Oh What A Time... - #173 Australia and crucially, who discovered it?! (Part 2)

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

This is Part 2! For Part 1, check the feed!This week we’re discussing that wonderful land of Australia! We’ll be finding out what was suspected about a land down under in Antiquity, south-east Asia’s Australian mythology and we’ll answer the age-old and quite complex question: who discovered Australia?!Elsewhere, Chris has barely survived a bout with Norovirus and Tom finally admits what he’s thinking when listening to electronic dance music. Do you have any confessions you’d like to share? If so, please send them in: [e-mail] from now on Part 1 is released on Monday and Part 2 on Wednesday - but if you want more Oh What A Time and both parts at once, you should sign up for our Patreon! On there you’ll now find:•The full archive of bonus episodes•Brand new bonus episodes each month•OWAT subscriber group chats•Loads of extra perks for supporters of the show•PLUS ad-free episodes earlier than everyone elseJoin us at 👉 patreon.com/ohwhatatimeAnd as a special thank you for joining, use the code CUSTARD for 25% off your first month.You can also follow us on: X (formerly Twitter) at @ohwhatatimepodAnd Instagram at @ohwhatatimepodAaannnd if you like it, why not drop us a review in your podcast app of choice?Thank you to Dan Evans for the artwork (idrawforfood.co.uk).Chris, Elis and Tom x Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh, What a Time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else, add free, plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets, and access to the Oh Watertime Group chat. Plus, if you become an O Watertime All-Timer, myself, Tom and Ellis, will riff on your name to postulate

where else in history you might have popped up. For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash O Watertime. And welcome to Part 2 of Australia. Before we get into Part 2 of Australia, we have just done our first ever video episode. It is a clip show. We've trawled the archives. Welcome to the future.

The future is here. We're now in 2D. We've entered the visual medium. You know that form of entertainment that's only been around for about... Well, I actually watched a Mickey Mouse cartoon yesterday. It was made in 1928. Oh, which one? Is it Steamball, willie?

Yeah, Steamboat Willie. I watched it with my son. It's brilliant, to be fair. Well, I can stop. Steamboat Willie is shit. I'm prepared to die on this hill. Nothing happens. While I'm here, Fantasia also crap.

Yeah. But let me bring this in. Yeah, Fantasia is rubbish. When you consider that Steamboat Willie was drawn by people who were born in the Victorian times, that is phenomenal. It's just incredible. I tell you what. If you'd have written Mrs Brown's boys in the Victorian era,

you would have been like Shakespeare. Oh my God. If Steamboat Willie is the hit they thought at the time, they just, you know. Well, another episode we're going to do as a patron special is the history of music hall because I found a documentary on musical from 1968. And I am willing to die on this hill.

The three of us are funnier than any comedian born before. 1940. Well, that was the kind of, I always always. saw that was the joke in Fars show, like the bloke in the grainy blackboard. Yeah, where's me washboard? And everyone's howling with laughter. Anyway, anyway. So the video episode we recorded is some of our favourite clips from the past on the subject of nights out.

And we've played them in. You get to watch them and hear us chat about it. And it's a really fun episode. And it's available now on our patron if that sounds to your liking. But shall we let people have a little audio bit of this episode? Why not? And if you enjoy this, you can enter the visual medium at patreon.com forward slash that show what a time. Here it is.

Watching this clip, I love this clip. It's a great clip. And I love what it represents the importance of community of these places. Having said that, I do think the jelly deal looks too much like what it is for it to be, for it to be in any way something I'd ever want to eat. I appreciate its cultural importance, but you couldn't pay me enough money to go anywhere near a job. I love Pine Marsh. Well, hang on, Tom, hold that thought because you might prefer jelly deals. In fact, I'm sure you're going to love one.

When I tell you that some people say they're an aphrodisiac, and let's cut to Toby Isaacs, who runs a stall in Aldgate, who is about to sing their praises. Jelly deals, they've been known to be an Ephrodisiac. This was one of the things that they blame the high population in the East End of London for. and one of our cries used to be when we was flogging our wares in the old days was everyone's a baby, come and have a basin.

This used to be a regular call of ours. This was a cheap means of feeding a family, but I'm afraid they've gone from those days to summing the reason of about a pound to pound. So there you go. Tom, they're an aphrodisiac. I'm sure you've already, since hearing that clip, you've already ordered a load on Uber Eats. I've already got two kids.

