker 3: at that time, which was watching a ship come in
Speaker 3: and like what's happening those basically the movies back then. Yeah,
Speaker 3: we'dn't go down to the dock and wave at a ship.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people shot them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and they had shot with a fucking can Jesus.
Speaker 2: And so that's probably when we talk about like some
Speaker 2: people were like would have been violent when these folks
Speaker 2: like failed to do their choice. Well, maybe some of
Speaker 2: the reason why they were forceful is that they'd had
Speaker 2: friends and family killed or been injured themselves by European guns,
Speaker 2: you know, not the craziest scenario wild take. Yeah, So
Speaker 2: you know, there's some other things happening here. There's all
Speaker 2: this kind of lingering belief that these people have something
Speaker 2: to do with return to spirits, and like when someone dies,
Speaker 2: you burn their shelter because it's bad luck to have
Speaker 2: the shelter around the spirit might get stuck there. And
Speaker 2: so there was this attitude that like, well, they don't
Speaker 2: need to sleep indoors, right, which is bad for them,
Speaker 2: you know, like it doesn't make this any more comfortable, sure,
Speaker 2: but they're not trying to be assholes by doing that.
Speaker 2: Probably the kind of darkest matter of conflict here is
Speaker 2: the matter of what happened to Captain Fraser. We don't
Speaker 2: know exactly, but Eliza's husband was killed or died soon
Speaker 2: after they were taken in by the tribe. Eliza would
Speaker 2: later claim that about after about five weeks with the Bachola,
Speaker 2: she saw her husband trying and failing to drag a
Speaker 2: log for like the fire, and he was in bad
Speaker 2: health and not able to do this very well. And
Speaker 2: as she described it, a hunting party returned home empty handed.
Speaker 2: And for some reason one of the men stabbed Captain
Speaker 2: Fraser in the chest.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: I was horrified to see it emerge several inches through
Speaker 2: his chest. I pulled this fear from his body and
Speaker 2: from his mouth. An immense quantity of blood spouted, and
Speaker 2: he died. She furthermore claimed that after this two other
Speaker 2: survivors were tied to stakes and executed by sun exposure. Confusingly,
Speaker 2: she also claims that several crewmen who escaped were burnt,
Speaker 2: but others were taken to the mainland. There is no
Speaker 2: evidence of this but her account, and in fact, there
Speaker 2: is no evidence that any survivors of the shipwreck died
Speaker 2: on Fraser Island at all. The chief officer, Charles Brown,
Speaker 2: who Eliza claims was burnt at the stake, died on
Speaker 2: the Australian mainland. Her husband died at Lake Cutharaba, which
Speaker 2: is also on the mainland, and he was in fact
Speaker 2: stabbed with a spear at some point, although this did
Speaker 2: not kill him immediately like she claimed. Instead, it seems
Speaker 2: like what happened is like someone slapped him in annoyance
Speaker 2: with a spear which caused like a superficial wound, but
Speaker 2: he was sick and it got infected, and so two
Speaker 2: weeks later he dies as a result of the injury, right,
Speaker 2: which is a very different story on the mainland. Yeah,
Speaker 2: on the mainland. Also because they take them to the mainland.
Speaker 1: He was so annoying that somebody spar spear slapped him.
Speaker 3: Yeah, to death.
Speaker 2: That's kind of what it sounds like. We don't know,
Speaker 2: because again she lies about all this, Like she says
Speaker 2: it happens on the island. They are taken off the island,
Speaker 2: like by the Butchola. It doesn't happen there. The guy
Speaker 2: she claims is burnt to death definitely isn't burnt to death,
Speaker 2: And her husband isn't just like impaled and bleeds to
Speaker 2: death immediately, like he suffers a light wound that gets
Speaker 2: infected and he dies two weeks later.
Speaker 1: This is a big episode for the women. Lie guys,
Speaker 1: Yeah maybe, I mean I didn't trust her from the beginning.
Speaker 2: Okay, speaking of lies, that's kind of what advertisements are.
Speaker 3: Sure, beautiful lies.
Speaker 2: Yeah, beautiful lies. Believe them, just like Australian people believed Eliza.
Speaker 2: Ah ah, and we are back. So in all, Eliza
Speaker 2: spent about three months with the Batchola and By the
Speaker 2: time she was rescued by her fellow Europeans, she'd been
Speaker 2: moved to the mainland. Her rescue was affected largely thanks
Speaker 2: to an Irish convict named John Graham, who's another one
Speaker 2: of these really cool guys you hear about in this
Speaker 2: story that I want more about. Yeah, he had previously
Speaker 2: wound up on Fraser Island, so he was he was
Speaker 2: a convict who had like escaped to Fraser Island and
Speaker 2: he had been taken in by locals who adopted him
Speaker 2: as Moilo, the spirit of an elder who had died recently,
Speaker 2: And he basically been taken in by the old man's
Speaker 2: wife and sons and spent six years living as part
Speaker 2: of the family and then headed back to the mainland.
Speaker 1: What is happening in this?
Speaker 2: In this, I mean people could just do stuff back then,
Speaker 2: Like there was it was really easy to die doing stuff,
Speaker 2: but you had a lot of options for you know what,
Speaker 2: I'm going to live a completely different kind of life
Speaker 2: now for like six years.
Speaker 1: Bye, I'm still stuck on you're annoying. I'm gonna spear
Speaker 1: you in.
Speaker 2: The I have definitely met some people that had I
Speaker 2: had a spear in hand. I would have slapped them
Speaker 2: with it. Now, thankfully, we have modern methods of cleaning
Speaker 2: spear wounds here, so every time I've done that, I've
Speaker 2: been able to stop them from, you know, dying of
Speaker 2: an infection.
Speaker 3: It would have been a friendly spear slap to the chest.
Speaker 2: Oh, it wouldn't have been friendly. But so anyway, this
Speaker 2: guy John Graham, right, he'd spent six years or so
Speaker 2: living with the Batola, and then he had returned to
Speaker 2: European civilization and he had gotten imprisoned again. Right, so
Speaker 2: he's he's in custody. But when members like folks from
Speaker 2: the Pinnis who had like left, get back and are like, yeah, there's.
Speaker 3: Spelling, by the way, I just have to ask.
Speaker 2: The pennis p I n n acee.
Speaker 3: Okay, got it.
Speaker 2: So when they get back, people are like, hey, there's
Speaker 2: more shipwrecked victims that are out somewhere near this island,
Speaker 2: you know, off the coast. We should go get them.
Speaker 3: They tried.
Speaker 2: They start to, like local authorities start to put together
Speaker 2: a rescue party, and someone's like, well, there's this dude
Speaker 2: in prison, John Graham, who like lived on that island
Speaker 2: for a while. He probably knows how to talk to
Speaker 2: people and can probably find them right from the rock. Basically, yes, yes,
Speaker 2: this is a this is this is the Yes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well there's only one man who knows in there.
Speaker 2: He's in the island is where he went to escape
Speaker 2: from prison as the prison.
Speaker 3: Was in its complicated but yeah. Basically.
Speaker 2: In his book Irish Convict Lives, author DJ mulvaney describes
Speaker 2: Graham stripping himself as soon as he's like, yeah, I'll go,
Speaker 2: I'll go rescue these people. He strips naked, greases himself up,
Speaker 2: and then leaves with bread and a potato.
