Rewilding for Biodiversity with Costa Georgiadis

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Do the bandy-legged handstand, you jangly Anthony's welcome to the Blind By podcast.

I'm currently in a hotel room in Perth, in Australia, in Borloo, as it is known in the indigenous language.

It's my last day in Australia.

I've got a flight.

I'm flying back to Ireland in about three hours.

So I'm scrambling to get this podcast out.

I had a day off in Melbourne, which I was going going to use.

I was going to use that day off to get this podcast recorded but I had it all planned and scheduled.

What I didn't account for was exhaustion.

With every single Australian city I was moving from city to city each day

and Australia is so fucking big that every time you move from city to city you're going between time zones.

So I was basically flying into cities, bringing all the luggage, going straight to venues, doing a show, getting off stage,

going straight back to the hotel and then getting up at like four in the morning to get on another flight.

So I did that, I did it for like four or five days solid on top of being jet lagged, running off the pure adrenaline and excitement of seeing audiences and being up on stage.

This is one of the reasons that drug abuse is so high in my industry because

the last few days would have been a lot more manageable if I was on speed or coke.

I can see why a lot of entertainers did that now.

Instead,

I wasn't on speed or coke.

I was just making sure that I was exercising and getting plenty of fluids and just battling through it and meditation and that's the right way to do it.

But I had my day off in Melbourne and my plan was I was going to record my podcast in Melbourne.

Gonna take the whole day to do it.

But fuck me.

When I got into Melbourne, I got to my hotel room and when my brain acknowledged you've got a day off you're not gigging tonight you have a day off as soon as my brain acknowledged the truth of that

then everything collapsed all all the adrenaline that i've been running on was like fuck this i slept through an entire day i slept for i think about 18 hours solid of actual sleep.

So please excuse me this week for not having a monologue podcast prepared for ye.

I just literally didn't have the time or the energy.

The tour that I'm doing is very intensive, and the only time I have is right now.

Right now, in part.

But you know my role: if I can put out a podcast, I will.

So, I was working away on something while I was on flights and shit like that, just editing things together for this week's podcast.

My time here in Australia has been wonderful,

but fuck me, incredibly overwhelming.

Like, I knew I had a sold-out tour,

but I didn't.

Like I don't...

I don't check the venues that I'm playing.

I didn't know it was this sold out.

Like I played in the Palais Theatre in fucking Melbourne.

It was 3,000 people.

I genuinely had no idea that there was this many podcast listeners in Australia and they're not Irish people either.

Like when I came to Australia in 2019 and did a live podcast tour,

I was playing like

500 seater venues and it was like 50-50 Irish and people who are living in Australia.

But fucking Melbourne, Narm as it's known in the indigenous language,

the Palais Theatre, I sold out the largest seated theatre in the southern hemisphere.

It was a wonderful night.

I wasn't expecting it at all.

And it might seem silly.

You're thinking, blind boy, how did you not know?

How did you not know that you were playing the venues of this size?

I don't want to know about that stuff.

That type of information gets in the way of creativity.

Like each week when I'm writing the podcast, let's just say I want to do a podcast about bananas.

I literally only want to think about bananas all week.

That's it.

I want to think about bananas and nothing else.

And only when I do that and focus on bananas

morning, noon and night, then I can get a hot take.

But if I start allowing information in such as where my theatre is or the size of the theatre, then I can't focus on bananas.

So I have a live agent and my live agent's job, they look after all that shit.

And all I want to know is at what time is the gig on and when do I need to be on stage.

So I thought I was coming over here playing like smaller theatres like I I would have played in 2019

and when I get out onto the stage of the Palais Theatre in Melbourne Narm and I saw all the people it dawned on me I'd been on that stage before

back in 2014 when I was in a comedy act

we played the Melbourne Comedy Festival and we were playing like tiny venue like I'm talking

30 people a night tiny venue on Bark Street in Melbourne.

And we got the opportunity to, for a three-minute slot at the Melbourne Comedy Festival Gala.

And this gala, which had all these big name comedians, we got a three-minute slot at this gala and it was on this stage.

And I remember going out, this is 2014, and I'd never performed in front of an audience that large before.

And it was terrifying.

And I swear to fuck,

if you'd have said to me in 2014 one day you're going to be back on this stage except you'll be headlining it and it'll be sold out I I can't even say in my wildest dreams because I wouldn't have even thought like that that that type of thinking would be so irrational and unrealistic that I wouldn't entertain it so I'm very overwhelmed I'm incredibly overwhelmed and kind of in shock a little bit to be honest you have to realize too

i don't wear a plastic bag i only wear a plastic bag on my head on fucking stage most of my life there's no plastic bag i'm just a regular person i don't experience the i don't experience being blind by in my real life at all so suddenly coming to a country on the other side of the fucking world

and i'm setting out massive theaters and like the the biggest seated theaters in in every city it's a lot to take on it's it's i didn't know that my podcast was being listened listened to like that in australia i thought it was mostly the irish people that were down here i didn't know it was at the the level that it's at so i just want to say thank you thank you to all the listeners in australia

it's just word of mouth that's the only way i can describe it because i it's not like a fucking advertise down here it's word of mouth one person likes the podcast and then they tell a friend and then they tell another friend and all of a sudden there's 3,000 people showing up in Melbourne.