What would be the equivalent in Wales? What's the sort of Kamarvan Shiet equivalent? Is it, I mean, cockles, that's more like Pembertshire and something like. In terms of food, no, cockles is big. Is it? Okay. I genuinely love cockles. I think they are absolutely delicious. Yeah.

Oh yeah, I bought, I ate two pub at the weekend. In cuckles? That's it. Dude. Isn't that the sort of thing that will rot your gut? It's the kind of thing that makes you grow big and strong. It's sort of thing someone does when they're trapped on a desert island and they've got no other option. It's the kind of thing that puts hairs in your chest.

I've looked it up, El. 30p in 1975 is worth approximately three pounds today. Oh, okay. So it's actually quite a cheap. That's a cheap meal. You say it's not too bad, but what you're getting for three queen is an eel. And I think a penny is too much for an eel.

There you go. You can watch that video if you want, patron.com, for us and a while time. But we're here to talk about Australia, and Tom, the floor is yours. I'm now going to tell you about how the ancients predicted the existence of Australia and other more misguided assumptions about this funny little place we call home, planet Earth. These assumptions were made, essentially, way before travelling long distance by boat made it possible to test if any of them were right.

So I want to start with a question for you. Because this is what I'm thinking about. Because it's fascinating to me that these people were. living at a time where they had these beliefs about the world but no way of testing if they were true. My question to you is this, how would you have dealt with living at a time where you didn't know what was out there when your understanding of your world stretched to only what you could see around you? Would you find that exciting or would you find that deeply disconcerting but you have no idea what's there?

Deeply disconcerting, no thank you. Well, I mean... I don't like adventure, I'll tell you to. I don't want to get too philosophical. But aren't we in that latter place now where we don't really know what's around us? And like, we don't really know what's around us in the universe. We're kind of there now, aren't we? That is true.

But I suppose there's something more immediate about it then. And also... Like, I'm not terrified of Kent. They did have a tendency. I know what's in Kent if I was to just get in the car and start driving. Also, Al, they did have a tendency back there. on maps to just like stick in a dragon or some awful sea beast.

That's funny that, isn't it? Why did people do that? And those Mappamundi and stuff like that, like, oh, over here there's a big fire-breathing dragon or a 90s, 50 foot tall. Why? So when the experts, and I say that in heavily inverted comments, were riffing on what was out there,

they always seemed to go quite dark often, didn't they? There's some three-eyed monster of it. As soon as it sees you, you used to tell. to stone, whatever. So I'm like you, well, I think I'd find that quite disconcerting that I don't know what is, especially over the ocean. That's the scary one, isn't it? Looking out to see what is there, what could be coming. I think I'd find that quite disconcerting. That was the experience for people way back when. And for centuries prior to the discovery of Australia, Europeans therefore speculated as to the likely composition of the known and the unknown

parts of the earth. There was constant debate about what might be out there. There are, of course, known regions at that time. They were those of the northern hemisphere. They knew about those. The western edge of Europe across to North Africa, then all the way to northern India and Central Asia, and albeit more spectatively, to China. That's quite a long way, actually. Yeah, it is. It's pretty impressive, isn't it? To be honest. But there were still huge parts of the world they didn't know about. It was a world known to the Greeks and Romans, either through exploration or by the exchange of ideas and texts. That's how they found out about these places, People would visit, they'd discuss what they'd seen, they'd exchange maps, all this sort of stuff.

That's how their understanding of the world grew. Huge pressure on the people coming back. Yes. What's it like? Tell me everything. Oh, well, I had norovirus on day two, three and four. I don't, I don't. What's the Greek for Delhi, though? But also, what's also incredible is that they knew.

things about the world in a sort of general sense. They knew that the world was around the ancient Greeks and Romans. They knew its circumference. They knew there were two hemispheres north and south. That just blows my mind, that's cool, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So long ago you could know that.

I've got well into flat earth recently. Oh, no. Not the idea of it, but the people who believe it. Okay, good. Oh, fascinating. But the fact that these ancients had figured this out so many thousands of years ago just with simple observations

like the two hemisphere thing it takes a certain kind of person to dispute knowledge that's been around for over 2,000 years yeah no I think they're all wrong do you know the one thing as well that I never hear flat earthers have to answer is

why does the sun disappear over the horizon because in all their maps the sun if it's a flat earth the sun always has to be above the surface doesn't it so why does it go over the Someone switches it off. Yeah. So what it is?