Speaker 3: And which is what you did immediately after accepting my
Speaker 3: offer to work at a at iHeart.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I stripped naked, he creased myself bread and
Speaker 2: a potato and we're out the door. Yeah. I know
Speaker 2: it sounds like I'm being like racist to Irish people,
Speaker 2: but that is what the history says is He's just
Speaker 2: march up with your Brendona potato. According to Fianz, who's
Speaker 2: like one of the authorities at the time, Graham stripped
Speaker 2: off his close, greased himself up with charcoal and greece,
Speaker 2: and set off to seek information, armed only with some
Speaker 2: bread and and a potato. He was soon welcomed back
Speaker 2: among his people, observing customary ritual by sharing his carbohydrate
Speaker 2: rich food with them around the fire. That night, he
Speaker 2: learned of the presence of two young ghosts across Lake Kurobora.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: He offered tomahawks to those who brought them to him,
Speaker 2: for he's stressed. They were my sons. So maybe he's
Speaker 2: not working like he's looking for like two men who
Speaker 2: were among the shipwrecked people. He's not really thinking about
Speaker 2: Eliza for whatever reason.
Speaker 3: Oh, those are the ghosts, are the white Yeah, shipwrecked victims.
Speaker 2: Right, That's how he's talking about it to his people
Speaker 2: on Fraser Island and they're like, well, we already actually
Speaker 2: took them across like the strait to the mainland. They're
Speaker 2: over you know, by this lake now.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Just a world class bullshitter who's like yeah. And
Speaker 3: then I told them that they.
Speaker 2: Were ghosts and they're my sons, my other kids, the only.
Speaker 3: Way they could possibly understand.
Speaker 2: He's got the he's Irish, he's got the gift of
Speaker 2: gab and he and he brought up potato, so you
Speaker 2: know they're endeared to him. You bring me a potato
Speaker 2: and some axes. I'm going to be your friend.
Speaker 3: Based on his behavior and having nothing to do with
Speaker 3: his Irish heritage, I'm going to be forced to assume
Speaker 3: that he was shitfaced this whole time.
Speaker 2: One has to guess, right, I'm not. I'm not going
Speaker 2: off on this mission sober.
Speaker 1: Was the taking all of his clothes off and greasing up.
Speaker 2: And I don't know, maybe he does this like on
Speaker 2: the boat when they get him near the island. But
Speaker 2: the way the story is it like he's like in Sydney,
Speaker 2: had just stripped naked.
Speaker 3: They're like halfway through giving him the assignment and he's
Speaker 3: already taking his clothes off.
Speaker 2: This guy got his dick out immediately. He was down. Anyway,
Speaker 2: to make a long story short, Graham saves the day.
Speaker 2: He rescues a couple of the remaining crew members and
Speaker 2: Eliza Fraser, for which he was rewarded with his freedom,
Speaker 2: and he went on to live an apparently law abiding life.
Speaker 2: There's a book about him called John Graham, Convict eight
Speaker 2: teen twenty four that was published by Robert Gibbings in
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty seven. Grandma, but he doesn't really seem to
Speaker 2: have done much after this. He at least doesn't wind
Speaker 2: up in trouble again, So good for you, John Graham.
Speaker 3: Fucking Grambo, guys, a legend.
Speaker 2: Granbo. Yeah yeah, loves being naked and covered in grease.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fucking animal dude.
Speaker 2: Thanks to Grambo, Eliza wound up back in Sydney, where
Speaker 2: she spent several months recovering physically from the trauma of
Speaker 2: the journey and crafting the first versions of what will
Speaker 2: soon be her famous story. Her exact motivations after this
Speaker 2: point will forever be unclear. There are many things we
Speaker 2: know that she lied about, such as the nature of
Speaker 2: several of the deaths of her crewman, But then there
Speaker 2: are things that may be down to interpretation. For example,
Speaker 2: perhaps she interpreted the behavior of the Bachila as cruel
Speaker 2: when it was not, and felt a need to punish
Speaker 2: them by lying and exaggerating what had occurred. The idea
Speaker 2: of an English lady living among Aboriginal people on an
Speaker 2: island for months tidillated white society, not just in Sydney
Speaker 2: but around the globe. And we kind of we have
Speaker 2: global media by the mid eighteen thirties. Newspapers and stuff
Speaker 2: get around, so this story doesn't just stay in Sydney.
Speaker 2: For very long. In addition to that, like people are
Speaker 2: leaving constantly Sydney on boats and they're spreading the story
Speaker 2: around the whole British Empire. Eliza gives her first version
Speaker 2: of events when she's still in Moreton Bay in September
Speaker 2: of eighteen thirty six, and this was noted by Peter Lower,
Speaker 2: the historian, as being the least sensational version of the
Speaker 2: story she would provide. He writes that this version of
Speaker 2: events was quote gradually embroidered with new horrors in Sydney
Speaker 2: and London for the titillation of eager audiences and anticipation
Speaker 2: of financial recompense.
Speaker 3: Right like basically a stand up routine that like they're
Speaker 3: just like working on their material. They're seeing what gets
Speaker 3: a reaction, they're steering it in that direction.
Speaker 2: And yeah, it's also and there's a little bit of
Speaker 2: like a go fundme situation here where she's like because
Speaker 2: she is raising like donations to help her for this,
Speaker 2: and she's kind of like the original story, I got
Speaker 2: to if I'm going to really get donations, I gotta
Speaker 2: make people feel sorry for me, if they're going to
Speaker 2: open their pocketbooks.
Speaker 3: Here. It's a good system. Capitalism it's great love. I
Speaker 3: love the way it works. Oh my husband is dead.
Speaker 3: I'm going to have to tell enormous, harmful lies in
Speaker 3: order to get people to give me their money, because
Speaker 3: otherwise I'll starve to death.
Speaker 2: It's simply the only way to succeed. There is some
Speaker 2: debate that she may have been coaxed along injuicing up
Speaker 2: the story by her second husband, the man she married
Speaker 2: not long after be like within weeks of being rescued
Speaker 2: another captain. She's got a type John Green, and at
Speaker 2: least one version of Evince is that Green helps her
Speaker 2: massage and maybe even written the second version of the
Speaker 2: story into something that was more fit to win sympathy
Speaker 2: and money from the English citizen rate, because he takes
Speaker 2: her from Sydney to London, right, and they get a
Speaker 2: bunch of donations in Sydney with the first version of
Speaker 2: the story enough that she's doing well. She's got like
Speaker 2: enough money to start a new life, and she's also
Speaker 2: now married to a captain. But he takes her to London,
Speaker 2: where they publish another version of events and they start
Speaker 2: raising money again to compensate for Miss Fraser now missus
Speaker 2: Green's trauma. Eliza again she's like has done pretty well previously,
Speaker 2: which may have had something to do with why Green
Speaker 2: married her in February of the next year. But we
Speaker 2: don't really know that he wrote her version of events.
Speaker 2: The best evidence for this is that when they land
Speaker 2: in London, they published a more embellished version of the story,
Speaker 2: and the signature on this was different from how Eliza
Speaker 2: had signed her first account and how she'd signed documents
Speaker 2: in the past, and people wonder, oh, was Green just
Speaker 2: kind of forging her signature? Did like he do this?
Speaker 3: Right? We'll never know because I mean it's being written,
Speaker 3: so it must be the man right.
Speaker 2: Right, right right. And that's also a woman could never
Speaker 2: lie about things that happened to her for money.