And then for the little bit of time I did have off, for the few hours that I had off,

I went to the fucking the art gallery in Melbourne.

I can't remember the name of it.

It's the big one on the way to St.

Kilda.

One of the best art galleries that I've ever been to in my life.

And

I only had an hour to get in there.

I got in there at four o'clock.

I only had one hour inside there.

And I went to the second floor, which is where the European art is,

and it has an entire floor of just modernist paintings.

I'm talking

George Surratt,

Cézanne, Picasso, Dali, Mane, Mane,

just

like we don't have that, those type of collections in Ireland.

So to be in the presence of

unbelievable paintings by greats to be in their physical presence is it's a spiritual experience for me because I'm looking at these paintings all my life in books and studying them and here I am inches away from a Monet painting and I was staring at a at a Cézanne painting Cézanne would be an early expressionist painter French fella and as I was staring at it whatever way I was staring

I went to art college for years and my master's is in art and I used to teach painting so when I look at a painting I'm interested in the language of the paint I look at it up close I look at different areas so to the observer I'm the person who's looking at the paintings in a different way like you ever see someone holding a glass of wine and they're holding the glass of wine correctly and it's not in a performative way it's They've done a wine course probably.

That but looking at paintings.

This lovely lady came up to me and she said to me, You look like you know about these paintings.

Whatever way I was staring at the painting, she just figured that fella knows a thing or two about these paintings.

And she says to me, Can you tell me about these paintings?

Because we were on the European art floor.

And she was...

she was a lady from Korea.

She lived in Korea.

Her name was Isu

and she had fantastic English, the type of the type of English that would suggest she probably lived in America for 10 years and worked in the service industry.

Because you know, you can tell when someone has English as a second language, you can tell when they've worked in the service industry in an English-speaking country because their ear is fantastic.

Because

she was able to listen,

a man from fucking Limerick

describing the paintings of Cézanne and George Surratt,

saying French words in a Limerick accent, and she was locked on.

So this lovely lady from Korea, Eisu,

I took her on a tour of all the 20th century European paintings

in that gallery in Melbourne.

And I know you might be thinking, you know, because of my autism I'm not crazy about small talk.

It's not small talk when I'm talking about something I care about.

That's not small talk.

I can talk about fucking 20th century modernist painting all day long.

And when I do that, I'm not nervous I don't have a problem making eye contact all of the the difficulties the communication difficulties that I experience as an autistic person which can come across as shyness they're fucking gone out the window as long as I'm speaking about something that I'm passionate about so you know you listen to my podcast but anyway as I got talking to this woman Turns out that she'd actually studied English literature.

She had studied English literature in America, which was wonderful synchronicity because there was a painting there by Paul Cézanne,

one of the early expressionist painters, and Ernest Hemingway was one of the most important modernist writers of the 20th century.

When Hemingway was in Paris and he was a journalist,

Hemingway went to a Paul Cézanne exhibition and he saw with Cézanne's paintings how

Cézanne wouldn't just like paint a landscape he'd break it up a little into squares like almost pre-abstraction

he would he would break up the landscape into its constituent parts and then the observer has to kind of put it together with their eye and this then inspired Hemingway to completely change how he wrote so after seeing the the paintings of Cézanne Hemingway started to write

doing a thing he called the iceberg theory, where

he would write stories made up of little snapshots and details.

And then it was up to the reader to piece them together and form an emotional connection for the emotions to bubble up through those details, inspired by Cézanne.

So your one Issu was absolutely thrilled with this.

She loved that fact.

And after I'd left, I was fucking sickened.

I was sickened that I didn't bring a recorder with me.

Because that would have been a brilliant podcast.

I'd have asked her permission, obviously.

But

bringing a lady who just asked me out of nowhere around the gallery of 20th century art and speaking about the paintings, that's exactly the type of spontaneity that I'd love to put out as a podcast.

And if you're a long-time listener, you know I've been planning for fucking years to do a gallery podcast.

To walk around the gallery and just whisper into a microphone and describe the paintings that I see.

So I was disappointed by missing that opportunity.

And then I went up.

There's a giant shopping centre in Melbourne, in Narm, a huge shopping centre.

And I've been there about four times.

And I go there specifically to feel overwhelmed.

What I mean by that is

I was once somebody with social anxiety.

And this particular shopping centre, where the fuck is it?

It's quite close to Chinatown.

You'd know it if you live in Melbourne.

This particular shopping centre is so huge and so massive massive and so busy

that

it's like the final boss of social anxiety.

So I loved, I took the opportunity to go there and drown myself in people.

To be so far outside of my comfort zone and to sit with it and to notice,

Jesus Christ, there was once a time where doing this would you'd get a full-on panic attack and now

I can sit in the here and now in this huge overwhelming shopping centre.

Cause we don't have anything like that in Ireland, not that extreme.

And then I got to fucking Sydney.

Waran as it's called in the indigenous language.

I got to Sydney and I'd fuck all time in Sydney.

