The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret - 79: The Last Continent Pt. 3 (What's Syllabub With You?)

Episode Date: March 21, 2022

The Truth Shall Make Ye Fret is a podcast in which your hosts, Joanna Hagan and Francine Carrel, read and recap every book from Sir Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series in chronological order. This week, Part 3 of our recap of “The Last Continent”. Cockroaches! Creative Patisserie! Concepts!Find us on the internet:Twitter: @MakeYeFretPodInstagram: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretFacebook: @TheTruthShallMakeYeFretEmail: [e-mail]: www.patreon.com/thetruthshallmakeyefretWant to follow your hosts and their internet doings? Follow Joanna on twitter @joannahagan and follow Francine @francibambi Things we blathered on about:Terra Australis - WikipediaWhat is a Quokka? - BestLife Map Of Tasmania (Amanda Palmer) - YoutubeThe Beautiful Land of Australia - Australian CultureChard stem gratin and garlicky greens - GuardianPetrichor - The Met OfficeCrimson Eleven Delight Petrichor (Doctor Who) - YoutubeNed Kelly | Biography & Facts - Encyclopedia BritannicaBold Jack Donahue (Roud 611) - Mainly NorfolkThe Old Bush Songs, by A. B. Paterson - Project GutenburgWhat is the “Dreaming”? - Creative SpiritsAussie slang: why we shorten words - Australian GeographicMusic: Chris Collins, indiemusicbox.com

Waltzing Matilda, Waltzing Matilda, you come a Waltzing Matilda with me. We sing and we song and do something, something, Billy Bong. You come a Waltzing Matilda. I think we used to sing in school. And he swore as he hacked and hacked at a can of beer saying, What kind of idiots put beer in tins? Yeah, it fits. Nice. I just said I wasn't going to sing on the podcast. It's like it counts and we're kind of, what's the word for that?

Like it's not singing, it's not speak singing. It's the, when you're not willing to commit, you know. It's what you do in school assemblies, if you're in the back row. Shine, Jesus, shine. Not me, I used to try and show off. Eventually I then went to the pretend singing because someone may have fun at me. Yeah, that's fair. And also, admittedly, none of us did that with Shine, Jesus, Shine, because that was a fucking belter.

Oh, yeah. That was that perfect harmony, suddenly. I know I'm not Jesus-y anymore, but honestly, that one still slaps. Yeah, I mean, say what you want about Jesus folks, they have some bangers. And by that, we mean bagging tunes, not sausages. They might have sausages. Oh, there was some weird Australian slang for sausage that I forgot again. Snag, hold on, thank you. Only remember because I did rewatch Priscilla Quinn in the desert this week.

That test. Which this book doesn't reference as heavily as I kind of vaguely remembered it doing, but it was still nice to watch it again. It loomed really large in my head as well. But I think, yeah, do you have any powerful post-itty bits about the handling of the gender thing? Not really, I'll talk about it. Considering the rampant transphobia that constantly exists whenever I fucking open Twitter, it seemed quite wholesome by comparison.

Yeah. God, there was a really fucking bad article. I've literally only read the headline of it. It was on a magazine cover or something, but everyone was riffing into it on Twitter, which is women dressing like lesbians to feel more powerful, and then pictures of women in power suits. And one of the women they used to illustrate this was Kristen Stewart, famed heterosexual.

Yeah. Not the straightest of the straight and narrow. I'm really quiet. I know that and I know nothing about anything celebrity-wise. But also power suits have been part of women's fashion for decades. Yeah, I thought they were going to say something about dungarees, because I'm not going to lie. I enjoy the mask element of wearing things like work clothes, especially in the summer.

When we went to the garden center together and I just moved into this place, and you were in the dungarees, and I was in a really femme floral dress, and we looked like a very cliche lesbian couple. Especially when I was then helping you move furniture into the flat. It was a moment where your neighbors thought we were a very nice couple, I'm sure. Do you know any of your neighbors? No. I met the guy next door to me like one time,

because I had to call an ambulance for him that one time. That's right, yeah. So you know his ex-wife. I know his ex-wife. She's lovely. We occasionally text each other. Hopefully whoever moves into the one next to you, when they finally stop using power tools every day.

Since December, it was supposed to be done by the end of January. And still, every morning, blah. And they seem to have got a new one that drills at just the perfect frequency to like vibrate my brain a little bit. Like it's a really high-pitched one. Oh no, that's awful. Yeah, it's just on fire. Did you ever get around to looking at noise counselling headphones?

Or were you the person who said they made you feel a bit sick? Yeah, I don't like noise counselling headphones. Also like quite often I'm watching TV or something. I can't really have headphones in very comfortably. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, my double media tends to be drawing and listening to podcasts. Yeah.

Yeah, whereas you do triple media. I know what you're talking about. I got a new lip tint. It's called Dear Darling Tint. That's from House of Itude and it's Korean. And that's my favourite thing in the world. It's so nice. It smells like watermelon.

That's kind of cute. I'm sure it's really unethical or something, but I love it. I need to... I've done that thing where I've run out of all of my regular daily makeup at once and I used to go shopping, but I don't physically go into a shop because that feels like far too much effort. Do you stick to one brand easily or are they all from different... There's two or three different brands I use, but I'll also quite often.

Primer-wise, I'm not really stuck on one that I love. So I just buy whatever's on offer on Amazon. But I hate the one I'm using right now. What one are you using? It's a Maybelline one. But it was another one. Oh, what's the one I've been... I was using for it as it was a W something.

W7 Princess, something like that. It's slightly purple tinted. Oh, cool. Which just takes a bit of the yellow out of my skin in the winter. You're about to get a bit more brown, so that might not be... No, I saw quite yellow undertones though, but I tend to use a green tinted primer because the circles under my eyes are really blue.

I'm enjoying learning about color theory, and my makeup's getting better at the same time. I think you have more of a head start in art than you think you do, because you understand all this already. You say that, but I had to actually... I very rarely, when I'm sewing and designing stuff, I very rarely do much of a design on paper first. But because I'm working on a dress for someone else,

and we haven't nailed down the design, I did some on paper designs to send over, and was like, this is what I'm thinking of doing. But the person I'm doing it for is quite talented in the art department, and I am not. So I did have to send these sketches over with a very... Please ignore the art skills, but these very bad pencil drawings

are what I'm thinking of making for you. I forgot how perspective works, and also apparently sleeves. Sleeves, who needs them? Photoshop might be best, but eventually. Yeah, probably, but it's fine. Whatever digital artist you use procreates the one at the moment. I have no idea.

The ability to undo. Yes. If you're doing sketches, it's very nice. There's enough on paper that they've been able to go, no, I don't hate that, and now I can do what's best for me when designing, which is to make one out of shit fabric. Nice.

3D. Yes. I know how it all goes together. I just can't make that two... Yeah, sorry. I can't make that two-dimensional on a piece of paper. Speaking of design, the second game we played, last night, do you remember what that was called?

Little Town, that was really cute. That was, I don't know why that aesthetic tickled my brain so very much. We were at the Board Game Cafe again last night, and I won a game for the first time, which was exciting. You did, I'm very proud of you. I won that one, Little Town. I did not win Catam, again.

I was one point of winning for ages. Oh, no. And then someone... See, that's what I hate. But then someone took longest road off me, and then someone else won before I could get longest road back in that last point. But it was fun, though.

We had a very good time. We did. I haven't laughed so much in quite a while, especially when we used the word inscrutable and realised that Scrut has no base form. Don't conjugate it again, I can't. Literally, it was one of those nights when my jaw hurt afterwards.

Scrutted. Scrut. Scrot. Scrut, Scrut. Anyway. Scrut, Scrut. Anyway. Since last night, I've not been able to stop

just occasionally saying to myself, Scrut, Scrut, motherfucker. See, to me, it's toad at Total. Oh, that makes sense. In his little car. His canary carriage, whatever it was, and then a motor car. It's been a very long time

since I've read Wind in the Willows. I'm going by the film for that one. Oh, the film. I think I may have only read Wind in the Willows like two times, once as a kid, once as an adult. I love it. It's a lovely book. It's just not one of the ones that I'm like, oh, I want to read that.

It was never like a favorite favorite for me, whereas the Beatrix Potter ones, like the Miss T. E. Winkle book, I had memorized. And I also had it in French. Not sure why. I don't really attempt to make you bilingual. I did start studying French when I was like five or six years old.

It's amazing how little of it I fucking retain now. No, same. I need quite a lot as a kid, and then just a few years off. The only reason I started studying it so young is because there was an afterschool French club, and the woman who ran it lived like three doors down from us. So mum got me to go to that,

so I'd have a lift home from school. That's good. That's a good idea. Which I respect. Absolutely. It's like the slightly posher version of being a latchkey kid. Yes, very much so. Afterschool activities good. Only the free ones where someone else could give me a lift, though.

Oh, yeah. We weren't that posh. Oh, there was an afterschool club that took my brother's primary school, which I would then go to as well. It was for kids whose parents were teachers, basically. So you'd just send an hour there while your parents were finishing, and my mum was a teacher.

I used to be a toast. Oh, I can still smell that. It was like a little, what they called, static caravan-y thing outside. Yeah, I know the things you mean. And it was just like unreasonably warm in a nice way that make you all sleepy, and they give you toast.

That was so nice. It was like 10 or 11, I really like. I don't remember anything else about from it smelled really nice. It was really warm when I got toast. That's fair. Pretty much all I ask of a static caravan. Whereas most of my afterschool activities, because I went to a small Catholic primary school

next to a large Catholic church, they all took place in the crypt. Oh. Literally, there was like an under space of the church. It wasn't like a creepy old crypt. What's a merit? No, it's an evidence. So much.

I used to do theatre club in a cellar of one of those. There's so many churches in this town. There's so many churches just where I live, that when I have a friend who lives a couple streets away, who was trying to, admittedly it was New Years, and I was a couple pots of champagne in, but she wanted a smoke and asked me to drop some down to her, and was trying to direct me to hers.

And I went completely the wrong way, because she was directing me via church, and there were two churches near each other, and I went towards the wrong one. Yeah, and that was just on random housing estate. There were three in total, I could have walked towards. Nice. And she was like, no, it was the one, this denomination.

I was like, I don't know the denominations of the three churches in five minute radius. Oh, well. Yeah, but you've done like a whole week of board games, haven't you? Sorry, circling back, because board games are fun than churches. Yeah, they very much are. Yeah, my friend's been off work,

so we've spent this entire week playing Massive Darkness 2, which is a very fun, big, sprawly, dungeon-crawly thing. So him and his mate did not okay. You showed me the picture of all the boxes together. The base game, listeners. The base game is like a dozen large boxes. It's not a dozen large boxes. I showed you the table.

We've got like all the character boxes. We've got like all the mini finnaker characters out on the table. And also, we've got a bunch of the expansions so we could play some of the other characters and have some of the other enemies. It's one of these weird things where like part of the reason the game takes up so much space is because all the enemies are these little minifigures,

which is like a really genre thing. So this is like these RPG dungeon store crawler style. And part of the reason they're so popular is people buy these massive games that come with boxes and boxes of figures that they can paint. Mm-hmm. I don't know anyone who has bought one of these and actually painted all the fucking figures, but...

That massive cabinet behind me full of blood bowl figurines. Yes, but he has actually painted them, hasn't he? Yeah. Yeah. All right, fine. There's one person. One. Of course, it would be Jack. Of course, it would be Jack.

