aussie english — The Goss Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre Floods Comes to Life

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G'day you mob, Pete here, and this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English.

So, today I have a GOSS episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smithson, and we talk about the week's news, whether locally down under here in Australia or non-locally, overseas, in other parts

of the world.

Okay.

And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right.

If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goss.

So, these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English.

So, it is particularly good to improve your listening skills.

In order to complement that, though, I really recommend that you join the podcast membership or the academy membership at AussieEnglish.com.au, where you will get access to the full transcripts of these episodes, the PDFs, the downloads.

And you can also use the online PDF reader to read and listen at the same time.

Okay.

So, if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast,

Get the transcript, listen and read at the same time, keep practising, and that is the quickest way to level up your English.

Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit.

I've been talking a bit.

Let's just get into this episode, guys.

Smack the bird and let's get into it.

Dad.

Pete.

How's it going?

It's wet.

Rain, buddy.

Well, not in Victoria, but New South Wales and Queensland.

We're in a drought at the moment, aren't we?

Sort of, yeah.

Yeah, it hasn't rained much for months.

This year's been so weird.

I think this is one of the first years where I've really sort of started to experience climate change, the effects of climate change significantly.

I remember, I think it was only...

What, a week or two ago, we had a day that got to 25 degrees in mid-May.

I know.

Which is, you know, it's the fifth month of the year.

You're pretty much in winter and it's reaching sort of average summer day temperatures.

I had the doors open in the house at 10 p.m. to air it out in May.

That's crazy.

And was just like, what the shit?

And then a week later...

It's 10.

Yeah, or less.

Like this week, the last few days, it's been down to, I think it got to four degrees down here.

We went to Noah's school the other day.

I dropped him off at school and there were these like sword blades of ice hanging over the roof of his classroom because obviously the water or the frost had piled up on the roof and frozen solid.

Yeah.

And then as it was defrosting, the grooves in the corrugated iron roof were kind of having ice slide down and just smashing on the ground.

They looked like it was about the size of the ruler, like a 30 centimetre ruler.

And there was a few of them hanging over the edge of this thing.

And the kids were going berserk, throwing rocks at them, throwing sticks.

Of course, they were.

I'm like, guys, you can do this, but just one, watch where you're throwing it.

And two, don't stand under the ice.

Yeah, exactly.

It's going to hit you in the face.

Yeah.

You Muppets.

Idiots.

Yeah, so it's been pretty dry in Victoria, but...

For two or three months, it's been raining in outback Queensland.

And so there have been, now, the rivers that drain that Western Queensland basin all run into Lake Eyre.

Is this Darling, the Darling River?

No, that's the Murray Darlings, further sort of east and south.

But all those rivers run into Katitanda, which is Lake Eyre, and it's filling.

Yeah.

It's going to be full for, I think, the third time in 150 years or something.

Yeah.

It's a very, very rare event.

Are you planning a trip out there?

No, not particularly.

I wouldn't mind going, but, you know, the trouble with...

Well, going to Lake Eyre is all right, but you can't go into outback Queensland because all the roads are closed.

Because of the water, yeah.

Because of the water.

Well, the river crossings are impossible.

Yeah, you're going to get stuck.

Or if it does keep raining whilst you're there, you might get stuck in one area and have to go to another.

Like last year, this time last year, that was July last year, I went up to...

Southern Queensland was going to come back down the Darling River.

And it started raining when I was in Southern Queensland, just about to the next day I was going to start the sort of week-long trip home.

And the predictions were that the roads would be closed in two days.

So I thought, no, I'm going to stay on the bitumen and just drive home.

It was nuts.

I remember doing my master's degree or my master's research and doing that trip up the eastern coast of Australia during, God, that would have been 2011, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2011.

And those floods that had hit, was it Gosford?

Yeah.

Yeah.

There was a few of those suburbs around, like, was it northern New South Wales that had been smashed.

Yeah, north of Sydney.

Yeah, and when we drove through, you would go past the rivers and it would be like, that's horrifying.

The amount of water, how high it was and how fast it was flowing.

That's the problem.

The other side of this now is that we've had an instantaneous flooding event, effectively, in central northern New South Wales.

Yeah.

Yeah.

where just this morning's news, there's one person dead, three missing, and about 50,000 people evacuated from their homes.

Wow, yeah, I think I saw the news story, but didn't read it.

They're talking about a one in 500 year.

I always wonder how they can do that, given that we haven't been collecting data for 500 years.

You should just extrapolate out.

Collecting for about 150 years.