Speaker 3: Yes, too ingenious. I also wonder like was there so
Speaker 3: element of like when people find out that she lived
Speaker 3: out there with this tribe for so long, Like is
Speaker 3: there some like looking askance and being like, uh, she
Speaker 3: went savage or you know that was like a big
Speaker 3: term at the time, Like.
Speaker 2: Yes, a wild European I think was another way they
Speaker 2: put it. A wild white person. Yeah, wild white man.
Speaker 2: That's what they call these convicts.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she's having to like do some reputation, like by
Speaker 3: acting like she was that they were mean to her
Speaker 3: and not that she was like accepted into the tribe
Speaker 3: as like helping her kind of save face a little bit.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think that's part of it too, because there's
Speaker 2: also all these myths or these rumors about like well,
Speaker 2: did she sleep with any of them or did any
Speaker 2: of them like rape her? Right, Like that's a that's
Speaker 2: a thing that people talk about, and she kind of
Speaker 2: plays into to an extent because again, it it increases
Speaker 2: the sympathy of the story a little bit, but you
Speaker 2: also can't go too far because it's bad for your reputation. Right,
Speaker 2: there's like a lot of patriarchal norms in the society
Speaker 2: that also play into how she's received and what she says.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that makes sense, Like that feels like that's something
Speaker 3: that's got to be playing in there. That's got to
Speaker 3: be like at least a consideration for her and her
Speaker 3: new captain husband as they're like deciding. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the version of the story that she disseminates
Speaker 2: in London, the natives of Fraser Island, which had been
Speaker 2: named Fraser Island at that point. Again it's always called Gari,
Speaker 2: but people now call it Fraser Island because her husband
Speaker 2: had died there, even though he didn't die there, he
Speaker 2: died on the mainland. The people there are depicted as
Speaker 2: nightmare savages. She called her time with them a fate
Speaker 2: worse than death. She described them as cannibals, and she
Speaker 2: of course raised money from the people of London offer suffering.
Speaker 2: Now again, global media does exist by this point, and
Speaker 2: so as soon as she starts telling this story in London,
Speaker 2: there are people who had been in Sydney and traveled
Speaker 2: on different boats, maybe even on the same one, and
Speaker 2: we're like, well, she teared it. First off, she's raising
Speaker 2: money here. She just raised money in Sydney and she
Speaker 2: got a lot. And second it's a different story. Now
Speaker 2: is she telling you guys she doesn't have any money
Speaker 2: like this? This kind of seems fucked up, And so
Speaker 2: some people go to the London press, to journalists and
Speaker 2: are like, this lady might be a grifter, right, which
Speaker 2: actually causes a scandal, Like there's articles about this because
Speaker 2: she comes and she's initially everyone's really sympathetic and giving
Speaker 2: her money, and then there's stories that like she's she's
Speaker 2: raising money a second time off this story and it's
Speaker 2: different now, right.
Speaker 3: Which probably also doesn't really hurt the virality. The old
Speaker 3: timey virality of the story is.
Speaker 2: Controversy sells baby, no bad pr.
Speaker 3: Yeah, controversy. So now, yeah, the story isn't doesn't have
Speaker 3: like more legs if it's just like and that's messed up. Yeah,
Speaker 3: well there goes that story. Now it's like, wait that
Speaker 3: she might be the villain, yeah, the story actually and
Speaker 3: then yeah.
Speaker 2: This is why periodically I'll just make up a bastard
Speaker 2: to do episodes on. For example, Hitler, not a real guy.
Speaker 2: I just I just came up with him, you know,
Speaker 2: Joseph Stalin.
Speaker 3: There's a lot of people who want to believe that
Speaker 3: you did make that one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, you're right.
Speaker 3: He's actually a normal guy who gets a bad rap
Speaker 3: a lot.
Speaker 2: Just a painter, right, Yeah, look, Sophie, they can't all
Speaker 2: be Unfortunately, not all the bits are terrible. Actually, I
Speaker 2: don't know, they have to be bits. So this causes
Speaker 2: a scandal and there's a formal inquiry in London, which
Speaker 2: is where she gives her third and final version of
Speaker 2: her story. Right, so the third version of this story
Speaker 2: is like she hands gives out in court when she
Speaker 2: is questioned as to what happened. And this is the
Speaker 2: first version of the story where she claims she was
Speaker 2: forced to nurse a child by the island and that
Speaker 2: she had given birth to a baby who died. And
Speaker 2: maybe so part of why people say she may have
Speaker 2: lied about these things or even likely did is that like, well,
Speaker 2: she's in trouble when she first starts telling people about this,
Speaker 2: and maybe like that's why she brings this up, is
Speaker 2: she's like she doesn't want this inquiry to be meet
Speaker 2: like to judge her too harshly, so like, well, if
Speaker 2: they feel like my baby died and I had to
Speaker 2: like nurse this baby, who I am going to She
Speaker 2: describes the infant as subhuman. She calls it quote one
Speaker 2: of the most deformed and ugly looking brats my eyes
Speaker 2: ever beheld. She is very racist.
Speaker 3: It's also just like you made the point earlier that
Speaker 3: this it becomes like a Marvel cinematic universe of like
Speaker 3: multiple stories, like it is the writing process of a
Speaker 3: film where they're like the protects baby in there. Yeah,
Speaker 3: she's not like sympathetic enough and like they're not scary enough.
Speaker 2: So we're gonna make does she captain more likable.
Speaker 3: She captain lost a baby, and then she has to
Speaker 3: nurse basically like the alien from the Alien movies. You know,
Speaker 3: like that would really make things scary.
Speaker 1: Why didn't she try just stripping down in pouring grease
Speaker 1: all over herself and grabbing a potato. People seem to
Speaker 1: really like that.
Speaker 2: See, I mean, first off, Sophie, who wouldn't like that?
Speaker 3: That's that only works for men. Yeah, women who do
Speaker 3: that go to jail. Sorry, is she captain?
Speaker 2: She captain who does that would go right to jail.
Speaker 2: So disgust is also a major part of her narrative,
Speaker 2: and that is, like, you know, a major motivating factor
Speaker 2: for conservatives, like the kind of people who are going
Speaker 2: to be running a board of inquiry for the British Empire. Like,
Speaker 2: you get a reaction out of people by making them disgusted.
Speaker 2: So I don't think it's coincidental that she dials that
Speaker 2: up to ten for the version she gives when she's
Speaker 2: in trouble. Ultimately, the whole situation seems to have ended
Speaker 2: well enough for Eliza. She made a sizable amount of
Speaker 2: money off of her story and retires, probably with her
Speaker 2: second husband, to New Zealand, where she lives out the
Speaker 2: remainder of her days. So unfortunately she's one of yours.
Speaker 3: Now, Yeah, so we're good here, we're good. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, there's a there's a genocide. We got to talk
Speaker 2: about it. Yeah yeah. Yeah. So she disappears oll Eliza
Speaker 2: as a public figure not long after this point, but
Speaker 2: her story continues to spread about as fast as a
Speaker 2: story could spread in that period of time. In fact,
Speaker 2: variants of the Eliza Fraser story become a cottage industry
Speaker 2: in their own right for like a century or so,
Speaker 2: and I guess in a way, I'm continuing that tradition.