So we're looking for an exception to prove the rule. But yeah, so that's part of the reason it takes up so much space. It's fun though. I have been enjoying myself. I'm glad you have. Currently, we're wandering through a hell maze while a Banshee and the Queen of the Undead follow us around. I think one of us...

We paused. It's nice because I've got the space to leave it out, so we can literally pause mid-quest so I can come record. But at the point we paused, I think one of us had died. Gosh, you? Can you remember? Well, I died, but I kind of slightly rec on the move, so I could basically teleport out of the way

because I had a potion that let me teleport to a forge. It's a joy of playing with one friend. Yeah. You can negotiate. Yeah, I'm not a super stickler for rules because sometimes rec conning makes it more fun. But yeah, then I think he died, but that's fine. One person can come back to life once.

Okay, that's good. What happens if you both die as a game over? Game over. We already failed at this quest once yesterday. Jack's been playing something not similar because I think it's much smaller that he's been playing. Oh God, I can't remember what it's called. It involves space orcs and space hobbits.

Warhammer 40,000? No. It's like a dungeon and RPG thing. But in space. But in space? Yeah. No one can hear you. Orc.

Nope, orc orc. Scrooge, scrooge. Scrooge, scrooge, motherfucker. Right, okay, I think at this point we should probably just make a podcast front soon. Yeah, let's make a podcast. Would you like to make a podcast? Yeah, let's make a podcast.

Hello and welcome to The Tree Shall Make You Threat, a podcast in which we are reading and recapping every book from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, one at a time, in chronological order. I'm Joanna Hagan. And I'm Francine Carroll. And this is our final part of The Last Continent. Terribly said.

It's the last bit of The Last Continent. Note on spoilers before we crack on. We're a spoiler-like podcast. Heavy spoilers for the book The Last Continent, obviously. But we will avoid spoiling any major future events in The Discworld series. And we are saving any and all discussion of the final Discworld novel, The Shepherd's Crown,

until we get there so you, dear listener, can come on the journey with us. Balanced precariously on a boogie board. Perfect. Follow up. Do we have things to follow up on, Francine? We do. I mentioned Terra Australis, I think.

I think I did on the podcast as a concept last week. And I just had a bit more of a look into it. And it's really interesting. So it was a hypothetical content, Continent first, that turned up on maps like from the 15th century onwards. So people were just trying to work out what was in the bits of the world if they didn't know.

And there's some really interesting maps and things, which I'm not going to describe at length on the podcast because I've got some idea of what makes terrible audio content these days. But I'll link to them in the show notes. And yeah, I didn't realise Australia had been named after a hypothetical, I guess. Australis, I think, means Southern.

An unknown land of the South, Terra Australis incognita. But yeah, the legends go back even further to Roman times. That was just mysterious. I know this isn't the Countaway Continent, but effectively, mysterious Countaway Continents. It's quite interesting. Cool. Cool.

We got an email from Kylie in Australia. I don't think it's that Kylie. Oh, still. Could be, just using a fake name. We were talking about neighbours, maybe. I think that summons them, right? I think she has COVID because she was meant to be on Comic Relief last night. Oh, that's sad.

Yeah, I hope she's okay. I didn't know it was Comic Relief. Or Red Nose Ale, something. The same thing. Yeah. Anyway, this Kylie messaged us to let us know greetings and albatrosses from Western Australia. Adding some medicinal knowledge.

Sheepshearing contests do happen at agricultural shows, but she's not sure how they would judge the winner. It must be like a combination of speed and not nicking the sheep, I reckon. Yes. Because sheep shearers leave cuts all over their sheep and they can get infested and infested because lots of flies. Yeah. Poor sheeps.

Poor sheeps. Um, language and place names and things. In the Noongar language, which is Indigenous language of Southwestern WA, places ending in up means the place of. So that would make bugger up the place of the buggers. And Neil, I think it's actually in this section, mentions a place called Kangooly, which is based on the town of Calgorely, named after the local waterhole.

And water access is actually a huge issue there because it always comes in from Perth, 600 kilometers away via pipeline. Now, do you know, it's places like that. I'm like, why did you build a town? Yeah. Fine. A bit like if you've been, if you can live out in the bush and like survive or whatever, I'm sure there's Indigenous populations.

But what an earth possess people to build a town that far from water. Right. Madness. I'm sure there's probably like a, a good geopolitical historical reason. But. Yeah, I didn't like that. Can't be that good, Jesus. And then a vaguer one, but worth mentioning.

Not sure on this one, but something that jumps to mind when they meet the created drawing animals, and one of the wizards describes the kangaroo as a rat, is the description of the quokkas by the Dutch. So quokkas are actually a type of wallaby. Oh, I love them. The Dutch, yeah, they're little. Yeah, they're very cute.

They're so cute. But when the Dutch first found them, they named the island, they found them on rat's nest and mistook them for rats. Oh. And Kylie has very kindly linked to a list of quokka facts, which I will link to because it's full of pictures of quokkas. And I feel like we all need to look at them because they're really fucking cute.

Well, for your picture of a quokka in the starring time, yes, you can, always. Always. So that was my follow-up. Oh, I've just opened the email. I'm going to click on that link there. Oh, yeah. Did you just get a little smile?

Oh, yeah. A little chubby. Oh, very good. OK, sorry. Right, I'll close that otherwise. I'm never going to pay attention. OK, no, you're not. Francine, would you like to tell us what happened last time

in the last continent? I would. I would. Previously on The Last Continent, the wizards get an idea of the island and meet its disappointed deity, who needs a bit of tuition on the birds and the bees, but not the beetles, he seems to have those mastered.

Rid, cully, et al, bid the immortal adieu and get ready to head out to see in a beautiful pumpkin green boat, but Ponder stays behind to take a hands-on role in evolution. Rincewin gets drunk, she is sheep, rides off on a tiny horse, invents Fegemite and meets a watchman while bleeding around the bush. It's all a misunderstanding, Officer. Bleeding around the bush.

I really wanted to shoehorn that pun in somewhere, and I just wasn't confident enough that I'd remember, so I had to put it in there. No, thank you. Before I summarise one last bit of follow-up, I forgot. I don't remember writing this, but clearly I had the bad management slogans somewhere in the back of my brain while doing my notes,

because I found a written at the bottom of one of the pages. You don't have to be a crocodile to work here, but it bites. I have no memory of writing these words down, and I didn't take any of my notes drunk this time, so I don't know where that came from. You don't have to be a crocodile to work here, but it bites. Yep. I love that.

Oh, my God, I'm going to photoshop that up for you. I want it on a mug. Perfect, perfect. Okay, anyway, do you want to tell us what happened this time? Yes, I managed to still keep the summary to a page, but I had to slightly expand the margins to do so. Yeah. So on Mono Island, Pondo works closely with God

until the big project sends him running for the shores and arriving scantily clad on the wizard's sailing vessel. Gender splits the decks and a storm looms ahead as the waters gird the last continent, currently under construction with a high field of background magic causing the wizards to get carried away. The storm rages and the boat degrades as they approach the continent,

sinking under the waves and floating on boat seeds to reach the glowing shores. The ragtag bunch of washed up wizards experience some temporal instability as magic overacts, and the bursal wanders to a camp along the shore where a fire burns and the old man paints with perfect simplicity. The well-meaning wizarding faculty arrive at the camp and attempt to teach some more complex perspective

as the currently infantile librarian finds a bullrore in the old man's things. The sky is clear and darkness falls on the faculty as the old man paints the wizards and finds himself some simple silence. Meanwhile, in the same wear but a much later when, Rincewin is incarcerated for his heroic sheep rustling along with the stolen sheep in question

and talks escape plans and ballad writing with the guard. After dinner and a dialogue with death, he finds a way out and the sheep fades into the stone of the cell. A large kangaroo looms in the sky and seems to be just a sign as Rincewin meets the local dibbler in his search for the docks. Watchmen arrive and once again Rincewin runs

straight into the kitchens of the opera house. He stops just long enough to invent a dessert before the watch catch him up and Scrappy joins his jog just long enough to tell him he can't simply sail away. The heroic Rinceau the Bush Ranger takes shelter in a parade float as sequins sparkle and beer cans fly.

Chased by the watch once more, Rincewin is reunited with the luggage who reveals its cargo of the not-quite drag queen Nealette and they take brief shelter in the old Rue beer brewery until a roof collapse and a conflagration sends them through the cellar. There's no water in the pumps, but there's a great wizarding uni just around the corner.

Rincewin finds himself summoned into the university, climbs a tower that's taller on the outside, learns his cousin is the arch chancellor, and with a few tinnies in him, they head back to the brewery to look for signs of the mysterious floating pointing hats. Through the smoky brewery, the cellar and into the caves, Rincewin explains rock formations and recent ancient history

and the UU faculty burst forth from the pointy hat paintings. As the less local wizards discuss ways to bring the rain, Rincewin and the librarian reunite at the top of the tall short tower. After a brief bit of threatening over nomenclature, Rincewin spins the bullrore and the rain's return. The wet fields, rivers and lightning strikes our favourite wizard as the weather finally rains true. Some days later and with the winds blowing fairer,

it's time for our wizards to head home. Nealette and the girls are reopening the brewery the chefs say adieu and Rincewin, now pardoned, says farewell to his cousin and heads home. A boomerang splits the clowns but the rain promises to return. Oh nice, thank you. So, helicopter and minecloth watch. Oh yes, any of either?

Well, I'm calling the bullrore a helicopter. It does spin and then fly up into the air. Yeah, sure. And I'm going for naked ponder but with a hat for dignity. Yeah, that is pretty lawncloth-ish. Yeah, that's fair. And just other callbacks. They're talking about the brewery and the fact the beer goes flat.

Rincewin said perhaps it was built on some old religious site. That sort of thing can happen. You know, back home there was this fish restaurant that got built on a callback to Mr. Hong and the three jolly luck takeaway fish bar on Dag on Street. One of our favourites. Let's do quotes. Everlasting storm was 7,000 miles long but only a mile wide.

A great turning boiling mass of enraged air circling the last continent like a family of foxes circling a hen house. The clowns were mounted up all the way to the edge of the atmosphere and they were ancient clouds now. Clowns that had rolled around their tortured circuit for years building up personality and hatred and above all voltage. It was not a storm, it was a battle.

Mere gales a few hundred miles long fought amongst themselves within the cloud wall. Lightning forked from thunder head to thunder head, rain fell and flashed into steam half a mile from the ground. The air glowed. Weird sisters callback almost. Yeah. It's another long passage of personified storm.

Very much so. This one's its big brother. This one's had a couple of big breaks already. Yeah, yeah. But it's been stuck performing at the same theatre for years. I think it's a bit bored now. That's true. And I finally get his breakthrough act.

Something like that. What about you, Francine? Yeah. I picked a complimentary one that is sillier. As loudly as a thunderstorm under the bed, but as softly as two souffles colliding, past and present ran into one another. Oh, lovely.

Just one of these beautiful, silly metaphors that I haven't done in a long while. Softly as two souffles colliding. That's a lovely simile. All right. We can talk about characters now. Yeah, right. Good. Ponder.