Like a night light. And where's the edge? Yeah, where's the edge? Anyway. I like that you've described that as through simple calculations, by the way, that the ancient Greeks worked out there was another northern and southern hemisphere. Chris, you've just completely watered it down to a really easy thing that you definitely would have worked out yourself as well.

I'd have got it. I'd have figured it out. Now, the big question, though, was what lay in the unknown, in the unknown southern hemisphere? and just what was Terra Australis, as the Romans called it, likely to be? Was it going to be a great ocean, another landmass, a forest perhaps, a desert, or something capable of supporting life? And so indeed, the guessing began.

And this guessing was based, as always with the Greeks, on the principles of mathematics, observation, and scientific methods of analysis. Once again, things that Chris will dismiss as really simple as nothing. That I'd figure out in five minutes. Exactly. For a start, Aristotle theorised that there was a great continent, which he called Antarcticaos. But this Antarcticais was not the frozen landmass we know today,

rather a name that was derived from celestial observation. So the north, Aristotle noted, had a constellation called the bear, which is Ursa Major in Latin, or Arcos in Greek, which could be seen in the sky all year round. And Aristotle reasoned, based on the law of symmetry, that if there was a bear in the north, there must be an anti-bear in the south,

one being the opposite of the other, hence anti-bear, Antarctica, which is where we get the name Antarctica today. Great, that's a great dinner party fact, that, isn't it? Aristotle gave us that name because of the anti-bear. But Aristotle did not finish there. He assumed that just as there was a north pole, there has to be a south pole.

Just as a north wind, there must be a southern one, and so on. Symmetry, all based on logic, just as a northern continent was inhabited, and inhabitable, so the southern one must be as well. And there Aristotle leaves matters. He doesn't speculate on the character, the quality of the southern civilization, all weird things that they might do.

But you'll be pleased to hear, boys, his success has did, and it's completely bonkers. Okay? So most notably, a Roman geographer by the name of Pomponius Mella. This is one of my favourite... Pomponius is an unfortunate name. As is Mela. He sounds about up yourself, doesn't it?

But his assumptions, okay, are remarkable and some, the favourite things I've ever read about on this podcast. Mela, okay, for a bit of context, he's born in southern Spain. He lived the first half of the first century ADC. His surviving work, De Situ Orbis, divided the earth into five zones, which were the frozen, the frozen, the frozen, then below that, the northern temperature zone, then below that frozen once again. And Meller argued that the torrid zone, which is across the middle, of the earth, yeah, was so hot that it could not be crossed in either direction. So that each temperature region was cut off from the other. Still, there was a south and it was inhabitable.

And Mella suggested that people who lived in this inhabitable south, who obviously they hadn't seen because they couldn't pass the torrid zone, lived alive based on the laws of opposite. That's like a kid's stories. Okay, now care to guess what was suggested. It's amazing. Well, even more so as we go into the details now. Care to guess what was suggested by Mellar about the people of the Southern Hemisphere?

How do you think he felt they lived their life, bearing in mind it's the world of opposites? So everything is backwards and upside down, presumably. Yes. Time ran backwards? So the first thing is that people in the Southern Hemisphere, according to Mela, as upwards down and down was up, people in the south walked around on their hands with their feet in the air. That's fantastic. Oh, my God.

How do you think that's... working out for you. Do you put shoes on your hands? Well, he didn't drill down into the existence of shoes in the Southern Hemisphere. I'm not doing detail. I suppose everyone, it would be like there'd be a big street performing culture.

Yes. But the street performers would be walking on your feet, wouldn't it? Yeah, of course, yeah. It's not amazing to see another person walking on their hands. Everyone's arms would be massive. They'd be like Raphael Nadal. I like this. Well, one of Raphael Nadal's arms.

He had one thin one and one big one, didn't he? Also, the guy who figures out it's better to walk on your feet immediately becomes king within like two days. It's so easy to rule to that point. But it doesn't stop there. Mella all suggested they slept when the northerners are awake and their seasons were back to front and so on. Well, that makes sense.

Absolutely. So that's not quite so mad. In fact, it was the early Christian scholars who did most of Poo-Pooley's ideas of symmetry, southernness and a second earth, decrying the very possibility of a southern land and of southern people. At least one pope denounced it all as heresy against God. Augustine of Hippo wrote that it was absurd to say

that some men might have crossed from this side of the earth to the other and that the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from Adam. So they were outraged at the idea that there could be people living there. But it was long before the Europeans could know for sure. In fact, it was only in the Renaissance, how long it is, it's remarkable, that the Europeans finally passed through the Torrid zone and proved that these ancient ideas were incorrect,

which in Mellor's case had been for 1,400 years. They'd sort of stuck around in some form. If you're Mela and considering how mad your ideas are, you've got to be happy with that in these 1,400 years of people thinking that you're... To come up with an idea that's accepted for 1,400 years is pretty good good. That's the good thing about being a scientist, whatever you call it back then. you could just come up with assumptions about things that can't be tested and people, some people will probably go along with it.