Speaker 2: The story first enters North America in eighteen thirty seven
Speaker 2: as a pamphlet titled Narrative of the Capture, Sufferings and
Speaker 2: Miraculous Escape of Missus Eliza Fraser. Scholar Olaine Brown writes
Speaker 2: that quote for American consumption, the illustrator dressed the Aboriginal
Speaker 2: people in loincloths, tunics, hose, and feather headdresses and gave
Speaker 2: them tomahawks, daggers and bows and arrows. So we just
Speaker 2: they just like are depicted as like a racist drawing
Speaker 2: of like indigenous American people because like otherwise American audiences
Speaker 2: won't get what the fuck they're looking at. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: also i have no idea what these people look at.
Speaker 2: I'm not doing any research before I draw this cover. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The first attempt at a serious historic account of the
Speaker 2: whole deal was John Curtis's The Shipwreck of the Sterling Castle,
Speaker 2: which gets published in London in eighteen thirty eight, so
Speaker 2: like a year after Eliza comes to London. Now Curtis
Speaker 2: is the closest thing to a journalist that existed in
Speaker 2: that era. And he had attended the inquiry in person
Speaker 2: and taken notes using the system of shorthand he'd invented himself.
Speaker 2: So he is. He's there for like her court appearance,
Speaker 2: and he takes notes on the story she tells. He
Speaker 2: reports on the case for the London Times, and he
Speaker 2: doesn't just listen to Eliza.
Speaker 3: He does.
Speaker 2: Scholar Olaine Brown describes what he does is quote a
Speaker 2: little research of his own, so not a lot. It's
Speaker 2: good for him.
Speaker 3: Do your own research, bro.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the equivalent of like he glances at wicked for
Speaker 2: like fucking Frasier Island is what it's called now. She
Speaker 2: describes his book as sympathetic to the survivors quote, Curtis
Speaker 2: made the most of his opportunity to produce a new
Speaker 2: Robinson Crusoe. He was dealing with a true story of
Speaker 2: shipwreck and an exotic setting on an unexplored Pacific shore,
Speaker 2: A cast of exceptional characters, the crew of a merchant's ship,
Speaker 2: the captain's lady, cool savages, red coated soldiers, and a
Speaker 2: heroic runaway convict. A story with unlimited possibilities for conflict, tragedy,
Speaker 2: and pathos.
Speaker 3: Sounds like he's thinking like a real journalist.
Speaker 2: Guys, right, right, right, right right, yeah, in that you
Speaker 2: journalists at this point are basically structure. Yeah, we talk
Speaker 2: about again this method of oral storytelling that you know
Speaker 2: is common on the people of Ghari in a lot
Speaker 2: of ways better than journalism at the time. So that
Speaker 2: quote comes from a paper that Elaine Brown wrote in
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety three titled The Legend of Eliza Fraser, A
Speaker 2: Survey of the Sources, which I would describe as useful
Speaker 2: but also too sympathetic to our grant Brown. The fact that,
Speaker 2: as we kind of discussed, a lot of misogyny is
Speaker 2: rooted in stories by other survivors that like called Eliza
Speaker 2: a liar and a she captain, but also the evidence
Speaker 2: strongly suggests that she did lie a lot, or at
Speaker 2: least let herself enter story be used by someone else
Speaker 2: who lied. Now, there is still a potentially sympathetic version
Speaker 2: of Eliza in this, a physically and mentally traumatized woman who,
Speaker 2: by several accounts, was not quite sane after her rescue
Speaker 2: and was easily manipulated both by this new husband and
Speaker 2: by a public hungry for stories of savage natives and
Speaker 2: a man who promised her some kind of security in future. Right,
Speaker 2: that is maybe what's going on here. We'll never really know.
Speaker 3: And at a time when yeah, like women are just like.
Speaker 2: There's not a lot of options, treated like.
Speaker 3: Shit, not a lot of options immediately like view a
Speaker 3: you know, she captain, Yeah, she captain.
Speaker 2: And again she's just got a barrel of PTSD from
Speaker 2: this whole situation, and.
Speaker 3: There's gotta be so many like sec assistant sinuations happening.
Speaker 3: The fact that she survived living with these you know,
Speaker 3: religious tribe for that long. Right, Yeah, it's just a
Speaker 3: she captain. Sure, sure, sure, Sophia is really luxuriating in this,
Speaker 3: and I feel like it's good like going to become
Speaker 3: a new sound drop and then a T shirt and yeah, sure,
Speaker 3: whole brand of yeah merchandising.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're really going to squeeze more water from the rock.
Speaker 2: That is the Eliza Fraser story. So her lies were
Speaker 2: just what got the ball rolling right, whether or not
Speaker 2: you want to see her as like sympathetic and in
Speaker 2: some way a victim herself, or is fundamentally malevolent. What
Speaker 2: happens next is entirely out of her hand and is
Speaker 2: a malevolent process, Elaine Brown writes back in Sydney Press.
Speaker 2: Accounts of the shipwreck were synthesized for a chapter in
Speaker 2: Australia's first children's book, A Mother's Offering to Her Children,
Speaker 2: written by a lady Long resident in New South Wales,
Speaker 2: imprinted by the Sydney Gazette in eighteen forty one. The
Speaker 2: text is in the form of a rather mannered conversation
Speaker 2: between missus S and her children, Julius, Emma, Clara and Lucy.
Speaker 2: The dates and events mentioned are tediously detailed, but some
Speaker 2: idea of the tone of the work can be gained
Speaker 2: from Claria's exclamation on hearing of the death of the
Speaker 2: mate mister Brown. Such wanton barbarities fill one with horror
Speaker 2: and indignation and a wish to exterminate the perpetrators of
Speaker 2: such dreadful cruelties. So this is from a part of
Speaker 2: the book where they talk about one of the shipwreck
Speaker 2: survivors being murdered by the people of Gary Island and
Speaker 2: the response of one of her children to this is kill,
Speaker 2: we should exterminate the people who did this, right, Oh,
Speaker 2: we should exterminate the brutes.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Like that's that's literally a ligne in a children's book,
Speaker 2: you know, kid stuff, when we're talking about the way
Speaker 2: in which this story influences the genocide that's happening in
Speaker 2: this period. Literally, like the first major publication in Australia
Speaker 2: to use this story is like, yeah, we should murder
Speaker 2: the people who did this, all of them, right, So
Speaker 2: to continue with Brown's writing, thus emerged the third problem
Speaker 2: historians have faced in dealing with the fates of the
Speaker 2: Sterling Castle survivors. The mutually hostile attitudes subsequently assumed by
Speaker 2: both the White Bay Aboriginal people and the Europeans who
Speaker 2: learned of their supposed wanton barbarities through the worldwide publicity
Speaker 2: given to Eliza Fraser's story. An undercurrent of what poet
Speaker 2: Judith Wright calls the fear as Old as Kane runs
Speaker 2: through most European accounts. So you know it's bad. This
Speaker 2: is all going to be bad. Now, before we move on,
Speaker 2: I should note a coda to the Fraser story, which
Speaker 2: is that well, the early stories that went viral were
Speaker 2: very much focused on her as a heroic victim. The
Speaker 2: most popular early American account was an article for Knickerbocker
Speaker 2: magazine by Henry Yolden, who is the crewman who survived
Speaker 2: and hated Eliza and maybe stole everybody's water. He is
Speaker 2: the guy who goes viral in the US for a
Speaker 2: version of this story, and he describes her as a vixen.
Speaker 2: So again, maybe not himself the best source God.
Speaker 3: Also, everybody's just so horny back then.