Yeah, let's revisit a couple. Let us ponder some characters. Ponder is very arrogant over his role in the future, and it gets shat on very fucking quickly. Yeah, I like how he considered eugenics and then got humbled very quickly. He got the year of a god, and maybe some intelligence could be applied

to the task of creating intelligence. Actually, he does account as eugenics, not really. It's like a precursor. Yeah, it's not quite eugenics, but it's definitely a bit arrogant. Yes, I think we've learned that Ponder should not have any real power in the world. No, I think Ponder is best off where he is,

possibly with some more clothes on. Yes. But the pinnacle of creation, it took a minute for it to pay off exactly what it was, but finding out it's the cockroach. Yeah, I was thinking, Jack told me a long time ago, that a cockroach is not the creature

that's most likely to be like the nuclear apocalypse. I think it was a wasp, because it made me very sad, whatever it was. Yeah, because it's the long-running joke, the main things that was five, the nuclear apocalypse, cockroaches, and Cher. Yeah, no, I think Cher's still on the list, but I think it might be Cher then wasps.

No, it was always, oh, what's the, fuck me, Keith Richards is the other one, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the whole running into the darkness thing is very interesting. I think we might have talked about cockroaches before, so I won't go into it too much. We talked about how they like to be touched,

didn't we? Yeah. But yeah. Let's not talk about cockroaches though. Rats are another interesting. Love rats. Very adaptable thing. Rats could have been the answer there, I feel,

but obviously he's a beetle-obsessed, God, so. Yeah, so cockroaches make sense. And the wizards fighting. That's really cool passage, isn't it? Or just like the nearly moment. It's when they start arguing before the magic, even slightly starts flying, no one's resorted to it, because they've spent a lot of time

in an atmosphere where a cutting remark did more damage than a magic sword. Yeah, but then there's like an accidental spark. Yeah, and everyone's staring at it. Was it? I think Ponda managed to break the tension. Also, the boat was about to break, yes. Yeah.

That's very... Yeah, it was a really interestingly funny, but tense moment, I thought. It's nice seeing the tensions reach that with the wizards, because it's very rare. It's nice to get the reminders of what the wizards used to be. Yeah.

Especially with the Dead Men Shoes tradition. If I keep looking the other way, by the way, I am listening to it. It's just that my notes pulled from the book are on the screen, because I've got the Kindle. That makes sense. And then Rid Cully. Rid Cully, doing his usual clever than he looks vid.

I like seeing... I already mentioned the hat bit, but I like it because it's also a bit of a... I can't remember if it's a callback or if we haven't seen it yet, but we definitely see Lisey Rid Cully with nothing but a hat at one point, insisting that he is very much fully dressed.

He's got little drawers in his hat. Not that good. Well, that's sensible. And the top of the hat unscrews. Yeah. Yes. Oh, yeah, that's right. He's got a perfect match of whiskey. We've definitely...

Yes. Definitely seen that. I'm not sure if he was naked in that scene, but... No. No. That seems unlikely. We did see Toplas Rid Cully in Hogfather, but I'm not sure I needed to think about Rid Cully's nipples. Did you work out what's signed Kwanon?

Is... May I congratulate you on being properly dressed? You are wearing your pointy hat, which is the sign Kwanon. No. Oh, wait. Is that some kind of dog Latin that just sounds like Canon? The signer Kwanon of a... A central condition thing that's absolutely necessary.

That's an actual thing. It's not dog Latin. Okay. No, we'll get to the dog Latin later in the book. Yes. But obviously the scene where the wizards come in and interrupt the painter is uncomfortable, and I think it's meant to be uncomfortable.

Oh, yeah. Something about... The writing about the confidence of the wizards is very good. Family-sized self-confidence that seem to be able to get away with anything. Yeah. I quite liked also how the Persa... I'm very attached to the Persa who had been properly brought up said, Hooray, there's a rose bush.

That was one of my favorite lines. But yeah, the rest of them just like, I have an art teacher. He's to like sketch on your art to correct it. It's like that. It gave me those vibes, except like with an extra layer of white nonsense. Oh, my art teacher was just a bully. God, I hated that woman.

Yeah, I didn't get it. Well, I told you, didn't I? I got kicked out of that. Yeah. Ha, jokes on you, Mrs Lady, whose name I've now forgotten. Now I can kind of paint. I remember the name of mine purely because I became friends with her son many years later.

Because he was the bouncer at our local nightclub. TJ. Yes, the same one who's back I walked on in High Heels for free drinks that one time. TJ's a nicely anonymous name, isn't it? Yeah, we can say that. Listeners, no, I know who we mean. Anyway, Rincewind. Rincewind is having a lovely time.

I love Rincewind. Isn't he doing well? I feel so sorry for him when he's in the cell. Because he's been in nastier places and this made it worse because he'd been up against nasty weird and magical things. But now he's just in some stone box and some perfectly nice people. He might quite like if he met them in the bar. I'm going to march him out and make him stand on a really unsafe floor in a very tight collar.

Yeah, he's not got the adrenaline fighting yet for that, have you? Yeah, like a creature from a dungeon dimension you can sort of hopelessly run. But this is, it's dealing with the fact that you're not fighting something clearly evil, but that they are very nice people. Yeah. It's going back to the last book maybe when you've reached the end of the law. Yeah. I liked when he was spitting the bullroarer and he kind of couldn't stop spinning it. It was very reminiscent of when he had the half brick in a sock.

Oh, very much so. Which is just a nice continuing metaphor of like, I don't think you must have done if you ever start spinning something. You're like, if I stop, this is going to hurt. It's a very nice kind of visual metaphor of how out of control his entire narrative always is. Yeah. Like, this is started spinning and now I am just on this ride. Oh, look, a handy storm.

It was a nice ending for him once though. It was a very, well, he did get hit by lightning. He did. But everyone was nice to him. All the Aussies like gave him a nice send off. I did like the little scene. The elect seem to fancy him a bit. Everyone comes up to the boat and says goodbye one by one. You should have stayed there.

He's got a nice cousin. Yeah. Yeah, but you wanted to go home and hang out with the librarian and like in the library. That's fair. They're reunited. I would also like to work in a library with an orangutan. Before I go to the librarian, though, I do enjoy Rincewind finally getting to run away through a city and he's like, right,

I know what I'm doing now. I can run away through cities. I've done this. There's Halley's. Apparently that's a reference to, or some of it is a bit of a reference to Crocodile Dundee. Like there's one where he's in New York and he kind of escapes like that, like jumping on people. People's heads.

Yeah. I don't remember that film very well. But I think that is the one I had on video. But it's fair enough some time ago. But yes, the librarian who... Yay. Considering the entire plot of the book was based around the wizards wanting to learn the librarian's name, although they've forgotten by this point. I may have found a slight reference that I didn't pick up anywhere else.

Yeah. I'm not sure this is, because later I'm going to talk about Bush Ballads a bit. But this is from that. There's one called The Beautiful Land of Australia that was written in the mid-1800s, published for the first time in 1905. But it's a piss-take describing actually a horrible time in Australia. Right. Like starving, as she bulldies, that kind of stuff.

But the chorus goes, I'm not going to sing, because I couldn't actually find a tune. I was going to try it. But ilawara, mitigong, paramata, woollengong. If you wish to become an orangutan, then go to the bush of Australia. Ah. I mean, he would have had to go to Australia anyway for the entire plot. But it's quite nice that he went to Australia and became an orangutan.

I'm very happy for him. Yes. I was very pleased when I saw in my Australian folk song an orangutan. An unexpected crossover event. Not particularly native to Australia, as far as I know. No, no. If it did, it would have a pocket. But yes, he's very much not willing for Rincewin to let him know.

Let them know what his name is. Yeah, for sure. That's another thing I was thinking of maybe this month's rabbit hole. I've got four subjects in my head now of doing Australian wildlife, because that at least would be relevant, right? Fuck relevance. Yeah. And then dibla.

We've got another dibla. Oh, he's such a twat. He's the twattiest dibla we've had. I'm going to save talking about the full breadth of his twattiness for later. Yeah, good thinking. But it's nice to know that they continue to reoccur throughout the disc. Yeah. That was, I also quite liked the phrase that he was looking at his wares for the first time.

Kind of, oh, oh, yes. No, dude, you're quite right. Right, it is washing line. Here's it. Good Lord. Well, it's probably made nearby. Yeah, it's local. And then we've got the girls, Letitia, Darlene and Nealette.

Yay. As well as I mentioned to listen, it's the homework of watching Silicone in the Desert. Not actually super relevant. But I enjoyed rewatching it and having the excuse to, because he doesn't want to see Elrond in drag. Oh, I do. I forgot what I might do anyway, even though it's not homework anymore. You are allowed to just watch films for enjoyment, Francine.

Also, it's not too long. No, it is nice and short, isn't it? And I've watched it before, so I can just have it in the background. Yeah, I forgot to look up. There was some line like she kicked him with a stiletto and achieved what? Three weeks was something in tea was meant to do, which I seem is like infertility. Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, okay. But yes, the sort of running joke of rinse when not quite working out their drag queens and not knowing what drag is because I guess there's not his version of drag is female impersonators. Yeah, like the old university kind of posh boys put on women's clothes and do the Panto quite a lot. Yeah, but then also if you compare, say, British drag to Australian drag, a lot of British drag is still a bit more in the comedy, because it comes a lot more from the Panto Dane tradition. Not so much now, but it's changed a hell of a lot in the last 10 years

because RuPaul's Drag Race became a fucking mainstream. Was it that big of a fact, is it? It's a huge effect. You get a lot more fashion queens and lip syncing became a lot more popular. By no means an expert. I remember seeing a show like that in Jersey maybe 10 years ago now, like that was the first time I'd seen like a glamour drag show. Yeah, but it came more from that tradition and was a bit more comedy,

whereas yeah, Australian drag has definitely, I guess, been a bit sparklier. I do like sequins in Australia. Who doesn't love a sequin? Me, because they always fall off. I can't be bothered telling them back on. No, I actually, I fucking hate telling sequins. This is why I don't like hand embellish a lot of my shirt. But yes, there's quite sweet characters.

I like the little moments with them. Yeah. I don't have the energies get particularly perfectly post-itty about any of it. No, he's trying his best. Rincewind. I mean, I don't quite see him bratch as well. And then luggage. Trunky.

Good old Trunky. Little Trunky. He's got a piercing. Yes. Had his lid pierced. That's not taking it out. It's coming through his face. But also, I really like the mental image of him wearing hundreds and hundreds of little pairs

of stilettos. It. It. Wearing. It. Now, that was brought up in Pratchett as an interesting example of Pratchett doing a kind of gender issue quite well. And the Trunky has always been,

luggage, sorry, has always been very definitively it, not he, even though Rincewind kind of thought of it as a he. And like it's had children with what look like a more female luggage, whatever. Well, yeah. And then even with, even when it had all like its makeup and shoes, it was still referred to. Yeah. I think I subconsciously kind of masculinised it because of the relationship in interesting times, but that's very heteronormative of me.

Yes, they might have adopted. They may have adopted. Also, no, I don't think they have sex. We need to go and ask that God on the island. No, he won't know. This is Whitlow. Where's Mrs. Whitlow when you need her? I'm sure she can explain to luggage reproduction.

Oh, no, she's exciting. She's exciting. The senior wrangler and her suddenly quite loose bikini. Good Lord. No, sorry. New Zealand. High New Zealand, yes, but it's she's. Oh, I love that.