Yeah, well, it's the best idea we have. Because there's no way of proving it. Exactly, yeah. And I've got the nicest tunic, so I must be right. So in their attempts to make sense of this opposite earth, ancient geographers had come up with all sorts of proposals as to what it would be like and where the landmass would be found. One theory was advanced by Crates of Malos,

who's a Greek from the second century BCE, He posited there were four landmasses, two in the north, two in the south, each separated by oceanic river. The known world, Europe, North Africa and Asia corresponded to Okumene in the northeast. Quite by chance, creates theory hit upon the existence of North and South America, Perioki, and the antipodes in the northwest and southwest quadrants. And that left Antoichi in the southeast quadrant. And the nearest we get today to a parallel is Australia, but not possible. quite so accurate as the other hits.

And Crate's work was widely used in the ancient world, not least by the Romans. Cicero, for instance, one of Julius Caesar's opponents, imagined that there are indeed people living in far-off lands, the lands identified by crates, but they were all cut off, okay? They could not be communicated with and therefore unable to enjoy the fruits of Roman civilization,

as it was described. And the southern land, this Terra Australist, whether as theory or as a basis of imagination, was formative in Greek and Roman geography, meteorology and literature. I didn't know they'd even consider the idea of Australia, the Greeks. That's amazing, I didn't know. They did. They may never have visited Australia, but they did figure out that it existed.

It's remarkable, isn't it? It's genuinely remarkable, incredible minds back then. And that on a round planet, basically, that everything had... I'd have figured it out. I'd have figured it out. And they worked out basically that on a round planet, everything had to balance, essentially, is not bad at all.

Fair play to the ancient Greeks. So they did predict it. And actually they got quite a few of these things correct, just not the walking around on the hands, that that thing was quite wrong. But yeah, remarkable, yet more remarkable achievements from the ancient Greeks. Fair play to them.

All right. Now I'm going to borrow a format point from QI, and I hope they don't mind. My question to you both is, who discovered Australia? Cook. James Cook. Yeah, James Cook.

Well, charted the East Coast in 1770, but he didn't. Not really. Well, you know, Aboriginal Australians were there already. Of course, there were indigenous people there. Yeah, exactly. Well, but, okay, maybe at this point I'll stop because, like many historical questions, but the moment you start to answer it, it actually falls apart because Australia, as you mentioned, Tom, was already inhabited for that.

of thousands of years before an outsider arrived to, quote unquote, discover it. So what we really mean is who was the first non-Aboriginal person to reach Australia? That's probably a better question. And even that answer. Crocodile Dundee. It's Crocodile Dundee, isn't it? Yeah. The Simpsons.

Even that answer is actually really complicated because if you look at a European history book, these are the sets of names you might get. So, Ellis said James Cook, that would have been my incorrect answer on QI. He charted the East Coast in 1770. Before that, though, hundreds of years before that, you had William Jansoun, the Dutch navigator who landed at Cape York in 1606. You had Louis Vaz de Torres, who sailed through the straight north of Australia the same year. Francois Tieson, who mapped part of the southern coastline in 1627,

and Abel Tasman, who explored further in the 1640s. Now, as a man of the sea, Tom, I presume you're familiar with. with all of those names? Absolutely, of course. They're all tattooed on my back, my shoulder, with a picture of a ship. So together, these collection of voyages

gradually revealed the outline of what Europeans called Terra Australis, the Great Southern Land. But even as this map was being drawn, it was already out of date. Now, there has long been a theory that the Portuguese reached Australia earlier,

perhaps in the 15th. And the logic makes a little bit of sense. So Portugal had established colonies across Southeast Asia, including in Timor. And Australia isn't far from Timor, if you know your maps. But there is a problem. There's no firm evidence. But there's plenty of maps, stories and hints. There's not exactly proof.

And the same applies to claims that Chinese sailors reached Australia before Europeans. It's intriguing but ultimately unproven. But let's drill into this. So where does the evidence come from? So in terms of a Southeast Asian connection to first an outsider discovering Australia, where the evidence does become more persuasive is closer to Australia itself.