Sydney was off the plane, gig, off stage, hotel, flight at 8 in the morning.

But as you know, I really wanted to go to the Sydney Botanical Gardens for a fucking run.

Like I'd been waiting for that run for five years.

So so nothing was getting in the way no fucking way So I got up at 6 a.m.

To go and have my run in the Sydney Botanical Gardens however

I'd washed I'd washed my running shorts the night before so anytime I get into a hotel Especially if it's in a warm country and there's a window that can be opened I take advantage of that drying.

I take advantage of the drying and I hang underpants and socks out the window.

Fuck the hotel.

I don't care.

If there's good drying, I'm taking advantage of it.

It's an Irish thing.

It's just what you do.

And the drying in Sydney was fantastic.

So I washed my running shorts in the sink the night before and I hung them out the window of the hotel.

But then, when it got to six in the morning, when I'm like, I'm gonna go run in the Sydney Botanical Gardens, my shorts, my shorts were wet, I'd gotten too cocky, they didn't dry over the night time,

the temperature had dropped and it was too cold to wear wet fucking running shorts in the Botanical Gardens at 6am.

So I was left with a dilemma.

Do I not run in the Sydney Botanical Gardens, this place that I've been waiting, the most beautiful place on earth that I've been waiting to see for five fucking years?

Am I going to let wet, wet running shorts get in the way?

No, I'm not.

So I got up at 6am and I ran through the Sydney Botanical Gardens in my underpants.

And people stared.

There was people up.

This is in the banking district.

So you've got all these stockbrokers and bankers clearly staring at a man who's running through the Sydney Botanical Gardens in his underpants.

Yeah, you have to realize too, this is in the context of Trump just announcing his tariffs.

Not a good time to be a fucking stockbroker.

So you've all these Sydney stockbrokers going to work

into face hell absolute hell 1920s economic depression hell and then there's me and my jocks

running on the road

so I hope they thought I was one of their colleagues who've just gone

mad tight white briefs very obvious bulge and

the translucency of human skin coming through.

Underpants, underpants.

They're not like some type of fancy fancy bicycle shorts.

That's a man running in his underpants.

Now, there's nothing indecent, there's nothing on show, there's nothing wrong with it.

It's just

humiliating.

It's a bit, it's, you could interpret that as humiliating if you wanted to.

Me, I'm like, no,

I'd feel much more humiliated if I let that get in the way of running through the Sydney Botanical Gardens as the sun's coming up.

I said, fuck that.

So,

also, I did it as an act of humility.

Here's the thing.

Coming to Australia and playing large venues and seeing, oh my God, all these people are showing up because they listen to my podcast.

That's very threatening to my self-esteem.

That's a lot of external praise.

You know, I speak about external praise a lot.

That's dangerous shit.

That's that.

outside external praise that

soothes, temporarily soothes the insecure child within me.

That's what Carl Rogers calls the ideal self.

So if I'm not careful, if I allow

that to pat myself on the head with that, I might turn into a prick.

I might start believing my old bullshit.

I might become cocky.

So a wonderful remedy to that is

to run through the Sydney Botanical Gardens in my fucking underpants.

The exact opposite.

The opposite of coming to Australia and setting out a venue.

The opposite to that is

the very safe act of public humiliation of running through the Sydney Botanical Gardens in my underpants.

So I did it to humble myself.

I did that to humble myself.

And I took note of judgmental looks.

Judgmental looks that people were giving me.

Fucking one fell in his suit.

There in his suit walking off to his banking job.

He puts his coffee up to his lips and does the double take.

Is that man in his underpants?

Yeah, yeah, there's a lizard over there.

I'm here for the lizards and the eels.

There's a pool.

There's a fucking pool in the Sydney Botanical Gardens.

And there's eels inside in it.

And when you go up to

this pool or a pond, the eels will come up.

They come up to you.

I don't know enough about these eels.

Someone informed me about them.

I need to do more research.

I went looking for the eels.

They didn't come up.

But it didn't matter.

The fucking sun came up.

I had the most beautiful, beautiful, humbling morning in Sydney.

In my underpants at six in the morning, running through those gardens, I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

If you're hearing background noise there, there's some maintenance work being done in my hotel.

What do you want me to do about it?

I've got a fucking hour to get this bit done.

What I have done this week is I've prepared and edited a live podcast for you.

One of my guests here when I was in Australia, when I was in Sydney, I spoke to some fantastic people while I was here when I was down in New Zealand too my guest in Sydney was a wonderful fellow by the name of Costa Georgiadis

He's a bit of a national treasure here in Australia He's a television gardener.

He does gardening on television, but he's more than that.

He's

off his rocker very very eccentric in the most wonderful way possible and he's deeply deeply passionate and knowledgeable about rewilding, preserving biodiversity and

promoting hope and enthusiasm in people and action when it comes to the climate and biodiversity.

So that's the chat I'm going to share with you this week.

Costa's a lovely fella.

We immediately hit it off.

We have the exact same type of brains.

and we great crack on stage.

He's an author, he's a landscape architect, he's an environmental educator, and he's a fascinating person.