Yeah. When you say that. Darling, I'd love to see you in your New Zealand. I won't mention the phrase map of Tasmania. Good Amanda Palmer song though. Oh, I bet. Sorry, I was going to say something. Mrs. Whitlow, I didn't put her in the characters,

but joy to find out that she's a stunning redhead. Of course she is. Of course she is. Of course she is. I miss being a redhead. Am I doing my hair? I actually, this is one of the few times I don't even mind a little bit of fracture being all like,

and she's really sexy and swayed towards them because that's hilarious because the senior wrangler was unconscious. Yep. I was like, throw him in the sea, will you, Jeff? No, we're too deep. Also points for Pratchett for not when she's in her younger form, suddenly being blonde and very tan. Yes, maybe.

You see, he's learned to imagine another kind of woman. You put a note under my little chunky bullet point though. Like a Jax Mackinaw. Yeah. Yeah. When Prince, when he's surrounded about, there's no way out and suddenly it happens a few times in the books, doesn't it? At luggages, which I enjoy.

I don't think of it as a lazy bit because I always forget the luggage is a thing until it turns up and eats everyone. Well, I think he's quite good at actually taking the luggage out of action so that not every problem can be solved by the luggage because like, if Prince would have had the luggage for him for this entire scene, like it would have eaten a womba at the bar. It would have probably eaten the watchman that first tried to kidnap him. It would have eaten all the sheep.

It would have eaten a lot of the sheep. Or maybe like just because it has surprising turns of heart sometimes, maybe just kept the sheep in and then let them out somewhere else. Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah, it would have been a good sheepdog, sheep luggage. Sheep luggage. That's a TV show. Sheep luggage.

Yeah, people love this shit. There's TV shows about sheep dogs, about that pig, babe. Oh yeah. That'll do a pig because that'll do a luggage. He'd be a great sheepdog. He'd terrify them. Also, I like that he hides in him for the first time. Yeah.

We've not seen him. Sorry, I've done it myself now. We've not seen him. Now I'm going to be constantly worried about misgendering this piece of luggage. Look, I know we consider ourselves very progressive as a podcast, but I feel like we don't need to worry too much about misgendering the luggage. Do you think there's not much of the luggage community that listens to us? I don't think many suitcases are supporting us on this podcast.

If we're wrong, I'm very sorry. Please do at us. Yes. But yeah, the fact that Nealette and everyone decided right away that it wasn't a dangerous beast and like, yeah, you can hide in it. Yeah. You can, yeah. And I enjoy the very slay.

You know, I think this might be a magical suitcase. It was when it turned out that it's still covered in opal. I assume it shed that now. Apparently that can happen to fossils. Like they can be coated in opal. Yeah, in Australia, yeah. Nice. I meant to look up a picture of that.

I love opal. Yeah. Opal's so pretty. Opal is gorgeous, yeah. I was always really jealous of my sister because it's her bathstone. Oh yeah. She always got like really nice opal jewelry. I always forget mine and that's because it's one I don't particularly care for.

I can't remember what June is. I don't really care. No. No, me neither, I suppose. Arts Chancellor Rincewin. Arts Chancellor Rincewin. Rincewin has a cousin of sorts. We don't know the exact relation.

Oh, yours is Pearl, Alexanderite or Moonstone. They're quite pretty. Sorry. Oh, that's cool. I do like pearls. Can't afford them, but I like them. They're very pretty. Mine is Ruby.

Oh, I don't hate that. Yeah, that suits you. I think I just wanted it to be Amethyst because I like falcons so much. Yeah, that's fair. Anyway, sorry, Arts Chancellor. Rincewin, as I already tried to segue to and then interrupted both of us. You interrupted yourself, Rincewin. I did, I did.

It's amazing. So Rincewin has a relative, which is surprising, considering his mother ran away before he was born. Rincewin does my relative. Yeah, so it'll be a distant relative, I suppose. Distant relative or just some kind of very strange concurrent naming. Yeah, parallel evolution, as Riddh Kalli was saying about the spells. Yes, but they're family now.

It's very sweet. I enjoy it. Bill Rincewin, he's got a first name, which Rincewin doesn't. Yeah, he's not noticeably Rincewind-ish. No, well, he's the Arts Chancellor. Yes. He's clearly quite competent. Is this sort of what Rincewind could have been if he'd grown up at a very different sort of

university? Maybe. I'm not sure I can nature versus nature. Rincewind, it's gone through so many parallel dimensions. Well, yeah, just look at the live timer. I know. Death is such a twat. Just thought you might like a so friendly face.

No, you didn't. You're taunting him. I love that, because we talked way back when we were talking about color of magic, when we were really excited to see death. We were like, listeners, I know he seems like a dick now, but you're going to learn why we love him. He's a different kind of dick now, though. He's just-

But he's still a dick to Rincewind. Yeah, he's not like been addictively against Rincewind the way he was in color of magic. But- Reminding you that I am, in theory, still a possibility. I just like that he seems to save all of his little dickishness for Rincewind. That kind of scans, doesn't it? Yeah, for Rincewind. The opera house.

Should we go to the location? Yes, let's go to the location. Let's go to the opera house. Described as like a boat about to set sail. Can't imagine what that said. Like a bunch of tissues pulled out of a box. Apparently both ways the Sydney Opera House has actually been described. You've actually seen the Sydney Opera House, haven't you?

Like you've obviously lived in Sydney. I've got a picture of me in front of it. Lovely. Did you ever get to go in? No, that kind of thing. Cost money or something, I don't know. I wasn't very into that kind of stuff then, anyway. I ran the nearby gardens quite a lot. The, what's it called, botanical garden.

Oh, that's nice. Always very nice. That whole area was nice, circular key. But no, I went and saw the opera house and took some photos and that was- It's weird seeing things like that. Yeah, I imagine it would be quite surreal to actually see it. Like I remember the first time I saw the Eiffel Tower, I was just stood really confused.

Like kind of a, I guess you exist outside of a postcard. Well, it's also difficult because, you know, if you're anywhere near it, you don't have the perspective of the Eiffel Tower because you're too close to it and you sort of, especially I was like eight or nine years old. So I was like, Yeah, whereas now obviously you can look at it face to face. Yeah, no, now I'm level with the top of the tower.

That extra foot's really made the difference with the Eiffel Tower. It really helps that I turn into Godzilla whenever I go to Paris. Oh, that's right. We've never gone to France together. That'll be a fun trip. God, sorry, the opera house. Yeah, that's the thing. Yeah, it is like the most frostidious venue for a lot of artists though,

isn't it? Like people who want people, like you want to break into New York, you want to play London, whatever, but like the Sydney Opera House, it just seems to me like the venue. Yeah, it's like the big shiny thing. Yeah. I don't know. That's cool. And I do enjoy all the chefs. I like that it has a whole bunch of neurotic chefs working in it.

I found that whole scene really relatable. I'll talk about the disaster stuff, but yeah, I relate it to that. And then Bugger Up University. Yes. Full of Bugger's University, as we now know. Yes, no place of. Place of Bugger's, sorry. Over the stone arch at the front, it's mostly built out of corrugated iron.

Burned into thin metal with the words Nullus Anziatus. No worries. No worries. And it also says Nulli Shile Sanguinei. No bloody sheilas. Maybe now I can get that one. I was very proud of myself for getting what the Sanguinei bit meant. It took me a second.

Yeah. Well, I'm always trying to remember which of the like four humor descriptions, mean ones. So you've got like Billius, you've got Sanguine, and then I always forget the other two. Yeah. I can't remember what she was on. Literally, I've gotten already. Yep. Billius.

No, did I say that one? Yeah. Yeah. So it's vile. So you know what? I'm not going to talk about the four humors because they're disgusting. I also like that all the buildings were low but had big wide roofs, giving the effect you might get if someone stepped on a lot of square mushrooms.

Such a lovely pointless descriptor because there's no such thing. Yes. I like that sort of nonsense description. It's interesting how many different harsh environments have a lot of corrugated iron because there are a lot of buildings like that in hot places, but also like the capital of Iceland, what's it called, Reykjavik, is like a lot of the buildings are corrugated iron. Hey, really?

Yeah. Very interesting. They're very, they have like underfloor heating, because they live on a volcano or something. Sorry, Icelanders. Feel free to ask me. I know I'm vaguely. Very vaguely.

To the idea. Yeah, I don't have anything about construction with corrugated iron. I've read about it before, but not at length. It is an interesting material because it's like a lot stronger than it looks, obviously, which is why it's like, pop feel, am I corrugated cardboard? What is it thing? But you'd think it would be like being in a roasting tin, wouldn't you?

Yeah, just a little box made of metal. Add that and to maybe follow up at some point. Listeners, if you know anything, do share this. Um, something that has become a mild bugbear for me. I don't like criticizing annotated projects. Obviously, it's an amazing resource we use quite a lot, but every time there's something that's a different size inside, outside, whatever, they'll say, oh, this is a nod to Dr. Who.

And like, I just don't think it always is. The taller is the tower is taller on the outside than it is on the inside. I bet that if they didn't put that in every time, they'd keep getting emails. Yeah, good point. All right, maybe my criticism isn't of annotated projects, it's just of people. Yeah, and Dr. Who is saying that to the massive Dr. Who fan.

Yeah, no, I'm a huge Dr. Who fan. I quite enjoy David Tennant, but Dr. Who likes the whole thing. I was telling someone the story of the other day of how I went to the Dr. Who experience in Cardiff, dressed as the TARDIS, and then my contact lens broke and I cried. I was really hormonal that day. It's a nice dress though. It is a nice dress.

It doesn't fit me anymore. I'll be way too big for you now, won't it? No, I can't remember things. Anyway, yeah, as a massive Dr. Who fan, not everything that's bigger on the inside or outside is necessarily a reference to the TARDIS. It's also just a cool idea. Don't mention all what it is.

Yes, and I like the idea of the tower. I want to climb it. It's like a taller on the outside. I just want to climb something that is taller on the outside, because I really like going up to cool high tall places, but I really dislike climbing a fuck ton of stairs. And a lot of them don't have lifts. I do not like standing on cool high places,

and I also hate steep stairs. So I think just for me, not big towers, not for me, not for me. Spiral staircases terrify me, particularly, but any kind of narrow steep stair that goes on for more than like the ones in my house is a bit much for me. I really like them. I'm very worried about heights. I'm not scared of heights at all,

unless there is absolutely nothing stopping me from falling off, in which case I'm completely terrified. But the thing that's stopping me from falling off could be like a very small wire fence. As long as there's something there, I'm fine. Speaking of bigger on the outside, one of the bits that Rince one says here, it's the more geography you've got,

the less history you ever noticed at, more space, less time. I wasn't quite sure what they're getting at. I was wondering if like, because everything's more spread out, like there's not as many like wars between nations and things like. I actually built a bit of a rant about that into my notes later, because it's something no game and said a lot in reference to America. At least it says that England has history, America has geography. I'll go into it a bit more later on there.

Okay, cool, cool, cool. Yes, I'm now seeing probably the angle you're coming at it from. Yes. Yes, I've got a specific angle. I've got to highlight it because it confused me. Joanna's managed to make a point out of it. Well then, Joanna. We say a point.

We haven't got there yet. Right, little bits we liked, Francine. Mm-hmm, escaping cell tropes. Yeah, oh, just such a, such a, such a trope, isn't it? The, just wanted to get this sorted out. It's not so. I've got time to waste. Is there any chance you're going to fall asleep in a chair,

offset the cell, with your keys fully exposed on the table in front of you? And then there's the like, the related ones in there where like, they've got it on the belt and it gets hooked off. I think that's like Robin Hood Disney I'm thinking of, maybe. Yeah, quite possibly. And then the Washer Woman is like in various, but also in the Willows. And there's like, you forgot to ask about the grill. No, it does not.