So long before the Europeans arrived, sailors from the islands of Southeast Asia, particularly Java and Salawesi, were already travelling south and they weren't explorers in the European sense. They were traders. Interesting. Their trading was a commodity

called Trapang, which is like sea cucumber, a delicacy highly prized in regional markets, especially in China. Speaking of Chinese delicacies, I watched that clip, Elle, you must have seen it, Ronnie O'Sullivan's getting the highest break ever in the history of Snooker. Oh, yeah.

In a Chinese tournament. And the Chinese tournament was sponsored by Roasted Eel. It's like the equivalent of Roasted Eel or the Sunday Roast sponsoring the Premier. I was watching Ronnie O'Sullivan, break, make snook a history. And all I could think about was like, how big is roasted eel in China?

But they're sponsoring the big Chinese thing. The Premier League brought to by Sunday dinner. But then the League Cup was sponsored by milk in the 80s, which is such a funny thing, isn't it? The milk cup. How powerful were the milk board in the 80s? Yeah. Marketing budget was enormous.

What's remarkable is that Ronnie O'Sullivan was using a hardened, baked eel as a cue, isn't? throughout as part of the original With the milk cup sponsoring the Lee Cup you know the milk marketing board

as it was then sponsoring the Lee Cup who doesn't know about milk yes it's not a sort of you know an interest generating exercise is it or

that said El I went through the entire existence of the Carabar Cup not knowing that Carabar was a drink I don't know how they failed to communicate that message to people yeah

I thought Carabot was an animal. You've been sponsoring this cup. Surely, at some point, you could have said something in your advertising to be clear. It was a drink. Yes, an energy drink, isn't it, Carabour. Yeah, when we were working on Fancy Football League, it came up in the writer's room and I was like, oh, right. I mean, I've never seen it sold anyway.

One of my favourite tweets is someone once tweeted, has anyone actually seen a can of Carabau in the wild? It's mad. In many respects, it's the most failed marketing ever because it's done wonders for the brand name, but no one actually knows what it is. Yeah. I'm aware of it. I'm just not aware of what it is.

But now we all know how big roasted eel is in China, so this sponsorship is clearly working. So yeah, these sailors in the islands in Southeast Asia around Java, they were trading sea cucumber, A delicacy highly prized in regional markets, especially in China. They also traded in turtle shell and beeswax. But by at least the early modern period and probably earlier, these sailors were making regular seasonal voyages to the northern coasts of Australia.

Amazing. Now, how do we know this? Not from European logbooks, but from, any guesses? How do we know this? Well, it's... Indigenous Australian myths. Oh, you're very, very warm. Or is it their own texts, I suppose.

Have they written it down on stone? Oh yeah, I've got drawings, paintings. I'll give you the point. Aboriginal art. So in northern Australia, there are depictions of Asian sailing vessels. Love it. Rended in beeswax and rock art that date back centuries. Amazing. And we know these pictures are not European ships.

They are unmistakably Southeast Asian. There are also... That's so cool. I love that. It is cool, isn't it? There are also... I wonder if you'd have used your one-day time machine, those Aboriginal artists might have just

doodled you in the water at home. Yeah. Oh no, you wouldn't be in Australia, would you? Whoever this guy is, he's the most natural swimmer

in history. Look how calm and happy is in the water. He's a man of the sea. Was it, Chris, was it Aboriginal art or was it print? Is that an Aboriginal? I'm trying to work out with the... Can I ask about that painting?

Is that an Aboriginal? Do you know what? I saw you shut down for a second. Oh, yeah, yeah. And I thought, what's he going to say? He was clearly trying to work out the maths of that. As I was, but the problem is, as I was midway through the sentence, I thought there's not enough.

This is not robust enough as an idea, but I'm now in deep. And I didn't even get the wording right. But I'm basically imagining someone in a cave pointing at the painting, going, can I just check, is that an Aboriginal or is it a copy? Do you know what, you've implied it? And I think we're all impressed. Yeah. Well done.