Here's my chat with Costa Georgiadis that I had the other day in Sydney.

What's the crack, man?

Hold on, can you pull that mic in a bit?

Yeah, there we go.

Just need to.

Is that the right?

I hope they didn't give you one of them flaccid Sydney mics.

They gave me one of them in Melbourne.

I go, oh.

Yeah, I got a flaccid, flaccid.

No, Brisbane gave me a flaccid mic.

Yeah,

I didn't intend for the first 30 minutes to just be about the male body.

Because halfway through it I was thinking, I'm fucking inviting this poor cunt out here now.

We don't have to talk about that stuff.

And then as well,

I'd only found out that you do children's television backstage.

I thought it was adult gardening, you know.

Well, you do do adult gardening as well, but I didn't know about the children

Yeah, yeah,

I was thinking about how I may edit some of those aspects of the conversation.

But that's all good.

I can walk those lines.

I kind of walk those lines every day, so it's one of those things.

So I love,

so I'm a fan of fucking

rewilding.

I am.

I just say, why do you think I'm just putting this out of my hole?

Because,

no,

I go at rewilding back in Ireland.

So I care about the climate deeply, as everybody should, you know?

And

the reason I promote rewilding on an individual,

oh no, there's a bit of an echo there.

Can you just keep?

I don't know, is it my mic or Costa's mic?

If you could bring it down slightly, just the monitor.

Okay, sorry, just had a Diana Ross moment there.

When it comes to climate action, right, sometimes I'm a little bit cautious of anything that pushes things on the individual.

Because as we know, individual action for climate change is fantastic, but unless everybody, including the gigantic corporations, are not taking responsibility, then it's quite difficult.

But I think individual action on climate change is wonderful for our mental health, our well-being, and for climate anxiety, which a lot of people experience.

And in Ireland,

we're colonized.

In Ireland, we're a colonised country, and we were colonized by Britain for 800 years.

And

I can't blame it all on them, right?

But there is, because we were colonized, there is a huge relationship between biodiversity collapse in Ireland and colonization.

And you can see it simply in the names of our counties.

Like, we have an oral culture that goes back thousands of years.

So, we've got counties in Ireland with names like Mayo, so County Mayo.

But

do you know what Mayo means?

It means plain of yew trees.

There's no fucking yew trees in Mayo anymore.

Why is it called that?

Because the Brits cut them down.

Derry is another county.

Derry means oak wood.

So, Ireland at one point used to be a rainforest, but the trees are gone because through the process of canonisation, a a fellow called Oliver Cranwell, in particular, who personally killed all the wolves.

I'm serious.

I try and get people interested in rewilding from a decolonial perspective.

I say to people, what I refer to it is as, I call it Chuck Eggar Lawn.

Because

in Ireland we have a phrase called Chuck Eggar Law, which means our day will come.

So I flip it and say Chuck Agar Lawn

to make it green.

And what I promote is a type of

friendly guerrilla terrorism.

And by which I mean by that, is

another problem we have in Ireland is a housing crisis and a lot of dereliction.

So, what I get people to do

is get native wildflower, make sure it's native, make your little seed bombs, yeah, but throw them specifically into vacant property.

Because I consider vacancy to be legalized vandalism by the rich.

Because it is like,

and if you're walking around your city and you see buildings that are vacant, that should be housing, well, there's tents there and you're really angry and you're pissed off about this and you feel you can't do anything.

One small act that you can do, which isn't illegal, and I do it, I fucking throw a seed bomb.

I throw a seed bomb into that property that's falling apart and I let that grow.

I'm not breaking breaking any laws, and no one gives enough of a shit to go and take the seeds away when they grow.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, and it's just a small little act.

And also, what I encourage people to do is make your own seed bombs.

Like, I got a couple of pubs in my home city to have like a donation box where people come in with their own seed bombs.

And a seed bomb, by the way, if you don't know, is

you mix a bit of compost with a bit of clay and then native wildflower.

It has to be native, very important.

You leave it dry, you throw it, and it grows into wildflower.

And the beauty of wildflower is you get insects, pollinators, bees, the whole shebang.

Is that the type of crack that you're into?

Oh, that's a great setup.

Yes,

Very much so.

But

I really love what you said about action.

And

like, we're in a period of time where overwhelm can actually lead to paralysis and then paralysis leads to inaction.

Inaction then starts to develop into uncertainty and uncertainty grows into anxiety, which is very different to nerves.

I was pacing around out the back there

with nerves.

Why?

Because

I care about something.

And I was talking to a whole group of youth climate leaders down in Hobart last weekend.

And that's...

And

this is the level where we can shift exactly what you're talking about, that difference between anxiety and nerves and being able to turn anxiety into action.

And when you start to sleeve that into the idea of plants and into the idea of native plants and then into the idea that you are talking about colonization, then

what this can actually become is

the most powerful form

of reconciliation,

but you change one letter in that and you call it reconciliation.

And the plants, they are

the vehicle.

And the more we get to know our native plants, the more we understand that they've been here and they've

built a life on and eked a life out of very difficult terrain,

evolved incredible processes of pollination, of nutrient uptake, of dealing with heat, dealing with cold, dealing with wind, dealing with all the elements.