There's a Washer Woman trope bit in a later book, and I love it so much. It's one of my favorite scenes of that book. Don't remind me now in case it's a spoiler, but it'll come to me. It's not a major spoiler, but it's in Monstrous Regiment. Okay, cool. Yeah, I don't know how much to say about that. I didn't look into TV jokes or anything this time.

I just enjoyed it, yeah. Local delicacies. We are introduced to the concept of the meat pie floater. Which is apparently a thing. Yeah, a bit of me with like, it's curious. Not curious enough to do it, but like curious. I quite like grace foods like that because I'm very into sauces and I like, there's no nice way to say it.

I like wet food. Does that make sense? No, that's fine. I always dip. I always have way too much gravy. Yeah, there's always got to be a sauce. I do like mushy peas. I like ketchup.

I don't eat meat pies, but you can get pretty good vegetarian quotes. Meat pies now. It's just all of them together. I'm not, I'm not sure. I think we should try it. There's two little bits in this. I like when he's first introduced to it and a bit later, when we talk to Dibbler about some of the food he sells as well.

On the strange regional delicacies, specifically featuring pies, I have eaten a pie bomb and I highly recommend that. Pie in a roll. Yeah, with butter and ketchup. That sounds like one of those, do you know when you get food that's like so heavily carbohydrate, like a chip butty or something like that as well. God, I love chip butty. But somehow it just really increases the chance of taking one of those bites that

hurts as it goes down because it's too much food. That has definitely happened to me the most with chip butties. I don't know why. But with a pie, there's enough gravy to stop that happening. Also, just a brief shout out to one of my favorite lines from any film ever, which is, I don't want to be a pie. I don't like gravy. What fucking film is that?

It's from Chicken Run. That's right. I can hear it in my head. Lines from movies that live in your heads rent free. Yeah, oh my god, Chicken Run. God, I love that film. That film makes me think of going around somebody new from school's house and I only went around there once.

And she was really nice and I never really spoke to her much after that, not for any reason. I just kind of felt bad for that. She's like horribly offended by the film Chicken Run. No, no, yep. I don't know why. It's just the odd things that you associate things with. Yeah, but yes, back on the regional boundaries.

Not my middle school stories, no, sorry. No, sorry. My boring, rambling middle school, no? Yeah, okay. We're a Discworld podcast front scene. Let's talk about food. All right, yeah. I should probably do some more interesting things with my life

before I start an autobiographical one. Food. But there's a really lovely long footnote about there's nothing that's a good, like there is something about the really shit food. Hot dog fillings that have more in common with meat than pinkness. But people can be trained to prefer the other sources if Machiavellia had written a cookbook. And there is something very relatable about that because sometimes you want the shit burger or the shit hot dog.

Yeah, you can come get food. You can get such good vegetarian versions of the bad hot dogs. Yeah, they do. Yeah, because there's barely any meat in the real ones. But I do like the end of that footnote says, even so there's no excuse for putting pineapple on pizza. Yeah, wow. I don't actually feel, I don't like it,

but I don't feel strongly about it that it's abomination. I just like the pressure back me up on it. Yeah, regional specialties are often odd. I remember Malta, one of the regional specialties was a meat olive, which has nothing to do with olives. It's like a minced meat filling wrapped in a bit of meat. I mean, I need that. I know, it's just such a, like, I was already like vegetarian by that.

I was like, well, I hope you enjoy that, Jack. That's odd. You didn't really get to eat well in Malta, did you? I did not. I think it was very veggie friendly. Not very, considering it is a little island, there's not that much seafood compared to the meat. But yeah, also they shot all the birds.

So I know not that I eat birds anyway, it's just weird. They're a very odd island nation, is my point. Speaking of odd island nations, I brought a book with me, show and tell, which is great for the audio format. But it's a Jersey heritage, Jersey, like the island, that I'm probably not like the New Jersey, which is occupation recipes. So when it was occupied by the Nazis, there was not a lot of food,

especially towards the end, and people got very creative. And you saying, you putting regional delicacies in the notes, made me think of, I have this book, and it's entitled, Limp It's Stew and Potato Jelly. Wow. It's jelly like the wobbly, jello Americans, not like the jam type stuff. Yeah, and there's a lot, there's a lot in here. But England has a lot of weird regional delicacies,

that like if you describe them, it would sound like you're trying to trick them into believing in something like drop bears, not just haggis. Like rock buns. Yeah. Rock buns, jellyed eels, and cockles. Spotted deck. And muscles, and labor, labor.

Sorry. Yeah, no, I know many Londoners who are genuinely jelly deal fans. And I've never eaten one. Can I eat an eel? Is an eel a fish? Yeah, I don't want to. Eels are fish, Francine. Eels like in sushi, lovely.

I was about to try and justify my reaction then, but like, what else are they? They're not on mammal. An eel is actually a duck. Where do amphibians land on your pescaterianism? No. So you wouldn't eat frog slugs? No, because frogs are already in trouble from that fungus thing.

Oh yeah, that's fair. Yeah, also my pescaterianism, also I will not eat squid or octopus because they're too smart and it freaks me out. That's fair. Also, I feel bad about eating fish at all. It's just that I am not an organised enough person to eat. To get enough protein. To eat enough protein.

Yeah, not unless I just sat down and ate a block of cheese every day and I feel like that would come with its own health issues. I feel like it's maybe not the... Well, I'm quite anemic a lot of the time as well. Yeah, you are. I'm trying to justify myself here, but yeah. Anyway, yes, fun regional delicacies. Listeners, if you've got any weird ones from where you are, please tell me.

They've got to be some like sapphic ones, haven't they? I don't think sapphics got anything that specifically weird about food. No, probably not, I guess it's just... But then also, I feel like... ...agricultural place, isn't it? We maybe can't see the wood for the trees. Like it is a weird place that I think so much of it just goes over our head. Yeah, I'm just having a look quickly on traditional recipes

from Suffolk blog, what we got here. Oh, no, this is old, old. I'm not sure that counts. Yeah, no. I can't think of any. One regional specialty that I have been missing, I found a recipe for, and I'm going to make is the Stottie, which is a northern bread thing. And it's kind of like a giant English muffin.

Okay, nice. That sounds good. I like English muffins, I like giant bits of bread. Like it's a very large, round, flat sort of loaf that you cook partly on the stove top. And if you make it the right size, you can put an entire full English breakfast in it and make a giant breakfast sandwich. Okay, sounds good. I've found something called a sapphic silla bub,

but that just looks like a silla bub to me, so I think it's not lying. What's a silla bub with you? Speaking of silla bubs, should we talk about the desserts? Yes, well done. I like that, I don't know why that works, but what's a silla bub? What's a silla bub? Nothing, what's a silla bub with you? Very good.

Desserts. This is when, as we mentioned, rinse when crashes into the Opera House kitchens and they're very upset because they've got to invent a pudding for the Prima Donna, which I'm very upset we didn't get any inventing puddings specifically for Prima Donnas during masquerade. Obviously, we did get the chocolate delight with the special sauce. I'm kind of glad we didn't because I feel like he would have tried to make a fat joke. Yeah, good point.

Also, there was quite enough dessert-related content with, as you say. The chocolate delight. The heavily-approdisiac. Yeah. I'm sorry, that was never explicitly said, was it? I think it was. I think it was my ability. I think it was implied so heavily that it crashed through a couple of floors of the Opera House.

Very good. Anyway, dessert. Yeah, so inventing desserts to one of Prima Donnas comes from an actual thing and Dame Nellie, but again, partial thanks to annotated for this reference to two different opera singers, Dame Nellie Melba. Oh, like the Peach Melba. Yes, and that's what brings me to an invent. Oh, right, okay.

There was also a Dame Clara, but who was an English singer who moved to Australia. The Banana Clara sounds great as a dessert. Did anyone make that? I just love the weeping joy at the end when they've got a new Prima Donna in her last name's Trifle. Yes. Not that I'm a big fan of Trifle as a dessert, but I'm very happy for Trifle. What are you on about? Damp sponge.

I don't like the texture of the damp sponge. I like the little trifles you can get from Tesco and the little pots. They don't have sponge in even. It's just jelly and custard and cream. Yeah, no, that I meant to. Jelly and ice cream with sprinkles. Children food is the best kind. That's in the same category of incredibly bad for you and delicious as, like, do you remember

sugar sandwiches? Yeah, just my mom used to call them fairy sandwiches. Which another Australian thing, fairy bread, bread and butter with sprinkles on it. Oh, very popular Australian kid snack. Something I learned about from, I forgot I had one other Australian cultural touchstone, which is Trilogy of Books by Jacqueline Moriarty, set in Australia, about teenagers in a high school writing lessons to each other that I

obsessed over when I was a young teenager. You've told me about that. I keep saying that. Yes, yeah, that's what I said. Finding a Kassie Crazy is the second one for listeners. I can't remember the name of the first one now. So I've linked to it in the past while finding my gun. Anyway, yeah.

But yeah, so I enjoy the dessert, but I like an excuse. I thought about trying to make a peach melba. I'm not sure. I need to look up some recipes. You need to add twice the brandy. Yes. But there's no initial measurements, so. Just add twice.

It's like when you tell me to add an entire butter to something to fix it. There are very few recipes that can't be fixed with an entire butter. I've got some apples that need eating. I might make an apple crumble or something. I quite like the idea of just panic-stricken trying to make up a dessert out of whatever. I've done it last minute. I've had people coming over. It's like, what fruit and cream do I have in the house?

How can I assemble it and call it fancy? Yeah. Which led to the caramelise. Then you're not making Compton Wizard, you are a chef. Yeah, no. That led to the caramelised plum custard tart with port syrup. That sounds good. Yeah, it was really good.

I'll make that for you at some point. The port syrup's non-alcoholic because the basil kicks off. That's cool. Anyway, yeah. Sorry, art and perspective. Let's get some perspective, Francine. We fucking need it. Yeah, I just...

The whole idea of a thing like being the essence of the thing instead of... Oh, God, it's so beautiful, isn't it? The thing. I'm really eloquent today, aren't I? That's great. The thing in the thing. You know, the thing that means the thing in the thing. Which reminds me that we haven't pointed out much that they've said the name of the thing

in the thing a lot in this book. Oh, they have said the thing. Yes, they haven't so often. I think I just stopped noticing it by the time we got to an episode. Yeah, here it is. Someone had drawn a tree. It was the simplest drawing of a tree the basil had ever seen since it'd been old enough to read books that weren't mainly pictures.

But it's also in some strange way, the most accurate. Simple because something complex had been rolled up small as if someone had drawn trees and started with a normal green cloud on a stick and refined it and refined it some more and looked for the little twist in the line that said tree and refined those until there was just one line that said tree. And I love that.

The minimalist line art is incredible. And so far out of my reach, it is wizardry to me. It may as well be done by a deity drawing on a rock, as far as I know. Have you ever seen the... I know Picasso is a terrible bastard, but there's like a drawing of a woman's behind. A woman's behind because now I'm a fruit. An arse.