But yes, you can.

But yeah, one in 500 year flood event, 600 millimetres of rain in 48 hours.

So it's 60 centimetres.

That's about three months worth of rain.

So two rulers deep.

Yes.

So it's like up to your waist or, you know, most of the way up to your hips.

Yeah.

Just range, just bang.

In some areas.

Over what period of time?

48 hours.

God.

So that would have just been literally piercing down for probably that entire time.

Yeah.

pretty much non-stop right yeah good grief yeah so um yeah that's the downside the upside is you know the the long-term rain in western queensland has meant that all of that sort of central desert area is now got water in it uh but

The downside of these weather events is that we get these, and this one was a freak weather event in that normally the sort of storm cells or water cells, you know, fronts come across the coast and then they just keep going.

This one came across and sat there for two days.

Yeah.

And if it rains over the ocean, nobody cares, you know, but when it just sat there over the coast.

Dumping water.

Dumping water on it for two days.

So is this like a sub-cyclone type thing?

Well, it's not cyclone.

It's just the normal weather pattern.

And there was a lot of water in the air, obviously, but it just sat there.

Normally, they just migrate out over the coast and gone.

This one just sat on the coast for two days.

So what does this mean for places like Lake Eyre?

Why is this important?

Well, Lake Eyre is important because the – well, it's –

Important ecologically because that whole area does support a huge amount of bird life.

Yeah.

And there will be 100,000 pelicans breeding.

I was about to ask, isn't that where all the pelicans breed?

The pelicans will all be going there in winter and they'll start breeding.

Yeah.

The bizarre thing is you go, who gave them the message?

Yeah.

There's a couple of pelicans just sort of, right, Bill, Wilma, your turn.

You go and fly over Lake Eyre, see if there's water in there.

Someone rang a bell.

We'll see you next month.

They're just like, oh shit, it's that time.

We're going to fly thousands of kilometers.

They know.

But do they do that every year and they get there and they're just like, shit, there's nothing there?

No, they don't.

But they just have these migrations.

They're probably following water.

They're probably following the flood water down.

Yeah.

New beauty.

We call it flood water, but in the case of the central Queensland, central western Queensland, it's not a flood in a sense of a river will suddenly have a wall of three metres of water flooding down it.

Yes.

It's not a flat flood like that.

Yeah, the water just keeps going and going and going and then the river forms.

These rivers are dry most of the time.

Yeah, yeah.

I think I was reading the article and it was saying that there was like an evaporative index of 20 times stronger than the amount of water that falls in Lake Eyre usually.

So any water that does fall usually evaporates almost instantly.

Yes.

But then you have these events every handful of years or whatever.

And it's not rain in Lake Eyre, that's the thing.

It's this huge basin of...

thousands of square kilometres in central Australia that all drains into Lake Eyre.

Lake Eyre is the lowest place in Australia in altitude.

It's below sea level.

And so it's just a huge sink for all the river systems in central.

It's just like a lake.

It is.

It's an inland sea.

Yeah.

It's an inland sea.

Just an empty lake.

Yeah.

And mostly it's just hundreds of square kilometres of salt flats.

Wasn't it?

I think the area from that article was like it's five times bigger than Victoria and the UK.

Yeah.

Like that area, that basin.

Oh, yeah.

That all drains in it.

Oh, it's huge.

So, you're taking water, any of the water that I guess falls on that area that is five times the size of the United Kingdom- Yes.

Flows into like- Flows in.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, the majority of that water will just seep into the soil, but once the soil gets waterlogged- Yeah.

Then the water just runs into the creeks and the creeks run into the large rivers.

What does it mean for the wildlife there, Dad?

Well, the wildlife will be able to breed.

That's the thing.

So even a lot of the mammals and reptiles and things will just be hanging around for years waiting for food in order to breed.

Interesting.

There's so many really cool animals out there that have adapted to deal with that intermittent...

Yes.

Water presence, right?

So, the water's not there frequently enough for them to constantly be active in breeding on a regular basis.

So, they go into torpor or hibernate or, you know, so I think like frogs.

East of Asia, I think.

Yeah, the frogs will dig down a metre or so and just stay in the soil.

They shed their skin.

They shed their skin and create this cocoon around themselves.

And just wait.

Yeah.

It's crazy, right?

Yeah.

And like there's also those little brine shrimp or whatever they are that live in eggs just in the soil.

The eggs sitting in the soil or in the salt.

For years.

For years.

And then as soon as water hits.

Supercharged and they start hatching out.

And you get...