The more you go into it, the more you know you don't know, but then the more you don't know, the more that urges you, the more

awe there is.

And I think when we can engender awe

into action, then that dissolves anxiety.

It empowers

activity.

And when it empowers activity, it brings people together and it will show that the collective will clearly have the power as it combines to turn the status quo.

I love the sound of that, Casta.

I do.

On the subject of

so canonization and rewilding, right?

So in Ireland,

like I'm only learning about here and the things that were done here with plants, which is fucking nuts.

In Ireland, what we had was

Victorians and their, so so we we had what we called the big house so the big colonial house so

the british would own the land and they would build a giant house and on this giant house a huge landscape and that yeah like even near where i live i can go to places and they were designed by a fellow called capability brown you're familiar with so

i mean it's beautiful to look at you can go to the The country houses that we didn't burn down, the ones that are left, you can stand at the door of some of these houses and there's a vantage point that you can look at and it's like a painting.

It's like a John Constable painting.

So they designed the whole landscape.

But the thing is, is that it's an ideology that you tend to find around the Enlightenment where

we are human beings, are fucking amazing, and God put us here to control the land.

And

we own all this shit.

And

nature is is messy and stupid.

And we're intelligent, and we're going to fix it to make it look beautiful.

And that happened to a lot of Ireland.

And also from that, that's the very, very rich people.

Then you get the emerging middle class with their little lawns.

And anything wild is ugly and bad.

So you have this sense that everything needs to be perfect.

And that's Ireland's thing.

And then I was learning.

I just found the name out today, but I want you to explain this to me because it's very fucked up.

Tell me about the acclimatization societies in Australia.

Well,

I think

from my understanding,

you've basically got a situation where people came from the northern hemisphere and they came into the southern hemisphere.

Everything was opposite.

The seasons didn't make sense, so they had to work it out.

And the best way to work it out was to try and make it like it was on a land that bore no relationship on

an incredible continent that had evolved the most intimately intricate plant communities and ecologies and yet we came out here and said we want it like what we know in Europe.

And are we talking about wheat?

things like what what destructive crops and animals yeah well look you know we could talk about the invasive species and the impact that invasive species have had.

Like, I mean, plants were brought out here to try and bring the so-called colour and forms of

the mother country and the mother continent.

And they bore no relationship to here, but they bought that idea of,

you know, you were talking going back a bit before, like 17th century.

I mean, you know, you look at those big French and Italian Renaissance gardens.

They were basically saying to nature,

we're going build it like this.

There's the view, we control it, we're in charge, this is it.

So then you went into that capability brown period where it was kind of like, well, we'll emulate a bit of nature and we'll kind of make it look nice and green and some trees and compositions like a dream.

Like an art, yeah,

yeah, that's beautifully put.

You know, it's like an art piece,

but everything had to, again, fit the you know,

anal retentive sphincter peak like that you know it was like that's how it is yeah we'll put these animals on so translate that people came out here they thought well we'll clear this and we'll sow and we'll do this the soils bore no relationship to the soils over there the landscape the rainfall the the the climatic regimes and so suddenly

the entire ecological balance started to change.

Species were bought out here that ran rampant because there were no controls.

But then other animals and systems were bought out here.

Foxes were bought out here.

Our incredible wildlife, our marsupials, the more you look into our marsupials, the more you realize we live in the most

incredible wildlife

fantasy land.

Yet we bought animals here that were predators and our animals

had no preparation for that.

They didn't walk around going, oh, there could be something come to get me.

So foxes just ran amok.

Wild cats have run amok.

And we have this problem extending.

We then tried to control agriculture.

There were insects.

They bought out, I mean, you know, they bought a cane toad over here to control an insect.

And that's now much.

It's terrifying to me as an Irish person.

I was hopping around.

They're like a nightmare about testicles.

Gee, Gee, man, I can't handle those.

Where did they come from?

Well, they were bought out here as a solution to

a problem.

What they were supposed to eat?

Yeah, they were supposed to eat something that was up there, which they couldn't get to, which was kind of

a minor fault.

But now they're marching across the country.

Do you have them here?

What's the place that has them the worst?

Well, north.

like Queensland.

These names are the ones that, because I saw a documentary about them from the 1970s and it was so insane I thought it was science fiction.

Yeah.

Where literally like a person opens their back garden and it's thousands of these Caden clothes.

Yeah.

And they're like that size.

And I think

there's so many of them.

They make them into wallets and sell them in airports, don't they?

I've seen that, yeah?

A toad wallace.

Just couldn't even explain that to someone in Ireland.

They'd just go go to the police immediately.

It's too strange.

Yeah, look, that's just one of many.

That's one of many from a plant point of view.

I mean, yesterday I was up

in Brisbane and, you know, there was water lettuce and water hyacinth because it was raining a lot.

There's water lettuce and water hyacinth

washing down this creek line.

Now, that's all stuff that was bought in as some aquarium, you know, a nice aquarium plant.

People tip the aquarium out over the back fence.

It gets into our waterways.