An arse. Yeah, see that seems wrong for an art, doesn't it? That is three lines, basically. And I'm like, ah, well done. I went through a phase of doing lots of really minimalist charcoal-y sketches and needs and stuff. Oh, they were quite good. Yeah, I could never make it quite as minimalist as I wanted. You know, you always go to put in that one extra detail.

I'm awful with that. I'd say my main failing with doing watercolours is I always add another extra layer that shouldn't have. But I really enjoy the ideas of perspective, because it goes against, obviously, a lot of the art stuff I've learnt. Like Picasso's whole deal was you've got to learn all the rules perfectly, and then you learn how to break them. And that was the thing I learned with learning to draw,

is you're not drawing what you know is there, you're drawing what you actually see is there. So you may know that that's a circle, but when you look at it, it's an oval, and you need to draw the oval. Which is why drawing realism has sometimes helped if you turn your reference photo upside down or something, because you can't stop your brain from saying that is a thing, so I'm going to try and draw a thing.

I studied perspective drawing for a little bit, and I fucking love it, fascinates me. Yeah, it was when I was doing some design technology and figuring out how to design a room, and you had to learn how to draw the perspective of the room to put a design together. I was doing a bit of perspective drawing during the first lockdown, I was trying to learn a bit of that,

and I got as far as five point perspective, and then my brain broke. Yeah, I only studied the very, very basic stuff. Yeah, I mean, I found even that quite difficult, to be honest, but I managed to do a couple of competent building sketches and that, and then I was like, the five point perspective is like, that lends the convex, the other one? What's the other one? Convex.

Yeah, I mean convex, I mean, it's going to be like a spoon reflection, and that's really cool. But I reckon here, he's obviously referring to some indigenous art, which actually, I was reading quite an interesting essay on how even referring to a lot of it as art is simplifying the whole thing, because it's history. But I might have mentioned it on the podcast before, some of the like cave art from France, I think,

that they talked about in the book, Shaman, and yeah, just the idea that they've managed to properly, accurately convey this animal through these really simplistic lines. And we'll come to that in another book a bit more, actually. So this is a signposting bullet point. For those in the know, it's not what it is, it's what it be. Yes. Something like that.

Yeah, I think that's right, yeah. Anyway, the smell after rain. Not what it looks like it, what it be. Yeah, it's not what it looks like it's what it be. Yeah, the smell of rain. The smell you get after rain. Where's the actual, so the line is, rinse and smoke are fairly primitive language,

and it had no word for that smell you get after rain, other than that smell you get after rain. Listeners may know that this is, I've always noted that. In my notes though, I was going to mention the word petricor, because I think it's such a lovely word. But very handily, just yesterday, I was reading through some recipes on the Cardian website. Sure, that's where you find things like petricor.

Just before I went to go do the episode plan, and this happened to be in a recipe for fucking Swiss chard. In his masterpiece, Nosedive, a field guide to the world smells, Harold McGee begins the soil chapter with the Roman naturalist Pliny, who thought the smell of fertile soil was the mixed breath of sun and earth. McGee then leaps 2,000 years ahead, and recounts how Australian scientists named the smell of dry rock and earth being moistened petricor, from the Greek petri,

meaning rock and equal blood of the gods. Were they referencing Pliny, or was this like a both parties notice? I think it was a both parties notice. So I've linked to an article from the Met Office website about petricor in the show notes. There's two researchers at the Australian Ciro-C-S-I-R-O Science Agency, and it was in a 1964 article for the General Nature, so it's not an old word. In their research, rocks have been exposed to warm, dry conditions, were steamed distilled to reveal a yellow-colored oil that had become trapped in the rocks and soil,

and that's the substance that's responsible for the smell. And it comes out like when it's cooled down rapidly? Yeah, I guess. And the source of this oil is a combination of oils secreted by plants during dry weather, which are signals to halt root growth and seed germination, and then chemicals released by soil-dwelling bacteria. And those particles themselves are called geosmins, as though geos are an earth and osme meaning smell. Geosmins.

Yeah, geosmins. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, huh, huh. So how cool is that? That was very cool. Fun little thing I learned. Ooh, which is why I guess that it's always stronger when it's not rained for a while, or when it's not been humid. Yes, more of that oil is built up into there. Cool, I didn't know that. I knew the word, I did not know what it actually was.

Yes, so that was a fun little bit of education I got there. I think it's an actual substance. Well done. Thank you, Rachel Brody, for putting that. Yes, we've all done recipe writer. For putting that. It also looks like quite a good recipe. It's Swiss chard, stalks in a bechamel gratin, and then the greens cooked with some chilli and garlic.

I think it's a word that's been so heavily referenced in the last few years, that it's become like a piss-take thing sometimes on Twitter and Tumblr. It was, it got really heavily romanticised, and then it was like a thing in Doctor Who, and then Doctor Who kind of became a bit cringy. Especially because it was Amy and Doctor Who, so this is like the Matt Smith era, which is... I would say I quite like that, that was sweet.

I like it, but it was definitely the kind of them... It was Princess Campi, yeah. It's the manic pixie dream girl era of Doctor Who. Yeah, well, Doctor Who is the manic pixie dream girl. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, I didn't, yes, I hadn't realised that's when it became a meme. I think that contributed to the memification of Petricor. But the whole bit about the last passage of this book

is one of the ones that's definitely stuck with me as well. Oh, it's beautiful. It's such a book of contrasts. Just the silliness and then the, as always, just the silliness and the beautiful metaphors, they're always weather-related. But I think it's also, it's a relatable feeling. I know I get, I am more of a summer person

than a winter person by a long way, but you know that first rain you get when the weather breaks after a really massive hot spell and you just have to go and stand out at the store. Exactly. Oh, do you remember? I was, oh, 2018, I guess, when we had like six weeks with no rain at all.

And it finally rained and I was like, I went and stood outside my flat barefoot, like a proper fucking manic pixie dream girl. I might as well have been a Wes Anderson film. At least now I've got a balcony so I can dance in the rain in private. I wish there was some way to find the data on this, but I bet the concentration of manic pixie dream girls

spiked that day. Yes, highly. I'm not sure. We're going to have Australians laugh at us going like six whole weeks without rain. Call that a drought. This is a drought. That's not a drought, it's a spoon.

Have I tell you, when I used to work at the Empire of the Bar, not the Empire, yeah, the Empire of the Bar in Sydney, we used to have these huge windows that lined one side of the bar and completely opened. And the older guys in there, the regulars, used to be able to tell when it was going to piss it down soon. Like it was complete clear sky and they'd be like,

you got to close those windows, it's going to piss it down in a minute. I ignored them the first time. They were always fucking right. We just picked up the sense for it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's like a vibe.

Two guys, particularly. One guy is Aboriginal and one guy who is white. And they just always, always sense the weather. And they were always in the pub, so that was useful. It's nice when you get a pub that comes with its own barometer. Yeah. Anyway, speaking of silliness. Yes.

I've been tracking, remember old throughout the book. Our full tally is only eight. I thought it would be higher. I think that's enough. Any more would have been a bit. But a few of my favorite names. Poor old Wally Slover. Windows book plunder.

Dickie Bird. Rubber Hauser. And my personal favorite, Cruddy Trussit. Which I think might become my drag name. Very Woodhouse, isn't it? It's so Woodhouse. I think Cruddy Trussit. No, that can't be your drag name.

Dickie Bird is sort of the obvious. Everyone whose last name is Bird has probably been nicknamed Dickie at some point. Especially Richard Bird. I know a Richard Bird. Do you know a Richard Bird? I do know a Richard Bird. Does he go by Dickie Bird?

I assume he must. He's one of my mum's friends. Ah, of course. You'll have to ask him. Anyway, should we talk about some of the biggest stuff? Sure thing. Do you want to start with Nick Kelly? Oh, yeah, okay.

So the whole bit about Rince when being a dirty vagabond is kind of a play on the old bush ranger thing. They talk about Tinhead Ned, which is a very obvious reference to Ned Kelly, who was one of the later crop of bush rangers actually. He was mid to late 1800s. Late 1800s being when he died.

He was the son of an Irish transported convict. He was involved with various bush gangs. He was himself the head of a very active one. But Tinhead, I'm guessing specifically, is he died in a shootout with police while he was wearing homemade armour. So a shootout would have lasted a lot longer than it would have done,

because it was very effective bulletproof homemade armour. Obviously, bullets weren't as good then. His last words were, and this might be apocryphal, but such is life. Well, I hope that. I love that. I hope so too.

But that sent me down like bush rangers and bush ballads. The Australian Wild West stuff. Did you disappear down a wombat hole? I did disappear down a wombat hole, which is always dangerous, because wombats will plug up their burrows with their bums. Is that a real thing? Yeah, no, they've got really, really tough hindquarters,

and they kind of arrange themselves, bum out if something's trying to get into the hole that they think's going to manage it. They also poo in cubes. Oh, I knew that. Yeah, Australia has ridiculous animals, truly. I don't think I'm just being like,

ah, it's foreign, so I feel like I know animals from various countries. I enjoy breeding about weird animals. Australia's animals are absurd. But anyway, sorry. I love them all, most of them. Not the jellyfish. I never went in the sea.

What the fuck was I talking about? So, bush rangers. Madder than a cornered wombat. They were originally escaped convicts who used the Bushes of Refuge to hide from the authorities, and so they were a bit less violently criminal at the start, because obviously the authorities were horrible in some of these cases, and a lot of these convicts

weren't violent criminals. And there were a few cases of these early bush rangers fighting alongside Aboriginal people on the frontier battle kind of stuff. Later, I think that massively decreased. And then later, the term evolved to refer to armed robbers, basically, like that was the life who used the Bush as their base. So I guess like highwaymen, they get a lot of popular public

sympathy in the same way that our highwaymen do. It's kind of, the term is social banditry. So it's a lower class criminals resisting authority, and obviously a lot of these things get, because we like the general idea of it, very whitewashed, and the romantic heroes, and then you look into it, it's like, oh, you were a proper bastard. Why did I just stop myself from saying prick?

Yeah, we can say prick on this podcast, Francis. Anyway, sorry. But yeah, so like same deal as like with pirates, I always get a little bit like pirates of the Caribbean did a lot to help that. But I mean, even before that, it was like pirate costumes. It's the fun thing to be highwaymen again, like the North American outlaws like Billy the Kid, all that kind of stuff is social banditry.

And kind of connected to that is the thing of Bush ballads, which is like folk ballads, but specifically about Australian stuff. It tells personal tales of rural life in Australia. So you've got like mining and sheep shearing, and it's like still an ongoing genre. So you've also got like trucking and things like that. Yeah. It's simple rhyme schemes, generally very down to earth language.

For a long time, it was like passed down orally only. I think it started being printed in, oh, what's his name? Who did the Watson Matilda, Patterson, something like that? Oh yeah, we talked about him last week. I have forgotten the name now. He put together a book of them. Yeah, edited the book of them,

which included the one with the orangutan thing, which is how I got there. But there's also a lot of them that talk about Bush Rangers, and famous last stands are very important, obviously. One, there are a lot, and I'm not going to go through them all, but one I quite liked because of a fun trivia detail of it was Jack Donahue, who died in a shootout, they're always fucking shootouts, at least, in 1830.

And a little snippet in Wikipedia, which I feel should have been put in like extra large font. Smoking pipes were made in the shape of Donahue's head, including the bullet holes in his forehead, and were bought and smoked by the citizens of Sydney. Including the bullet holes in his forehead. Because you look like holes in plate pipes. Yeah, pretty good, right?