Thousands of tons of them in the water.

The cool thing, I remember doing my PhD on native Australian rats.

And one of the species that I was potentially going to study at the time was the long-haired rat, Rattus villicissimus.

And it is from that area of northern Australia in the sort of arid areas.

And it lives in like, I think, three different areas that its population contracts to where it's dry.

And they're around those sort of like bores or where there's a lot of water that's always there.

But then when you have these periods of prolonged rain and, you know, a lot of water availability, those populations being rats breed up like crazy.

They go through huge breeding cycles.

I think if you have one or two years in a row, you'll go up like two, three, four orders of magnitude in terms of their population numbers.

So, they may go from a few thousand to billions, you know.

You know, something ridiculous across that.

And the next drought year, they're all dead.

Yeah, well, that's it.

And so, I remember my supervisor at the time of me starting the PhD, I think he had just completed a trip through central Australia because of the water at the time, around those times of the floods in Gosford.

Yeah, that would have been.

And he was just effectively picking them up on the side of the road dead because they were all just dying everywhere.

Yeah.

But the cool thing about them was that they go through these sort of punctuated evolution periods because their population explodes and then it bottlenecks and then it explodes and then it bottlenecks.

And so, the thing that I was potentially going to look at was- Speciation.

No, well, somewhat, but chromosomal rearrangements.

Yes.

Because in Raditz in particular, we're getting a bit nerdy, but-

They have many different numbers of chromosomes across the different species, even though they're very closely related.

Because the chromosomes are just split and recombined.

Well, they have these, I don't know if it's called like Johnsonian or whatever it is, events where the chromosomes can sort of like split apart or join together and all of that sort of stuff.

But as a result, that leads to, can lead to speciation where they can't interbreed with each other anymore because the chromosomes don't line up properly during fertilization, after you've gone through meiosis.

But, yeah, so that was one of those really cool animals that is affected by this kind of sudden flooding of areas in northern Australia.

And I think it's not just them.

It's going to be so many of those organisms, birds, fish, you know.

reptiles, bugs that just...

It's seemingly when it's dry, you would go there and be like, this is Mars, nothing lives here.

Yeah.

And then if you were to come back in one of these wet events, or especially after a prolonged period of wet time where you've got all of the vegetation's grown up, all the animals have populated... Oh, that happens.

If you go through the... You don't even need the rivers to come.

You can go through some of those central desert areas after a prolonged period of rain.

Yeah.

And...

They're just green.

And people go, desert?

Yeah, I know.

It's just green as far as you can see.

That's what I would like to experience.

Because the plant life just pops up, and then the water disappears, and it doesn't rain again.

And that's one of the reasons.

Australian deserts are different from deserts in Europe and America.

in that American, we don't have cacti, or succulents in general, because they rely on having a continuous, effectively a continuous supply, low level amount of water, but a continuous supply.

We have areas in Australia that won't rain for 50 years.

Yeah, you can plant a cactus there, and it'll be fine.

And it'll be dead in a year.

It'll be fine initially, and eventually the water evaporates out.

Yeah, exactly.

But then when you do get rain,

the seeds are there and they just germinate, bang, and they're gone.

Yeah, they're up and flowering.

They've evolved to just like produce as much seed as quickly as possible and just leave that in the soil.

And the same with those shrimp, you know, just grow up, breed quickly and just plant as many eggs as possible as you can in the soil.

It must be so crazy for them too because like, you know, from the subjective point of view of these organisms,

They're only really ever experiencing the desert in this place when it is incredibly lush.

Yeah, they're not experiencing the desert at all.

Yeah, exactly.

So, it must be so funny.

Like, they're obviously- I don't live in a desert.

I live in paradise.

Yeah, exactly.

What do you mean it's dry?

It's kind of like- It'd be like going to- They're going to sleep for a long period of time as a species.

And they never actually ever get to experience on a conscious level what it's like when it's dry.

Well, it's like kids.

Yeah, little kids.

never understand the concept of being dark outside because they're awake during the day and they sleep all night.

Yeah.

And this idea that it gets dark, what?

I'm writing an essay at the moment for one of my students who's an artist in Poland and he does like modern kind of biology and science related kind of art and asked me to contribute to one of his e-books.

And part of the thing that I was writing about was

the subjective experience of other animals, their consciousness and how as humans we can never truly understand what that's like.

There's this famous article by I think his name is Thomas Nagel that was like what it is to be a bat or what it's like to be a bat.

And this whole thing was like you can scientifically you can try and analyze what their brain is, what their eyes are like, how their sense of touch works, their sense of smell.