Speaker 2: Oh, you're just like they cloak it. Yeah, the only
Speaker 2: fans is very primitive at that point.
Speaker 3: On the kid book front, I would just on Daily's Like, guys,
Speaker 3: we were just talking about this book written by Mike
Speaker 3: Huckabee called Kid's Guide to President Trump.
Speaker 2: That yeah, I don't think kids need that, okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And one of the things one of the quotes
Speaker 3: was when people come to take This is him describing
Speaker 3: illegal immigration is when people come to take money and
Speaker 3: jobs without paying taxes, sneak in to sell drugs, commit
Speaker 3: other crimes, and in worst case commit acts of terrorism.
Speaker 3: So you know, as wild as continuing y.
Speaker 1: Is any of the current US ambassador Israel.
Speaker 3: And this is how one of the ways that it's
Speaker 3: actually like a weirdly popular way to uh kiss up
Speaker 3: to Trump is making a children's book about him, because
Speaker 3: I also I think it he likes the idea of
Speaker 3: being indoctrinating children, and it's also at his reading level,
Speaker 3: so he's like hell yeah, and.
Speaker 2: Again this book, this is the first like children's book
Speaker 2: published in Australia, comes out in eighteen forty one. A
Speaker 2: lot of the genocide we're talking about is like in
Speaker 2: the seventies and eighteen seventies, eighties, nineties, So it's going
Speaker 2: to be perpetrated and orchestrated by men who would have
Speaker 2: grown up as the generation.
Speaker 3: That was like, yeah, this was their green eggs and ham.
Speaker 2: Obviously that's not the only thing, right, It's not just
Speaker 2: this children's book makes them all do a genocide. But
Speaker 2: it's not like a non factor.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, background noise for their growing up.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So long after that account spreads in the US,
Speaker 2: in the eighteen eighties, another account is published claiming that
Speaker 2: an entirely different convict, a guy named Bracewell, had actually
Speaker 2: rescued Eliza, and Bracewell is the source of this. There's
Speaker 2: no evidence of this. There are some claims that maybe
Speaker 2: he's sexually assaulted Eliza. That's also not based on anything,
Speaker 2: and it's mainly just I only bring this up to
Speaker 2: note that, like fucking forty years later, people are coming
Speaker 2: with new versions of this story based on very evidence
Speaker 2: because it still sells. There's a book written about Bracewall's
Speaker 2: claims right by a guy named Russell in eighteen eighty eight,
Speaker 2: because there's still money in this shit, right.
Speaker 3: Like the jfk assassination. It's like, yes, people will keep
Speaker 3: telling and retelling the stories. Yes, and also everyone's so horny. Yeah. Oh,
Speaker 3: then there's this guy Bracewell who comes in and he's like.
Speaker 2: It's not really worth getting into. He may have had
Speaker 2: some involvement, but like it's not really worth talking about.
Speaker 2: What is worth noting is that Russell, the guy who
Speaker 2: writes this book about Bracewall's Claims in eighteen eighty eight
Speaker 2: describes how in the eighteen eighties, decades after Eliza left
Speaker 2: for New Zealand, there are side shows on the London
Speaker 2: streets featuring an Eliza impersonator recounting her story. Right, so
Speaker 2: like someone pretending to be her telling her story.
Speaker 1: I think she captain what's happening here?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's awesome. Quote from Russell's book. Walking from
Speaker 2: Hyde Park down Oxford Street, I observed a man who
Speaker 2: was carrying over his shoulder one of those show advertisements.
Speaker 2: A large wooden square for nailed at the to the
Speaker 2: end of a long pole. On the calico with which
Speaker 2: it was covered was a bright colored daub which represented
Speaker 2: savages with bows and arrows, some dead bodies of white
Speaker 2: men and women which other savages were cutting up on
Speaker 2: the ground, and another squad was holding on spits to
Speaker 2: a large fire. It was amusing enough to stop me
Speaker 2: in my walk, horrible enough to impress the writing beneath
Speaker 2: this picture on my mind. Sterling Castle wrecked on the
Speaker 2: coast of New Holland Botany Bay, all killed and eaten
Speaker 2: by savages. Only a survivor, a woman to be seen.
Speaker 2: Sixpence admission and there's a lot there, right, Both that
Speaker 2: at this point the story has turned into all of
Speaker 2: these people were eaten by these savages, right, which like
Speaker 2: just is not a part it is not even like
Speaker 2: a part of the original versions of this story, right,
Speaker 2: it's just something people have admitted to make it more racist.
Speaker 2: And also you can see the old lady if you're
Speaker 2: just pay she'll talk to you about what happened, which
Speaker 2: is definitely not Eliza. We know that she is in
Speaker 2: So it's got to be assuming he didn't just make
Speaker 2: this up. I don't think he would. This has to
Speaker 2: be like a show where someone's like, we'll just get
Speaker 2: some old late to pretend to be Eliza make some
Speaker 2: fucking money.
Speaker 3: Which was like a popular thing back in the day
Speaker 3: all the time, Yeah, touring people who are like I
Speaker 3: was George Washington's.
Speaker 2: You know neu Yeah yeah whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Also, like this the idea of like a you know,
Speaker 3: white woman who is under attack from you.
Speaker 2: Know, uh, like only a survivor of this cannibal holocaust.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, that's that's also like the birth of a nation,
Speaker 3: and like that's a powerful like that that will start
Speaker 3: wars across the history of you know, white supremacy and
Speaker 3: racism in uh you know the history of the world.
Speaker 2: Your dash gum tutin, so we know that. In the
Speaker 2: US and the UK there were also stage productions of
Speaker 2: the story of the Sharling Sterling shipwrecket gets turned into
Speaker 2: a play. There's like versions of this play up into
Speaker 2: the mid twentieth century, and of a licensed castivity with
Speaker 2: savages right, And the verbiage that Russell uses here is
Speaker 2: in keeping with like Leaflet's advertizing popular republications of the
Speaker 2: story from around the same time, like this Eliza Fraser
Speaker 2: who existed seven days without food or water, the dreadful
Speaker 2: sufferings of miss Fraser, who with her husband and the
Speaker 2: survivors of the ill fated crew are captured by the
Speaker 2: savages of New Holland and by them stripped entirely naked
Speaker 2: and driven into the bush. They're dreadful slavery, cruel, toiled
Speaker 2: and excruciating tortures inflicted on them. A horrid death of
Speaker 2: mister Brown it was roasted alive over a slow fire
Speaker 2: kindled beneath his feet. Meeting of mister and Missus Fraser,
Speaker 2: and the inhuman murder of Captain Fraser in the presence
Speaker 2: of his wife.
Speaker 3: It's like meeting of mister and miss so we get
Speaker 3: to see the meet cute and his uh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I guess there's no maybe they start with
Speaker 2: I don't knowl But this is how the story has
Speaker 2: been summarized now right. It's just completely separate from what
Speaker 2: we know of the reality.
Speaker 3: And they're bringing in like the iconography that we've all
Speaker 3: seen in like old like fifties and sixties movies where
Speaker 3: somebody is captured by camp and like they're tied to
Speaker 3: a post and there's a fire around them that you know,
Speaker 3: like all of those images are like, oh yeah, that's
Speaker 3: the familiar cannibal imagery.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the reality is like, yeah, you've got someone
Speaker 2: who's like starving and frustrated and maybe like hit, someone
Speaker 2: who's not able to who's like just can't learn a
Speaker 2: simple task, Like that's not ideal. But it's turned into
Speaker 2: like they were tortured and cooked over fires, yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: burnt alive. Yeah. So what really matters here is that
Speaker 2: the story became a huge and prominent part of the
Speaker 2: white Australian and European conception of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia.