You know, Kakadu's covered with water hyacinth and you know our waterways are covered with with things like that so what's my point we you know you only need to go out like i was in broken hill the other day does anyone know the weedy gardener anyway i went i went out on this amazing um

overland odyssey with him and like broken hill

we we drove 20 minutes out of broken hill i reckon within one kilometer i would have seen a thousand goats and they're just running ram shit and it is wild goats.

Wild goats, wild goats, just all over the place.

So they're supposed to eat young shoots of everything, don't they?

Totally.

And then if you go out into the center where we tried to turn the center into grazing country, so what did they do?

The aerial sprayed seeds,

buffalgrass seed, to try and green the landscape.

But it is the ultimate...

boa constrictor hold because this grass, it smothers the existing native plant species.

So that ruins pollination, decimates insect populations, which then affects the birds.

That grass burns hot rather than cool that the native grasses do because it's much thicker.

So when there is a fire through lightning strikes or any other reason, the fires burn hot, it burns down the elder trees and it is creating all sorts of problems.

So, you know, these are the realities that are out there.

And, you know, on this side of the Great Divide, that we call it the sandstone curtain, the majority of people don't understand that these things are going on.

Wild pigs, you know, wild goats, buffalgrass, you know, toads, like there's, it just,

it goes on and on.

And

there are things that we can do.

So I'm never one to, I think

we need to know.

these things, particularly as city dwellers and east coast dwellers, because the majority of the population here lives, you know, literally on the strip along the coast.

But these things are going on and,

you know, there's opportunity.

There's opportunity in every problem.

And when we see it like that,

we can

come together.

We can utilize groups and organizations, but we owe it.

We owe it to the next generation because our landscapes, our ecologies, our plants are the most incredible in the world and that's what motivates me.

And

something I'd love to know about

because again it's it's it's with no context for this in Ireland.

Like wildfires are supposed to happen.

Can you tell me about like that to me sounds mad, but wildfires are a thing that are supposed to happen and they're part of nature.

And isn't there plants as well that rely upon fires?

Can you tell me something about that?

This little

badge

tag I've got here is from a gathering I went to in Cairns 18 months ago.

And for all the mob up there, there was...

500 First Nations rangers from all around the country.

And they shared their knowledge and their skill and all came together to talk about these this very thing and the Australian landscape has evolved around fire.

First nations communities have managed this country with an incredible skill.

And like anything, the more you know about it, the more you want to know about it.

And for anyone wanting to to put your toe in the water you need to read Victor Stephenson's book called fire country he's probably the preeminent and and he won't exactly like this explanation but I'll explain it like that he's the preeminent fire

enabler in terms of bringing this knowledge back to communities, many of whom have lost it or in the process of rebuilding that knowledge.

He's an amazing human.

And

we went and did

some burns, some cool burns.

And what this requires is people on country.

This doesn't happen with policies and government interference saying, oh, you can't live out there.

You've got to, you know, we're not going to give you funding.

You know, all that political stuff aside.

Let's just look at the facts.

You need people on country to manage country.

And this is not about maintenance.

And there's a big difference here.

There's a difference between maintenance and care.

And the mob care for country.

They don't maintain it, right?

Maintenance is a lion item on the bottom of a Western thinking mind.

Care for country

is about passing on

this knowledge, where you're talking about a culture,

you know, that

sings its geography, that dances its stories, and it paints its culture.

So just let that sink in when you start to

try and position yourself in this context around fire and not take it from,

you know,

this is how we do it.

This is the fire authority, authority.

No,

and the word authority is not how you would even imply that fire management.

So it's incredible when you see a cool burn, and a cool burn is exactly that.

Well, yeah, well, a cool burn.

Let me explain.

A cool burn

happens because people know the time of year to burn, right?

So

it's not done between nine and five because that's when someone does it.

It's done because people know the country, they know the season, there's a certain amount of moisture, but things are dry.

It's generally done late in the afternoon and there needs to be wind.

Whenever we think in our terms of fire, we go, Oh, we don't want wind.

But you need wind because wind moves the fire and then it ebbs and then it stops and then it pushes that way.

And in the process of doing that, the fire leaves patches.

And so, I've been there, and Victor gave me a pandana sleeve and he lit it and said, Walk up there 20 meters and spark it up.

And I sparked it up, and then what happened?

I need to move.

I need to move.

What happened, right?

So you light it and then the wind came and pushed it up here for a little bit.

And it was just crackling, crackling in the undergrowth.

And as I watched, I saw little marsupials jumping out.

The birds were all around, so there wasn't the sound of sirens.

There wasn't jackets.

And Victor's walking around barefoot.

Kids were there with us.

If I pushed there, then the wind eased and then it pushed here and it left this whole area unburnt, right?

And then it came over here for a bit and then it pushed up and kept going here.

Oh, hello, I can see everyone now.

Shit, it's full far out.

I didn't want to tell you about that.

Oh, I thought it was just you and me doing a recording.

Recording dark because it freaks me out.

And while that's happening, where the tree is, if this is a tree, there's insects all climbing up the trees and the birds are like, oh, this is a little bit of a devastation.

And so the birds are having a good time.

The insects are safe.