But on a subjective human level, you can never really truly ever experience what that

is like objectively.

And I was thinking like with that, I brought up microbats and talking about echolocation.

What the hell is that like?

What the hell is it like to get, you know, send out sound and receive it back and get an image in your brain of what's going on out there?

And the thing I was thinking was, do they realise there's day?

Like, do these microbats live an entire life, especially the ones that live in like caves, they're going to be in there the whole time.

They may see a little bit of light at the edge of the cave or whatever, you know, if they're awake during the day, but it's still going to be pretty much pitch black.

Yep.

And then they come out when it's pitch black at night.

And so, it's like, do they think the entire world is just always in darkness?

You know, and the same for organisms that live deep in the ocean, you know, and never actually truly see life.

And live under a huge pressure.

Did you see that...

What is that fish called that has, is it a lamp ray or something?

The thing that has that thing on its head, the fish.

Oh, the lantern fish.

It uses that as a, it has this little bioluminescent lure on the front of its head.

It's a small fish that lives really far down in the water and it uses it in darkness to attract animals and then eats them as they come close.

Someone photographed one that had swum to the surface of the ocean probably about a year ago or whatever.

And there were all these photos and it got there and effectively died because of the pressure.

Just explode.

Exactly.

But it was like all these people made these images and shared them like on Reddit and the internet.

It was like, I finally got to see it.

This is what it was like.

There was light the whole time.

Like that the fish went on this epic journey and then realised, oh, my God.

There is light.

Yeah.

So, it just reminded me of that.

Light's not just this little yellow thing in front of me.

Yeah.

So, I don't know.

It is interesting to think about...

Yeah, and not things that are even that different.

How does a cat experience the world?

Yeah.

We think of them as being very similar to us.

They're mammals.

They're visual.

They smell.

They taste.

They hear.

But I don't even a dog in particular.

Dogs get 70%, 80% of their sensory perception is smell.

Well, I looked at the stats on that, right?

It was something like, I think, between 10,000 and 100,000 times stronger than our sense of smell.

Yeah.

Partly because they have, I think, billions of receptors in their nose.

And then the other part is they have a space 40 times bigger in their brain to analyze the smells that they get.

And I was mentioning that in the essay that they...

They don't really rely on their eyes, you know, to understand what's going on.

And I think the analogy I used was if they walked into a room where someone's cooking a stew, we would smell that there's a stew being cooked.

They would smell all the ingredients in it.

Yeah.

They would smell-

The fact that who the cook was, if they were anxious, where they bought the ingredients, what bag they had been brought to the house in.

Yeah, the detergent that the pot was washed in a week ago.

And we get all of this other extra information that us as humans would get all meshed together in a very dull kind of basic smell of the stew.

Brown.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So, yeah, and then like bees, right?

Bees seeing the world, they can't see red, but they can see ultraviolet.

They see ultraviolet, yeah.

They've just got shifted.

Birds are the same.

All these flowers have like...

ultraviolet light being reflected off them that effectively displays where to go into the flower to get the nectar or the pollen and everything.

And we don't see that.

We just see a single, quite often these flowers are bright colours or a single colour, like a rose, whereas they would see the rose and it would look completely different because they can't see red and there would be ultraviolet and other stuff on there.

And they're

They're compound eyes.

Yes.

What the hell is that one?

I know.

Seeing the world through 1,000 eyes out of each or 1,000 lenses out of each side of your face and having a 360 view and, you know, what depth can they see at?

How do their brain interpret?

I think that's purely designed to pick up movement.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's nuts, right?

And I guess they're following smell or they're using their antennae to follow smell to try and get to the flowers.

Exactly.

The eyes are just like, keep away from any shit that's near me.

That's right.

Like, anything that gets into my frame, just get away.

And they see it 200 frames per second instead of 60 like us.

I know.

So, yeah, anyway.

Well, 20 for us, 25.

Nerding out a bunch on that and just thinking about how, yeah, how different...

these animals are and their lifestyles in places like the deserts.

And it must be funny where you experience the world, like, temporally so differently as well.

And your life is so short and then the next generation could be 10 years later.

Yep.

You know, separated by that amount of time too is freaky.

Oh, you know, cicadas.

Yeah.

There's many cicadas of, you know, they have a 17-year life cycle.

Under the ground.

Where the adult life is...

a few days to eat, mate, lay eggs, and then the eggs just sit there and sit there and sit there and 17 years later they pop out and go, why 17 years?