Speaker 2: This would contribute to some pretty disastrous things in the
Speaker 2: coming decades. There's no one massacre or atrocity you can
Speaker 2: point to and say, well, they did this because of
Speaker 2: what Eliza said. But I think I've established how popular
Speaker 2: this account was and thus influential. A supplement put out
Speaker 2: by the Fraser Island Defenders Association notes that Fraser Island
Speaker 2: Aboriginal people gained international notoriety through the stories of Eliza Fraser,
Speaker 2: and one of Eliza Fraser's legacies was that there would
Speaker 2: be many men massacres of the very people who had
Speaker 2: helped her. In eighteen forty two, white Australians established a
Speaker 2: head station called Tiaro near Moreton Bay, which is in
Speaker 2: the bay that's very close to the island. This was
Speaker 2: attacked so vigorously by local tribes that the forces manning
Speaker 2: it were withdrawn and the station abandoned mere months later.
Speaker 2: The Commissioner of Crown Lands from Moreton Bay noted in
Speaker 2: eighteen forty three that twelve white people had fallen as
Speaker 2: sacrifice to the Aboriginal peoples of the area. And he's
Speaker 2: not saying they were sacrificed by those people, saying that
Speaker 2: those people were a sacrifice for the cause of colonialism right.
Speaker 2: It's also he notes twelve white people died. He did
Speaker 2: not bother to recount how many indigenous inhabitants were killed
Speaker 2: by white settlers in the same time period.
Speaker 3: Not important.
Speaker 2: Rome No and Peter Laura's History of Fraser Island says
Speaker 2: that this was the norm, right, They just didn't talk
Speaker 2: about that quote. So successful were what was aboriginal resistance
Speaker 2: activities against isolated white settlers in this period that those
Speaker 2: moving into the Mary River area by the late eighteen
Speaker 2: forties were taking up the country abandoned two even three
Speaker 2: times before. The pattern of warfare escalating upon this pastoral
Speaker 2: frontier by the late forties is well exemplified by developments
Speaker 2: at Richard Jones's Bowie Station on the Merry River. In
Speaker 2: late November eighteen forty eight. Jones experienced two successive raids
Speaker 2: upon his flocks, and a large number were carried off,
Speaker 2: not for many reasons of hunger, but as a guerrilla
Speaker 2: resistance technique, or as the Moreton Bay Courier saw fit
Speaker 2: determin it in the mere wantonness of patriotism. Hollanders. A
Speaker 2: reprisal party of ten whites led by station manager mister
Speaker 2: Clements and assisted by a collaborative black guide, then attacked
Speaker 2: the Aboriginal camp, firing a volley into it and dispersing them.
Speaker 2: And again there's no mention made of how many people
Speaker 2: were killed in this barrage of gunfire. Right, but this
Speaker 2: is kind of the nature of the conflict for a while.
Speaker 2: There's both like murders when you've got these these white
Speaker 2: folks at stations, but also, oh, they've got like a
Speaker 2: couple thousand sheep here and there's not enough of them
Speaker 2: to guard them. Will either kill or capture take the
Speaker 2: sheep for ourselves, and that will render this unprofitable for them,
Speaker 2: because we've started to gain an understanding of how they're
Speaker 2: xiety works and that if we can make this costly enough,
Speaker 2: they won't be able to afford to keep taking our shit, right.
Speaker 3: And that's the one thing us whites cannot abide is
Speaker 3: taking our shit. Yeah, yes, taking our shit, that's our property.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's well, And that is very much like however,
Speaker 2: things get dressed up today and you can find some
Speaker 2: articles made by conservative white Australians today about like, oh,
Speaker 2: you know, there really was a lot of you know,
Speaker 2: horrible violence done by these people to these settlers, and
Speaker 2: you know these settlers were just trying to make a living.
Speaker 2: Evidence at the time from the way these settlers was
Speaker 2: writing paints a very ugly picture. The Courier, which was
Speaker 2: a local paper, wrote published an editorial during this period arguing,
Speaker 2: we hold this country by the right of conquest, and
Speaker 2: if that right gives us a just claim to its
Speaker 2: continued possession, we must be empowered to enforce our claim
Speaker 2: by the strong arm when necessary. The Blacks have just
Speaker 2: the same claim to the restoration of their decayed nationality
Speaker 2: as would the principality of Whales have if it rose
Speaker 2: in open rebellion against the crown. One law must apply
Speaker 2: to all conquered nations so far as the rights of
Speaker 2: the conqueror, order and rule must be maintained, And if
Speaker 2: this cannot be done by kindness and indulgence, it must
Speaker 2: then be affected by the iron rod.
Speaker 3: Sound like cool people. Feel it's so nice. They sound
Speaker 3: like nice people who shell would be easy to get
Speaker 3: along with.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ, I don't see why anyone's fighting back against them.
Speaker 3: Why are they being so mean to us?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, they don't want us to just take their stuff.
Speaker 2: Over the next several years, until eighteen fifty, different groups
Speaker 2: of Aboriginal warriors continued. This is and this is another
Speaker 2: thing that's worth emphasizing. This is a very successful insurgent campaign.
Speaker 2: They are planning, They're like, they're thinking this through, and
Speaker 2: they're they're winning for a while. They take thousands of sheep,
Speaker 2: they destroy a lot of infrastructure, and they kill a
Speaker 2: number of settlers. And the effect of all this is
Speaker 2: to stretch the already insufficient local white labor supply and
Speaker 2: renders settling in the area financially unviable. Just describes this
Speaker 2: incredibly successful, vigorous defense as partly a response to the
Speaker 2: absolute shattering of the worldview many of these peoples had
Speaker 2: held for since time immemorial.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 2: The dawning realization that whites were not explicable spirits but
Speaker 2: unknown usurpers whose guns and horses induced terror and whose
Speaker 2: imposed presence demanded utter forfeiture of territory must have emerged
Speaker 2: as a dreadful, almost inexpressible revelation. The traditional verities of
Speaker 2: a complex, orderly pattern of existence were rudely shaken, spiritual
Speaker 2: values were partially falsified, and the formerly authoritative explanations of
Speaker 2: tribal elders were increasingly undermined a people who had totally
Speaker 2: believed in a certain right mode of behavior for every person.
Speaker 2: The sacrisanct nature of individual family and tribal totems, and
Speaker 2: all the rules of residency, hospitality, and reciprocity were rapidly
Speaker 2: confronted by incomers with new unstated rules and behavioral modes,
Speaker 2: who were no respectors of totems or territorial boundaries, and
Speaker 2: who were ready to impose an exclusive hegemony by force
Speaker 2: of arms. Tribal society here faced the most critical impasse conceivable,
Speaker 2: for to lose land was not simply to lose livelihood,
Speaker 2: but to abandon the meaning of life itself. The sudden
Speaker 2: onset of an unprecedented invasion situation demanded from the indigenous.
Speaker 2: Therefore new patterns of adaptation and resistance and encourage the
Speaker 2: emergence of new leaders capable of meeting the onslaught and again.