The fire's blown through there.

I fell the ground.

You feel the ground here?

It's cool.

And literally, I saw frogs jumping over the land.

that had just had the fire just whisk through.

And all that we had to do was go along where there may have been some invasive species around the base of the trees and just give a bit of a rake and just pull it away so that they wouldn't ignite the tree.

Now, this is a fire practice that has been

used

for thousands of years.

But it can't just be like, oh, okay, that's what we're going to do.

We need to respect the leadership of those practices and enable those people to lead the way in this practice.

And

that will

manage manage

and care for the country the way it's always been cared for.

And until you've been there and seen a cool burn and we were up in Kakadu and we came one day and we saw it and it was just burning along, dribbling, just like a dribble.

And we came back the next day and we went to an area that had been burnt a week and a week before

and already green shoots.

were coming up.

And this is where you start to talk about these stories, right?

so so you imagine everyone has a totem that they look after so you may be looking after the kangaroo I'm looking after the grass but when I manage the fire like that I create the grass so you're not having a going you're not chasing you're not running around I've just got this nice freshly green shooting grass

You just come up and when you need a kangaroo, they're there for you.

You just go poop.

And like,

this is the ecology being played out with a depth of understanding that

it rattles my heart when I see this.

Are these people.

Are these people

breaking Australian law when they do that?

Like, are you saying, is there policy coming in going, that's wrong?

don't do it that way?

We have science

that's oh, that's a kraken question,

and and it like that's so on the pulse.

Like, that that's that's exactly it.

And so, imagine at this conference we had First Nations people wanting to manage their land,

but they have to go and say, Oh, well, first you need

you need uh, your certificate in

fire, um,

and then you need your certificate in in first aid and then you need your certificate in operating

in in the wild like operating in the wild what what is wild for the for the people on their country you know but but the thing

and that's why I wear this right you know

the reason I wear this is because it represents

this this particular example that

with humility and patience,

some of these groups have gone through that process and they're now caring for their country.

They have the certificates

imposed.

They have them, right?

But they're doing the wrong thing.

But they're doing now their thing

within.

They tick the boxes.

And

that's what this culture has, this culture has

remained

strong

when it's been eroded on all flanks for a long time.

And I see something like that and I say, that's it, starting to blossom out again.

And,

you know,

hearing some of

the rangers saying, we had to just do this because we're doing it for the junior rangers and we're doing it for the rangers to follow and for the generations.

and then once you get two groups like that then they share that with everyone and then these

these

um

these

modules of experience can start to spread over the country again and we're starting to see

but it's also important that

that these practices don't just get appropriated like everything else has been and we call oh now we call it a cultural burn no it's not a cultural burn and it's not for you or me to say it's a cultural burn.

And that's the difference.

That's where we have to shift our thinking because leadership requires release.

And we need to release that with a trust.

And I see that trust, and I see that capacity.

And that's not a capacity comment from my judgment.

That's they have it.

They just need to be allowed to

carry on.

Do you think

does anyone who's making policy or anyone who has power and decisions have that type of

respect for indigenous practices there?

Or are they just fucking idiots who think you're doing it wrong?

We have science.

We have different words for this.

There's

I think

I straddle both sides in terms of, because I want to know.

I don't want to just

be one track because then it's not helping.

That's why I want to be able to go to events like that, but then also be in

other events and other opportunities where you say, speak to this person and have a look at this.

And I'm seeing it happening on the south coast of New South Wales.

And it just needs one or two people.

And then someone like Victor and someone from other communities comes in and says, This is how we're doing it, this is what's going on, let's empower and train.

And it's coming in to

the zeitgeist of the status quo, and that's a good thing.

I think it, well, it needs to, and we've got to draw that kind of tender balance between being

zealot on one side or

kind of, oh, you know, just,

yeah, they're not going to change.

No,

we have to.

What's that?

No, I'm not on the fence, but

because

I think, because what I'm saying that I saw with that is I saw that change.

Like I literally saw the power come back.

to the people with the knowledge and the skill.

If we go right to the far side it will never change the status quo and the power base will remain the same so so this is a really interesting period and I think the work that Victor's doing the work that's happening and that I'm seeing in communities all around the country

there's a little bit of there's a little bit of patience

but we just need to be present but as well as support and really support it when we're speaking about

I'm assuming a lot of the policymakers as well would have a generational bigotry where they just simply do not value indigenous culture.

Well, I mean, that has to be present, lady, in a country that's based on colonization, like that's what you're going to have as a mainstream cultural.

And

it's also, I mean, organizations and

power and money and the way it's being done.

And

it requires some skill

to enable it again.

It's not about controlling it, it's about enabling it.

And this is what I'm seeing, you know, when I at an

at a thing like that, and then I see these ranges, you know, up in Nurcala, I see what they're doing up there.

Because we're not only talking about fire, we're talking about the waste.

Like you imagine Yurkala is right on the top of Australia.

We're talking beaches so remote that you can only get there in a four-wheel drive.

They have hundreds, I'm talking hundreds of tons of plastic and waste washing up on their beaches every like every month.

And like to get it out.

They've only got a four-wheel drive.