What happened in evolution that created this?

So there's some weird stuff that goes on.

Well, I guess it could be one of those things where it wasn't necessarily a negative.

It could have been one year.

It could have been 50 years.

It doesn't really matter because it gets done at the end of the day and they're protected underground.

What was I going to say?

We saw some of those cicadas down at the lake recently.

There were these holes in the ground about the size of your thumb.

Yeah.

And I remember thinking, what the fuck came out of that?

Yeah.

Like, is that a spider hole?

But it was like- It was a freshly dug hole where all the dirt had gone around.

And I'm like, what animal was that?

Like, that's not normal.

And then all of a sudden, there were all these cicada shells all over the trees that I could see everywhere.

And I was like, that's what it's got to be.

The weird thing that I think freaked me out the most.

Because they crawl out.

The last nymph stage crawls out.

Yeah.

And then turns into the owl.

Well, they just look, they climb up a tree and then come out.

But the thing that I think really freaks me out was we found one of these mounds of dirt.

So, it was just like this freshly dug, like a mole hill.

Yeah.

And there was something under there pushing the dirt up.

Oh, really?

And I was like, what the hell is this?

And then when I tried to move the dirt away quickly to see, it obviously just went back down the hole.

And I was like, God damn it.

But then we found the cicada shells.

Yes.

Anyway, good chat about that.

So, what birds would you be hunting if you went to Lake Eyre?

Because there are so many birds being attracted there at the moment.

Would there be any specific ones you'd be chasing?

I'd be mostly pelicans, I think.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah.

And look, there are lots of, obviously, water birds, because that's all there is, is water.

Yeah, well, and the animals they're going to eat, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

So would the pelicans be eating a lot there?

Would they be chasing fish?

They have to.

They've got to feed the young.

Yeah.

Where does the fish come from?

Higher up down the rivers.

Yeah.

Little creeks and things higher up.

So will they get washed down and then they breed up there?

Yeah.

So, it's interesting too.

Does that mean the pelicans need to wait a certain amount of time?

Yes.

Otherwise, they get there.

Otherwise, there's no food source.

Yeah.

It's just water, guys.

Yeah.

What the hell?

It's too salty to drink.

Yeah, that's just nuts.

Yeah.

Okay, so you'd be checking out the pelicans.

I think I would.

Yeah, pelicans are cool.

They're a fucking weird looking bird.

They are.

Are they one of the strangest looking birds?

I don't know.

There's all sorts of strange looking birds, but pelicans are pretty strange.

The strange thing about pelicans is that they're almost everywhere in the world you go, other than polar regions, there are pelicans.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But there are only eight species of pelicans in the world.

They just go everywhere.

There's obviously enough movement.

Yeah.

It's like whales, right, where you sort of like... You see their distributions on a map and you're like, holy shit.

Yeah.

Like, that's the entire Southern Ocean around Antarctica.

Exactly.

And you're like, yeah, I guess they can move from large distances.

There's one species of pelican in Australia.

Yeah.

And it's sort of like...

They clearly...

They dead-ended themselves into an evolutionary state, a behavioural and morphological state.

And they're so good at it that speciation effectively ended.

Well, beyond that, they're moving around throughout that entire region.

Yeah, exactly.

Gene flow there to prevent any kind of speciation.

It's sort of like, well, they're not going to fly across the Pacific Ocean.

So there are two species in America.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, because I know there's those, they're sort of grey.

The brown pelican.

Is that the one that's out on the Florida Everglades and everything?

Because I know they've got some really cool ones out there that are quite colourful, aren't they?

Yeah.

During the breeding season.

Yeah.

Well, even our pelicans are pretty colourful in, well, in their faces.

They go sort of, their beetles go bright pink and their face goes blue and yellow.

Do you reckon they'd be good eating?

Isn't there a Rodney Rood joke?

One of those old comedians is like, he ate a fucking pelican.

Who eats a fucking pelican?

And he went to jail for two years.

He ate a fucking pelican.

There's an old gag about that, but it's a sort of a long Dorothy Dixer gag, so I won't bother telling it.

Cool, okay, that can be the good thing.

No, the punchline is that if they... All right, guy ends up in court because he's...

caught eating a penguin.

And the story goes on and on and on.

And then he eventually gets charged and sentenced.

And the judge finally says, so I've got to ask one question.

What does it taste like?

It's a cross between a goanna and a koala.

Jesus, yeah.

Oh, God.

Anyway, we can leave it there.

Thanks for hanging out, everyone.

All right, see ya.

See ya.