Speaker 2: So this is like a culture that is changing and adapting,
Speaker 2: And one of the things they're doing is like, Okay,
Speaker 2: the people who told us these white folks were one
Speaker 2: thing were wrong. We probably shouldn't listen to them about
Speaker 2: how to handle this situation. We need like a new
Speaker 2: plan because what we were doing doesn't work now. Ultimately,
Speaker 2: after several years of this, Australian authorities call the Native
Speaker 2: Police into the situation, which are like Aboriginal people who
Speaker 2: are taken in and trained and armed as police and
Speaker 2: led by white officers. Through the early eighteen fifties, there
Speaker 2: were a number of bloody clashes between tribesmen and these
Speaker 2: colonial forces that killed enough warriors to force their retreat
Speaker 2: to Fraser Island. Right. They basically use it as a
Speaker 2: natural fortress, that's how Lwer describes this, so that they
Speaker 2: can avoid like European reprisal raids. And you know, this
Speaker 2: seems to be something that goes on for several years
Speaker 2: from the end of the eighteen forties up to the
Speaker 2: beginning of the eighteen fifties, and there's a lot of
Speaker 2: talk with like officers of the Native Force and local
Speaker 2: authorities that like, we have to actually land people on
Speaker 2: the island to quote finally put a stop to collisions
Speaker 2: between blacks and whites. And there's an interesting line here
Speaker 2: in Lawer's writing. Although the Native Police acted as a
Speaker 2: paramilitary body engaged in border warfare while in the field,
Speaker 2: no legal recognition of this role could be given for
Speaker 2: officially the territory of others was not being conquered. It
Speaker 2: was merely seen as Crown land being settled. Resisting natives
Speaker 2: were therefore held to be British subjects behaving criminally, rather
Speaker 2: than being accorded status as the legitimate force of a
Speaker 2: warring people opposing the invasion of their lands. Thus, in
Speaker 2: order to invade Fraser Island, the required legal procedure was
Speaker 2: that the execution of warrants. Basically, well, we can't like
Speaker 2: this island even though none of us, no white people live,
Speaker 2: there is crown land.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, just land on it and be like I
Speaker 3: hereby declare that this is yeah your trustpassing, Yeah.
Speaker 2: You're trustpassing. And we have a warrant, right, we have
Speaker 2: to write out a warrant before. So they go around
Speaker 2: to locals to get like descriptions of some of the
Speaker 2: men who had been leading raids, and some of them
Speaker 2: are just known by like descriptive names that settlers give them.
Speaker 2: But they actually have a bunch of warrants in hand
Speaker 2: for thirty five Aboriginal men for murder and felony of settlers, right,
Speaker 2: and that's when they invade Fraser Island. This force of
Speaker 2: Native police, it's with all of these warrants. So they
Speaker 2: commence an assault on August fourth, eighteen fifty one. Police
Speaker 2: engage and slaughter locals and withdraw several times, but raids
Speaker 2: on mainland sediments continue. So in Christmas Eve of eighteen
Speaker 2: fifty one, the Native police engaged in a final clearing
Speaker 2: of the island. A mix of two dozen Native police
Speaker 2: under several white officers and an undisclosed number of random
Speaker 2: armed white volunteers quote, all armed and sworn in as
Speaker 2: special constables, run rampant across the island, killing whoever they can.
Speaker 2: So like these police get together with a bunch of
Speaker 2: just like local militia, basically like angry white farmers, and
Speaker 2: they do an ethnic cleansing on Fraser Island, right on
Speaker 2: Angari Island, right they're calling it Fraser Island. And that's
Speaker 2: how like a lot of these people get like forced off.
Speaker 2: That's kind of it's not entirely the end of habitation
Speaker 2: of the island in this period of time, but it
Speaker 2: is sort of the beginning of the end. In official reports,
Speaker 2: this is always described as a police action. And again
Speaker 2: you can still find conservatives saying like, well, they were
Speaker 2: just trying to arrest people who had committed crimes, and
Speaker 2: there were several men taken into custody and apparently tried,
Speaker 2: although there's no evidence that any sort of judicial procedure
Speaker 2: was followed. They were just like, yeah, we tried and
Speaker 2: convicted them, you know, yeah, maybe they just shot them
Speaker 2: where they stood and lied about that. Later. One local
Speaker 2: reporter at the time wrote, rumors are afloat that the
Speaker 2: natives were driven into the sea and kept there as
Speaker 2: long as daylight or life lasted. So basically, we drove
Speaker 2: these people into some say the sea, some say it's
Speaker 2: the Susan River, and waited until they drowned. Like that's
Speaker 2: how this massacre finishes, and somewhere between fifty and one hundred.
Speaker 2: But Schalla people are killed that way right.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 2: Again, you can find a lot of argument. I found
Speaker 2: a whole book by this Australian conservative commentator arguing that
Speaker 2: this massacre never happened. I should note that the publisher
Speaker 2: of that book, Connor Court Publishing, also publishes works of
Speaker 2: climate change denial and books by famous right wing shitheads
Speaker 2: like Cardinal George Pell, who has been accused of covering
Speaker 2: up and ignoring child's sexual abuse in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 2: so maybe I don't consider that the best source in
Speaker 2: the world. Fiona Foley, who I quoted earlier and Isobachila
Speaker 2: woman artist and writer, heard stories of the massacre from
Speaker 2: her relatives growing up as a child, and she created
Speaker 2: a sculpture based on these stories titled Annihilation of the Blacks,
Speaker 2: which became one of the National Museum of Australia's first
Speaker 2: major acquisitions by an urban Aboriginal artist, Aboriginal person artist.
Speaker 2: And this is Soviey's going to show you this work,
Speaker 2: Annihilation of the Blacks by Fiona Foley, who we quoted
Speaker 2: from earlier. It's a pretty striking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Do you want to describe it, Robert.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I mean, you've got two like what look
Speaker 2: like trees basically, I mean, I think they're made from
Speaker 2: like branches, but there's supposed to be trees with like
Speaker 2: a branch lying in between them. They're sort of like
Speaker 2: y shaped at the top and there's a branch in
Speaker 2: between them and strung up on the branch are let
Speaker 2: me count here, nine like black human bodies like strung
Speaker 2: up and hung while a single white person stands below
Speaker 2: with a pretty deep shadow cast like looking over them.
Speaker 2: So ultimately, the Aboriginal peoples of Fraser Island were forced
Speaker 2: out of their homes for generations. The displacement was justified
Speaker 2: by the whites, not only by the violence of the
Speaker 2: years of raids, but by the legacy of Eliza Fraser's account.
Speaker 2: In your twenty sixteen book Finding Eliza, Larissa Barren writes
Speaker 2: that stories like Eliza's provided fuel for British fear of
Speaker 2: cohabitation with Native peoples and quote once these anxieties found
Speaker 2: expression and form and narratives such as Eliza's, they justified
Speaker 2: the mechanisms for surveillance of Aboriginal people through policing practices,
Speaker 2: legal control, and government policy. And in her own article,
Speaker 2: Folly adds the unspoken fear in Eliza's case was that
Speaker 2: this white woman could be sexually violated by Aboriginal men
Speaker 2: if not rescued. Racialized anxieties have formulated many patterns of
Speaker 2: structured behaviors used to subjugate Aboriginal men, women, and children
Speaker 2: in Australia. And you know, yeah, it's fucked up, and
Speaker 2: it's made all the more frustrating by the fact that
Speaker 2: while this deplaced, displacement and slaughter was at its height
Speaker 2: near the end of the eighteen hundreds, clear evidence arose.