I'm so sorry, listeners. There are also, yeah, oral traditions and archaeological traces that point to sustained contact and not all of it was peaceful. Some accounts, including hints in Javanese chronicles, such as the Parathorn, suggests that these encounters sometimes involved armed raids as well as trade. Wow. Now, even early European travellers picked up on this. In 1510, the Italian explorer Ludovico de Vathma wrote that Javanese sailors traveled to lands in the south.

and if you draw a line from Java, there is only one place you end up, Australia. Now, one of the most intriguing figures in this story is Manuel de Iradia, a Portuguese cosmographer, born in Malika in 1563. Iradia grew up in a world of overlapping cultures, Malay, Portuguese, Indian, and would have heard countless stories about lands beyond the known maps. As an adult, he became a mapmaker and a geographer, compiling information from sailors, merchants and travellers. Among his works was a map showing part of Java

and a mysterious southern land he called Nuka Antara, very likely a reference to Australia. That's exciting, isn't it? Yeah. Amazing. In the early 17th century, as the Dutch were preparing their own expeditions, Iradia attempted something ambitious.

He planned to join a Javanese voyage south. In the end, he didn't go himself. He sent a servant, and a servant returned with a report. which Eradio wrote up in 1610. He wrote, We lost sight of Java and after three days of travelling, the mountains of Luca Antara came into sight. We followed the land and disembarked on a coast which was deserted.

In other words, this servant reached Australia. So, who did discover Australia? Well, here's the twist. Erardi's account doesn't really add another European name to the list of discoverers. By the time he was writing, the Dutch had already begun charting the coastline. What it does instead is, as in a different direction, because Iradia wasn't discovering anything new.

He was recording knowledge that already existed, knowledge held by Southeast Asian sailors who had been traveling these routes long before Europeans arrived. So that brings us back to the original question, who discovered Australia? And if by discovery we mean the first people to arrive, explore, and understand its coast, then the answer may not lie in Amsterdam, London or Lisbon. It may lie in Java and the islands of Southeast Asia.

The Europeans wrote it down. It, they claimed it, but they were not necessarily the first to note it was there. Perhaps then, this isn't really a story about European discovery at all. It's something broader, a story about curiosity, about sailors looking out across open water and wondering what lay beyond the horizon. And if I hazard a guess these days, what may lay beyond the horizon, almost certainly Tom Crane, at home. In the brine of nature, where he truly belongs. Absolutely. That's absolutely fascinating.

one thing that comes to my head when you describe the sort of plotting out and mapping of the edge and cosign of Australia as one of those early explorers their reaction to the side of it

must have been like, this never ends. This is, what have we found here? That's one thing about ancient MacMacon I can never really wrap my head around is like, you know,

how do you get a sense of scale? Because you can only see, when you look out to see, you only see a mile. So you only need a mile. mile in any direction. You'd have a map maker on board, wouldn't you? You'd have someone who makes the maps.

That would be part of your crew. But it's just a fact it just never... Australia is so big, as you said at the very beginning of this episode. You can't even begin to imagine. I think after about five days of still going along the same straight, I'm like, I think we just... I get the gist. Should we just accept it's massive?

I had a good fact recently that the moon is the same width as Australia. Is it? That is a brilliant fact. I'm not entirely sure it's right. No, yeah, I'm pretty sure. Tom, he's eagerly Googling for an immediate corrections corner. Is this moon the same width of Australia? It says here.

When you look up at the moon, no, it's the same width as Australia. It says Australia is actually wider than the moon. The moon has a diameter of roughly 3,474 common. Oh, it's pretty close to be fair. So the moon is slightly wider. Oh, no. No, I was wrong. Australia is wider than that.

the moon. There you go. So Australia is 4,000 kilometres. The moon, 3,476. There you go. Pretty bang on. Having that. Big old. They've actually got here, the moon is either 3,474 or 3,476. Whoever's come up with that. Don't worry too much about those two clocks. We're happy with that as an answer. You're happy with that? So no corrections quarter from me? Yeah, exactly. Very good fact, Chris. And also, a great episode. I love that. What a fascinating stuff. Thank you to our historian, Dr. Darrell Leeworthy, who does brilliant research for us. That's such interesting stuff. I've loved covering that. If any of you have any future episode ideas you'd like to throw our way, we will gleefully take them because your ideas have consistently been brilliant. We've loved the

ones you've come up with. So do get contact with the show with that. And I'm off to have a dip in the cold but safe British sea away from the Great White Sharks and all that might eat me. We'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye. Bye. Oh, water time is now on Patreon. You can get main feed episodes before everyone else. Add free. Plus access to our full archive of bonus content, two bonus episodes every month, early access to live show tickets and access to the Oh Water Time group chat. Plus if you become an Oh Water Time All-Timer, myself Tom and Ellis will riff on your name to postulate where else in history you might have popped up.

For all your options, you can go to patreon.com forward slash oh what a time.