It was Banjo-Patterson, by the way. Banjo-Patterson, yeah. How the fuck did I forget that first name? But yeah, I thought that definitely like, well, Pratchett's talked before about the weird thing that people liked, public execution and stuff like that, and like the grimness surrounding it. But then I quite like, that made me think of the passage,

which was, yeah, no worries there, but if it gets it wrong, see, you either end up with a next six feet long, or you'll laugh about this. Your head flies off like a Persian cork. Oh, good. With Larry and Larry, we had to search the roof all arvo. Marvelous, all arvo, eh? Yeah, I know, that was... That's really interesting.

I won't keep going on about the Wish Ballads, because I'm not, as I said, going to sing any, and there's only so much I can talk about them without that getting boring. But I'll link some cool ones. And yeah, it's like a, it's a version of country music. And it's... Yeah, I'm assuming this sort of a cousin

to like the sea shanty as well. Yeah, I'm guessing so. A lot of it must have come from... I'm sure a lot of it was set to the same tunes as well, because it was brought over from the places these people were transported. Yeah. Yeah.

I didn't get time to look into how much, into much of the modern stuff, which is a shame, but yeah. Yeah, yeah, interesting. Yeah, interesting. I'll use genre music. Well, not new. Also, sorry, not really relevant, but while you were talking, I also came up with squareer than a wombat shit as a...

Oh, terrible. I love it. A person waking these. Sorry, you just said something very intelligent. I wanted to ruin it with some wombat shit before I try and sound intelligent. That's good. I think that's like, no, palate cleanse is the wrong word.

Returning the bar down. And now we'll try and raise it again. Yeah. So I wanted to talk about the dreaming. Mm-hmm. Specifically used in terms of dreaming, not dream time. Oh. Neither of them are completely correct.

It's a very complex spiritual concept, and this is much more analogy than translation. A lot of different Indigenous tribes have different words for this same concept, none of which I'm going to try and say, because I could not find any good examples of how to pronounce it. No, I'd rather not say it than mangle pronunciation. That are so little good. So few good resources I could find anywhere on any of this stuff.

No, it's very difficult to find resources not from white people. All of my mythology and folklore books don't even mention anything Aboriginal. Yeah. Well, I'll go into part of the reasons for why that is, but the actual concept of the dreaming. The reason you say dreaming rather than dream time is it's not just about creation.

It's not just about a past era. It's something that continually lives on. I want to be really clear now. I'm trying to talk about this as sensitively as possible because this is a very active and alive culture that our ancestors oppressed horribly for a very long time. Yeah, it's not like a mangling Norse mythology. That I do on a regular basis, but that's just my shit memory.

As far as the Aboriginal creation myths, there's lots of different individual stories. Again, there's so many different tribes, but a lot of things these stories have in common is this idea of ancestor beings who rose in this barren land and they lived and fought and loved and created the land's features and became part of the landscape in these sacred places.

I assume the reference to this massive rock, the old man and the boy sitting at the end, is reference to a luru, which is often referred to as red rock. And that's very sacred to Aboriginal people. They went climate, will they? So I guess if you're a deity, you're allowed. There's a massive push for not letting tourist fucking climate because... The bit with the old man and the boy actually started to interject.

I was wondering if that was also kind of a... Something of a creation myth. Yeah, and that he was kind of nodding to the fact that all of this was preserved so well through oral history. Feels like making sure the boy saw him do it. Yeah, I don't... I assume that must be kind of a reference to it. But yeah, in these creation stories,

these eight ancestor beings become part of the landscape. And the spirits pass to descendants, and that's why there's a lot of important totems within different indigenous groups. The oral tradition thing is really fascinating though. So these are these song lines, told and told and told. Tens of thousands of years old. This is some of the oldest witnessed history to exist

and be accurately passed down. Retellings of massive landscape changes, so animal extinctions, there are song lines that tell of sea level rises after the last Ice Age 7,000 years ago. Fuck. Yeah, it's incredible. I could have gone down a whole rabbit hole just looking at how long these oral traditions have lasted,

but yeah, literally tens of thousands of years. That's amazing that there's these geographic events that we can just use as a... As like a marker, yeah. That you can tell this story being told is at least 7,000 years old still being... Carbon dating a song. Yeah, effectively.

It's fascinating. But the dreaming is a spiritual concept, and I'm sorry if I'm completely getting this off, but the biggest difference between this and say like Christian mythical concepts is that the dreaming very much exists and is something all around. It's not like a separate idea of when creation happened

or a separate idea of heaven that you'd have in Christianity. And this is from an Aboriginal man named Midnight Davies. Excellent name. The dreaming is more than just an explanation of cultural norms and where we came from. The dreaming is a complete guide to life and living. It is an encyclopedia of the world. It's not just stories, but art, songs, dance.

It is written into the land itself. Through the dreaming, we're taught knowledge of plants and animals. To us, many of the flowering plants are treated as signs of animals available to hunt. Fish about to appear. Fruits about to ripen. The movement of the stars foretells the changing of the weather, the birth of animals, the time for ceremony and gatherings.

The dreaming completely surrounds us. We are shown proof of it every day. It's not some old book written thousands of years ago. It is the living world itself. The dreaming belongs to every Aboriginal person. It isn't the sacred property of a few priests, rabbis or imams. It is the property of everyone. Every ceremony, every right, every tradition,

every bit of knowledge is destined to be known to an individual sometime within their lifetime. The dreaming was not designed to be just practiced one day a week or to only be turned to in times of need. It is designed to be lived in every moment and to shield you from those times of need. It serves as a guide to day-to-day life, a guide to the spiritual side of life.

So I thought that was a very good summary. That's very good. Yeah, it's a collective knowledge and history and guide. Yeah, that's amazing. I still obviously do not grasp it at all, to be honest. And I assume I won't until I've read a lot about it and probably not even then. Exactly.

And again, it's very difficult to read about and find written sources about because things are still very much traditionally pastoral, which is again why I struggle to find pronunciation guys because obviously I'm looking at things online and everything's written down with very much a this is kind of a phonetic interpretation because there isn't a written, like a strict set of written

guidelines for this language. Yeah, there are a few Aboriginal academics with studies I could find online. I'm guessing there are some massive systemic racism issues that are not helping there. In fact, I'm not guessing. I know very well. There are those, yes, and also that I don't know

what to be searching for a lot of the time, which is another issue. But that gives us some perspective, especially on this last third of the book, can you think about going from the time of creation to now? Yeah, I would really like to hear an Aboriginal person's perspective on how sensitively it was dealt with in this book. I mean, it was obviously not even to scratch the surface of,

which possibly was the better way to do it, but hinted at. Yeah, I would be interested to read it, read some perspectives on it. The concept of everything being very interlinked, and you just sort of tell when something is wrong through it. And that is kind of in the plot a bit, but I'm not sure if that's. Yeah, I can't exactly sit there and say, well, Terry Pratchett did X amount of research because we don't know. I couldn't even find any bloody interviews with him talking about this bit.

No. I had a decent look. I had a decent look as well, and I found very little. It's not in his folklore of discworld, nothing about it there. No. Anyone who does a better job than me at finding this stuff, I would love to hear anything about his writing process on those bits. But yeah, if anyone has any perspective that we are severely lacking,

then do throw it at us. Please very much, please very much, not just out of our vague interest, but the correcting us is we're wrong as well. Yeah, do correct us if we're wrong. Speaking of, should we go on to some of the more problematic stuff in this book? Yeah. Wow, we really did put it off to the last minute, didn't we? Well, we avoided doing what we did for interesting times,

which was just starting with the Blanket Problematic sticker. Yes, and I didn't want to do that because, well, A, because I don't think it is a Blanket Problematic book, and B, because I don't love how we did that anyway, and in this case, especially, I did not want to come across dismissive at all, because the things that our country did to the Aboriginal people in Australia are really very, very upsetting. Like, it is something from, again, anything I say is unsaid, just notice that

the horrible history books that I used to have all of went into detail. At one point about that. For many of the atrocities. Yeah, in Australia specifically, and that, like, those couple of paragraphs is stuck with me so much that it's just something I've looked up every now and then, and every time I do it's worse and worse, and it's, God. Goddamn.

And these things are still being enacted now? I mean, you can say, well, the people doing it now aren't really British anymore, they're Australian. I was like, yes. No, it's not really quite yet. I'm not saying I am, again, it's the whole fucking, like, there is a whole thing there. Yeah, we're not trying to take personal responsibility.

Yes. But we're aware it's a big fucking thing. Yeah, I saw this sound up really nicely somewhere, and someone's, oh, do you know, fuck it, TikTok, it's a fucking TikTok. But it was somebody who knew what they were talking about. No, they're like, it's not that you did it, you didn't steal something, you were given some of the stuff that was stolen, though. Yeah, you benefited from it.

Yes, with, whether consciously or not. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Anyway, do you want to swing back around to that point we were making about geography versus history? Yes, please, tell me about that. Well, it's just, I used to kind of go, uh-huh, yeah, especially in the context of, like, no game and saying it,

talking about America, because... Yeah, it's like 100 years is a long time, 100 miles is a long time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And especially because, you know, American friends, they move over here and it's always very funny when they come to our town, and they're like, oh my God, the house I'm living in is like 200 years older than the town I grew up in.

Yeah, yeah. And then they're like, then we're like, no, I'm not driving 20 minutes. And they're like, oh, I drive six hours to work every day. And we're all horrified. We're all piled both ways. We're doing camp, our box in middle of the road. But it's kind of a shit point, because, you know, we just talked about the fact the history of Australia goes back 10,000 years

and is still actively, actively told. It does have history. It doesn't have our history, because we only turned up on it when we turned up on it to colonize it. Same with America. America has as much of a rich and incredible history, much more than our little island. But the towns are only 200 years old,

because we were turned up and colonized it 200 years ago. I don't literally mean 200, obviously. Yeah, yeah. Whenever it is. However, yeah. The point I've very clumsily made a couple of episodes ago apply slightly here, which is that we for so long refused to take any native histories as actual histories. We thought they were charming little folklore things.

They don't mean anything. And then very recently, they've been like, oh, no, fuck, we could have like saved ourselves a lot of vulnerability to, say, natural disasters or whatever, if we had not been such absolute patronizing facts. Oh, you know, because they're not traditionally shared. And by traditionally, I mean, you know, we think of history as things that were written down.

And these are story cultures. Well, I'd say our way. Why the sounds of the timeline there is the weird newfangled way. Yeah, no, songs. Obviously, I knew that oral histories was older than written anyway. But yeah, yeah. Both older than sliced bread. Betty White was.

Oh, Betty White. Sorry, that is like the last thing we should be talking about now. Anyway. But there's a lot of things that are sort of presenting characters as problematic rather than the book itself being problematic. Yeah. Dibbler, obviously, being the worst example. But I think that's written to be kind of a man on the street thing,

if he's sort of saying, oh, people should go back to where they came from. I think I can't remember if it was the annotated aperture or another annotation. I saw it might be referencing a specific right wing politician that was actually during the time. Yeah. With the whole, I'm more indigenous than the. Indigenous people. Indigenous people.

Yeah, I earned my indigenuity. I did. Yeah. Yeah, that weird circular logic of I'm starting from a place of hate and I'm going to try and justify it backwards. Yeah. It's very, like I must have said before, I was always vaguely appalled at the casual racism I hear in English pubs as well.