Speaker 2: And this is while we're still in the eighteen hundreds
Speaker 2: that the whole phrase your story had been a lie.
Speaker 2: In eighteen seventy four, a colonial official named Archibald Meston
Speaker 2: spoke to several elderly men at Noosa and Fraser Island
Speaker 2: who had been alive when Eliza and other members of
Speaker 2: her crew were sheltered. These are members of the Bachola
Speaker 2: who had known her then, right, And so this colonial
Speaker 2: officer official like, who's you know, probably may himself have
Speaker 2: kind of grown up or as a young person at
Speaker 2: least new young people who were raised on these stories,
Speaker 2: as like, I'm gonna see if I can talk to
Speaker 2: anyone else who was there, right. And here's how lower
Speaker 2: summarizes that. Concerning Eliza Fraser, Meston wrote, she must have
Speaker 2: either had a serious quarrel with truth or else her
Speaker 2: head was badly affected by her experiences. Certainly, she gave
Speaker 2: a wildly improbable tale in Brisbane, accusing the Blacks of
Speaker 2: deeds quite foreign to their known character and quite unknown
Speaker 2: before since an Aboriginal annals Bracewell and Durham Boy both
Speaker 2: declared that miss Fraser's tales in Brisbane, Sydney and London
Speaker 2: were evolved from her own imagination. The old men in
Speaker 2: the seventies told Meston a story very different from that
Speaker 2: of the Lady, the effect that the Europeans were received
Speaker 2: in a friendly manner and passed on in canoes to
Speaker 2: the mainland. It didn't skip point to be forwarded to
Speaker 2: the white people at the Brisbane convict settlement, and we
Speaker 2: know they were sent to the mainland. That version of
Speaker 2: the story that like, yeah, we sent them there because
Speaker 2: we were trying to get them back home, is totally
Speaker 2: consistent with the objective evidence that we have, and this
Speaker 2: also comports orally with the story of the Batchula themselves.
Speaker 2: I found an article in the Courier Mail which interviewed
Speaker 2: Auntie Francis Gala, who's an elder of the tribe, who says,
Speaker 2: of Fraser's story, it isn't true for two very sound reasons,
Speaker 2: and never came down our oral storyline, whereas everything else
Speaker 2: of significance that happened in the past few hundred years
Speaker 2: did come down, and there's no dance about it. If
Speaker 2: James Fraser had been murdered, we would still know that
Speaker 2: dance today, Like we gotta fucking made a dance about
Speaker 2: killing that guy if we'd done it right, Like we
Speaker 2: have that for other people, you know, And it's a
Speaker 2: good point, Like there's all you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we don't skimp on. Yeah, that's like an important
Speaker 3: we want to dance about this, right, we wanted to.
Speaker 3: It would have been fucking great, but we didn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And now I should also note here that although
Speaker 2: Meston is kind of a hero in this part of
Speaker 2: the story where he's helping to break this myth, or
Speaker 2: at least attempting to, he's also not what you would
Speaker 2: call a kind man to the Aboriginal people of Queensland,
Speaker 2: even though his official title was Southern Protector of the Aboriginals.
Speaker 2: It was Meston who carried out an experimental attempt to
Speaker 2: stamp out opium use among the population of Aboriginal people,
Speaker 2: which is generally described by their descendants today as an
Speaker 2: excuse to govern and control the lives of their ancestors.
Speaker 2: Per Foley quote, the Opium Act contained thirty three clauses
Speaker 2: governing Aboriginal lives, with its tentacles reaching into my traditional
Speaker 2: country and the lives of fifty one Bachalla people living
Speaker 2: in Maryborough who are forcibly removed to the mission on
Speaker 2: Ghari under Archibald Meston's direction, and ultimately the peoples who
Speaker 2: had inhabited Ghari for many thousands of years were dispossessed
Speaker 2: of their home right. They eventually get kicked entirely off
Speaker 2: of the island, and this is kind of part of
Speaker 2: that process, and the whole situation was not remedied for them.
Speaker 2: This happens at the end of the eighteen hundreds and
Speaker 2: there don't start to be remedies to this until nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety three when the Native Title Act is passed in
Speaker 2: Australia and actually final. Fole's great aunt is the first
Speaker 2: Bachola person to lodge a title claim on Gari Island,
Speaker 2: which itself is officially renamed in twenty twenty three, so
Speaker 2: it is known legally as Fraser Island until twenty twenty
Speaker 2: three when it is renamed Ghuri, which is what it
Speaker 2: was originally called. So that just happened, that's crazy. Twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three, they finally get their name back.
Speaker 3: The wheels of history turn very slowly when it comes
Speaker 3: to naming things, but we go. We go pretty fast
Speaker 3: and check the check things out later, fact check later.
Speaker 3: When it comes to killing people, we're pretty quick on
Speaker 3: that front.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, great, Well that's the story you got any
Speaker 2: blog ablest club.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't know. That does sound shockingly familiar
Speaker 3: with like people being driven off again. There's just like
Speaker 3: all sorts of these things from history where that seem
Speaker 3: somewhat familiar if you pay attention to the news, which
Speaker 3: is something that we cover over on the dailies like
Speaker 3: me and my co host Myles Gray, which you can
Speaker 3: go check out anywhere fine podcasts are given away for free.
Speaker 3: You can find me on Twitter at jack Underscore Obrian
Speaker 3: and on Blue Sky at jack ob and then the
Speaker 3: number one.
Speaker 2: Jackie oh, which is not what we call you.
Speaker 3: No, not at all. My cousins should be a Jackie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, although, like JACQUELINEO Nassas, you also were present when
Speaker 2: JFK was assassinated and.
Speaker 3: Not a lot of people know that, and because I
Speaker 3: don't want them to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because.
Speaker 3: Is still not up.
Speaker 2: Well that too, Yes, the vampire thing, yes.
Speaker 1: Yes, that is the first thing you told me.
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, I know it's a you think that
Speaker 3: would be Oh, nice to meet you. You think i'd
Speaker 3: be more discreet, and yet I just Usually when I
Speaker 3: meet somebody, I brag about having seen the life train
Speaker 3: from Kennedy's eyes. Take up my clothes, cover myself in Greece,
Speaker 3: grab a tater and sea bread, and run out the
Speaker 3: door and listen.
Speaker 2: Folks you listening at home, don't keep listening to the news.
Speaker 2: The podcast is over. Come back and listen next week.
Speaker 2: But take some time off the internet, do a little
Speaker 2: digital detox. Strip naked yourself in grease, grab the potato
Speaker 2: and some bread, and run off into the woods. You know,
Speaker 2: see what happens to you. It'll probably be fine.
Speaker 3: I feel like that is better than like most of
Speaker 3: the advice that you get.
Speaker 2: That is, it's also healthier than being on social media.
Speaker 2: Sometimes naked in the woods, covered in Greece good shit.
Speaker 1: Or just peta dog if they want you to, yeah.
Speaker 2: Or peta dog, I don't know. Naked, grease, potato, petta dog, both.
Speaker 1: Good things if they want you to.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, if they want you to. But strip, nake
Speaker 2: and cover yourself in grease, whether or not anyone wants
Speaker 2: you to, Yes, you do that, no matter what. Do
Speaker 2: not listen to anyone who says, don't get naked and
Speaker 2: covered in grease, all right, great advice.
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