But in the pub I worked in and Sydney, it was far worse than any I've heard around here. And it's not great around here. No. Say, I'm sure. Pratchett heard a fair bit of as well amongst the many, many amazing people he met. Yeah. Yeah, we're definitely not coming from the point of view of all Australians are racist. Yeah, some of the stuff said is a bit more acceptable. Although actually, maybe it did generate a lot here recently.

Anyway, it really has. There's a point Sandoval made on our subreddit as well about two scenes, one in the first section and one in this section, the first of them being rinse wind meeting someone who's black and rinse and wasn't racist. Or he considered himself a racist because he was very racing away. The dirty, all skin colors the same. And then the same thing with Bursa here. Bursa had no room in his head for racism as a skin color.

Black came as quite a relief compared to some of the colors he'd seen. Very much. Look, see, this character is not racist. It's a weird thing Pratchett does and he gets better about it. He will introduce a person of color seen through the eyes of a white character and then immediately reassure us that that white character is not racist. Yes, I quite liked how he did it in an earlier book almost with Nani Og. Yeah, it's the first black person Nani Og I've ever spoken to and then that was that.

Yeah, no, I agree. It was a weird way to put it. It did jam me reading it this time around. I want, if I'm going to try and make a justification, it would be that he wanted to be clear that these were indigenous people and then trying to, like, mentioning that they were black. I don't have a room with pointing out that I'm not racist. Yeah, could you just not be pointing out that it's a person of color that the character is

talking to because people will fill in white characters in their head if it's not explicitly said all the time. I'm guilty of it. I know I am. To be fair, I'm guilty of it in, I will sometimes make that assumption if it's not explicitly pointed out, I'm not guilty of it. Like, the new Lord of the Rings series is going to destroy my life because they put black people in it.

It's not historically accurate to Middle Earth. Oh, fuck, no, I'm not getting into that. No, I'm not getting into that. But it does sit a little bit uncomfortably to sort of need to put that reassurance in every time. And I think some of it is a of its time thing. I know we're only talking about the 90s, but I think you're writing a bunch of... Wizards are kind of like the almost the equivalent of sort of Eaton school boys. Yes.

It might be worth pointing out they're not racist because you definitely would assume someone with that upbringing might be a little bit racist. Yeah, it's interesting because neither Rince Wind nor the Verse are acted in any way that could be considered racist. The Dean came right in and was a patronizing fuck. But I don't think that had anything to do with the painter's skin colour. That's what I mean. If I was going to try and point out that someone was not a racist, it probably would have been

Dean, if I need to say it. But yeah, no, it's odd. It read odd. I'm sure it was done with good intentions. I'm sure it was done with good intentions. Obviously it was done with good intentions. But yeah, it was just... Yeah.

Yeah, it reads odd now. Maybe it didn't 20 years ago. It reads odd a bit now. I think the problem is that you have this reassurance that these characters aren't privileged, but then you also have the weird attitudes about civilization, about savages. Rince Wind feeling like he's somewhere civilized as soon as he can hear voices and he realizes he's in the city. It's sort of a bit trying to have it both ways, if you know what I mean.

These characters really aren't racist, but they do think they're better than these people. I'm not being the pedantic. Well, the definition of the word thing is... Does civilian and city, are they connected? I assume they have... I know politician is, but I can't remember a thing. I assume they come from similar roots. But kind of rounding out the points I had anyway,

there's obviously been a lot of talk about Terry Prashett on Twitter recently, because someone else has been very shit, especially towards minorities. There's lots of people saying... If you don't have that anymore, come to Discworld. Terry Prashett was so much better. He was really trans-friendly. Thank you. Now it's cool. Come over to the Discworld.

It's so much better. Terry Prashett was great about trans people, about this, about that, and it's like... That's not what's so... I mean, it is one of the things that makes it better than Harry Potter, but it's been weird. It's been very deifying and people are talking about Prashett like he's perfect. And what's so great is that he wasn't perfect. There's like 40 books he learned.

He grew. The way he writes about people gets better. The books get better. And as I think we said a very long time ago, I've always felt very uncomfortable with people doing this cult of personality thing, especially around somebody who can't chime in. And it's one thing that Rihanna has spoken out and said, like, my dad would not have thought this, by the way,

setting the record straight, or yeah, I'm pretty sure dad would have supported this. Fine, that's his daughter. Absolutely. The fact that some people argue with her about that is insane. So creepy. But the rest of it that I've seen, and I've seen a lot of it, and I've retreated somewhere, honestly, because it's nice. I like the idea that if people are feeling sad about Harry Potter,

basically being taken away from them in some ways. That we can adopt them in the fandom. Here's another cool fantasy thing. And by the way, they actually have a lot of trans-friendly themes in this book, this book. Yeah. I also quite like the almost flippant thing of, oh, J.K. Rowling, what a twat.

Guess who's not a twat? Terry Franchi. And he is very much not a twat in comparison to J.K. Rowling, but he's not perfect, and that's what's good about the books, is reading the growth, seeing the growth. I also find it slightly uncomfortable. They're like, come into the Discworld fandom, because it's so much nicer.

It's like, ah. Sometimes. The younger, I will say the younger ones I've seen, yes. The younger ones I've seen, yes. Yeah. And a lot of the old ones, but the shit ones do tend to come out of the real work. Five or six Facebook group schisms based on transphobia, like it's not always the best.

No, I do appreciate the heavily moderated one for this reason. Yes. Anyway, sorry, it's off topic, but I think it's relevant. Yes, I agree. The joy of these books is not that the author perfectly handled everything, it's that he got better at handling everything. Yes. And for that, I do think this is mostly a very definitely handled book.

It just makes those bits that aren't definitely handled more jarring. I think so. That says, if we were reading in a random fantasy or sci-fi author from the 80s and 90s, it would, the entire podcast would be that if we were going to do it still. Yeah. So we're like, there's not enough purple pasted notes in the world. No, absolutely. And I've got loads of spare purple pasted notes.

But it's worth looking at the bits where you can criticize in this, because that's, otherwise, we wouldn't have much of a fucking podcast. And again, I looked for and could not find. And if anyone knows of any, please tell me of an Aboriginal analysis of this book. Like we've managed to do with a few other issues, the people involved have written about it. Again, I was not able to find that for this one. If anyone listening to us has an original perspective.

I would like to, I'm very interested. Yes. But I'm sure there's plenty of opinions we will just never be able to hear, which is. Yes. But if you'd like us to hear your opinion, do contact us in the usual manner. Albatross. Albatross. Before we get to how to contact us, though, do you have an obscure reference for Neil Francine?

Yes, it's a very scattered one, but I enjoyed it. It's about Australian slang. Mm-hmm. So just to start with a couple of the terms, he's a lot of them were just pure made up because they sounded Australian. Struth, I looked into. It's just a combination, a corruption of God's truth, which is nice. I like how many mild swear words are just blasphemy, like crinkle together.

Yep. Like zounds, God's wounds, but obviously that's not very Australian. Zounds, mate. They called, I think it was Darlene referred to the people like having a go at them as a bunch of hoonies. I've seen that referred to in a couple of contexts. The one I think it probably refers to is they're kind of like hooligans, especially in the terms of like, like those dangerous drivers and like doing donuts and speeding around, Gary Boy kind of thing.

Yeah. So I guess it could also just mean like yob. And then related, but more old fashioned Alaric in, because there was Alaric in Larry and Rinceven got called Alaric in in a friendly manner, is a boisterous or often badly behaved young man these days, but previously used to mean like allowed to or hood limit used to be a lot stronger. So I'm guessing that's the context we're in now, like criminal kind of thing. And then I went off track and started looking into why Australians, but oh well, in the end of everything. Because I think it mentioned the policeman outside having a smoke-o.

And I was like, oh yeah, I can smoke breaks for a smoke-o's. So there's a whole thing about diminutives in Australian English. So a lot of words end with O or IE or Y or E or any of it. Often it doesn't make it any shorter. So some of my favorite ones, smoke-o, obviously, bottle-o. Drive-thru bottle-o was one of the weirder phrases I heard on a regular basis, related as an eski, which is like a cold container. What do you call it? Icebox kind of thing.

And my favorite, I think, is Sanger for sandwich. And then I looked into you as like, why the fuck? Why is this so Australian? Why is this so Australian? Just putting O on everything like nickname. Why is this so Australian? Just putting O on everything like nicknames as well. Everyone's something like rinse-o in this case.

I was apparently more population with the older generation, more popular with the older generation, interestingly. So things like an S on the end are slightly more like mobs for mobile phone. That's a more modern one. But I found an article saying the purpose of diminutives in Australian English is just not very well understood on like a recordable level. There are some academics looking into it. This is like a 10-year-old article, and I couldn't find that study on a quick Google,

but I'm going to look deeper into it. But they were saying they were running experiments in which participants either use or avoid diminutives in conversation to see then how they were perceived. Oh, fuck. Sorry, Jack just came in and gave me a startle. Some people accuse our younger generations of spoiling our language with all these diminutives. Fuck, I'm trying to say anything. Nenagh says, Nenagh? Yeah, why not? But the earliest examples are from the 1800s.

It's a long tradition, not modern lateness. Despite that, Nenagh can't see herself adopting some of the latest lingo. I'm kind of bemused by the trends of saying mobs for mobiles or totes for totally, she says. I use some shortened words, but those just sound silly to me. Which I love, that every generation is going to be like, there's a generation of people saying smoco, who are like mobs. Yeah, so it's kind of, the general overview there is that it's kind of seen as a way of making language more casual. It's the matiness, friendliness idea in Australian culture.

There's also maybe a bit of class solidarity stuff going on there, avoiding tall poppy syndrome, which is like crab bucket syndrome related. You're awesome. Thank you. I love a bit of slang. I do. Right. Well, I think that's literally everything we could ever say ever on the last continent. It's the end of our episode. No. Epo. It's the end of our Epo. End of our Epo. Should be all right, mate.

We're going to take a week off. We will be back at the beginning of April. Very excited for talking about Carpe Jugulum. Yes. God, yeah. Let's get hyped. Get hyped. We've got a very good run of books coming up. However, in the meantime, while we're away, you can follow us on Instagram, at the true shall make you fret, on Twitter, at make you fret pod,

on Facebook, at the true shall make you fret. Join our subreddit community, r slash t t s m y f. Email us your thoughts, queries, castles, snacks, albatrosses, and wombats, the true shall make you fret pod at gmail.com. I don't want to warn that turning off a new box. That'll turn backwards, won't be able to get in. No, good point. If you want us to follow us financially,

go to patreon.com.com.com or the true shall make you fret. You can exchange your hard earned pennies for bonus nonsense. We've got a new rabbit hole episode with Francine coming out soon. We don't know what it's about. Quakaholl. Yeah. Quakaholl? Quakaholl.

Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah, definitely. New monthly recipes for the castles and snacks. So, if you want a recipe for something, text me, email me, you don't have my number. Let us know on Patreon. Please rate, review, etc. Wherever you get your podcasts, it helps other people find us. Sometimes we appear on the chart.

Sometimes we appear on a chart. Not often. Not often. But sometimes. I think it's correlated, I'm not sure. And in the meantime, dear listener, I forgot to have the end of the book out. Fantastic. In the meantime. Dear listener, it had, he thought, been well worth waiting for.