Like you can't get in there with trucks.

You can't.

So,

you know, when you talk about rewilding and when we talk about care,

we need to see it in the big lens, that every action we take

has a consequence.

And when we take responsibility for those actions and say, well, I'm not going to use this single use and tie it.

We need to tie it to our local actions.

but the bigger perspective.

And when you go to this beach and you're driving through these beautiful landscapes and I've been up there a lot and I was up there with a good 500

sea and land rangers and you turn up on this beach and there's just stuff but that's coming from the gyra from the Pacific it's coming from the north from from Indonesia and Papua New Guinea and then it's also getting caught in currents from the south so what's it all mean what it means is

we have to take these steps and

work at the the challenge through actions step by step.

We have to take little actions day by day and, you know, not having plastic, you know, you go, oh yeah, you know, I've heard that story before, but no, it matters, you know, we need to look at those choices and

avoid these things and equally take other steps.

So,

you know, I think rewilding.

empowering and doing things to support First Nations, getting involved with caring for the country and getting to know the groups, understanding that every decision we make has a consequence.

All of that stuff is part of this big picture.

But I don't get overwhelmed by it because we can tap lots at once and have an impact constantly.

I'm going to call an interval so you can have a pint and a piss.

and then we'll be back out in about 15 minutes.

God bless.

I hope that sound is alright for you.

We're gonna have a little uh a little interval now.

We're gonna have an ocarina pause.

I hope the sound of that live podcast is okay for ye.

Um bear in mind I did have to edit it on a shit laptop on an airplane, so it's not as perfect as if I'd have had to spend time with it, but it does the trick.

So let's have a little ocarina pause now.

I don't have my ocarina with me.

What I have is

a little strange clay instrument, a Maori clay instrument that was given to me in New Zealand or Aotearoa, as it is known in the Maori language.

So I've been given this mystery Maori instrument, and I'm going to play this, and then you're going to hear an advert for some bullshit.

I don't know what you're going to hear.

I think this is an instrument that you blow, I'm not quite sure, but I enjoy the sound that I get out of tapping it.

Hopsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

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Very dog-friendly Maori instrument there.

I haven't a clue what that's fucking called.

I'll upload a photograph of it.

Thank you to the person who gave it to me.

It's coming back home to Ireland.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

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This is all possible because this podcast is listener funded.

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Advertisers have to advertise on my terms.

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I want the only

I make sure that I put a podcast out each week and I make sure that every podcast that I put out, that I care about it, that I'm passionate about it, that

it's something I genuinely want to make.

And I don't think about

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I don't think about that stuff.

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Okay, upcoming gigs.

What have I got here in the old gigs?

I'm only going to mention gigs that

aren't sold out.

So, in the middle of May there in the 18th, did a little last-minute gig in Cavan, right?

There's there's fuck all tickets for that.

That's a tiny, tiny little gig that I'm doing.

I'm doing it because I want to go up and do this little lovely festival in Cavan, the Cavan Arts Festival.

So come along to that if you want, right?

The tickets might be gone, you might get lucky.

You never know.

My big summer tour, of course, is in London or sorry, in England and Scotland, right?

That's in June, right?

I'm in Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex, and Norwich.

Very nearly sold out that tour.

Come along to those gigs.

They're going to be wonderful crack.

I'm going to be speaking to local people, local historians, local lore keepers.

Don't miss those gigs.

They're going to be tremendous fun.

And then September 19th, September, I'm up in Derry, the Millennium Theatre.

And then I'm in Vicar Street in Dublin and on the 23rd of September.

Alright.

God bless.

I'm in a race against time here.

I'm ready to go to the airport very shortly now.

I'm in a mad race against time.

Let's get back to the chat with the wonderful Costa Georgiadis about biodiversity.

Hello, I hope you had a lovely pint and a piss.

And

something I would love to know about is

So, something that really changed my mind, not changed my mind, but something that deeply impacted me about rewilding was

when I first planted some wildflower seeds out in my back garden, just a tiny patch, and I didn't think,

I was just like, fuck it, I'll give it a go.

And I did it.

And the first year I saw the flowers, I was like, okay.

But then the second year, and we're just talking about a six-foot patch of wildflower, the second year, I saw insects that I had never seen in my life.

I saw grasshoppers that I, and I live in a city, grasshoppers that I didn't know existed.

And then finally, I saw a lizard.

Like, we only have one indigenous lizard in Ireland.

You never see them.

And I saw a lizard, all because of a six-foot patch of native wildflower.

And it was

amazing, right?

But it's Ireland.

It's very easy to say to people, a little lizard is going to appear in your garden.

A fucking Australia, man.

This is what I was only thinking about it earlier.

When you say rewild in Ireland, it means lovely things.

The worst thing that's going to happen is something's going to tickle you.

Seriously.

Nothing bites you in Ireland.

You might fall over something.

But, like, what do you do here?

What's it grow wild out your back garden, and then there's a fucking huntsman in your bollocks.

How do you navigate that?

Oh, huntsman is quite gentle.

But it is something to.

Yeah.

Like, like how do you navigate that?

Like, people are entitled to not want to die.

And look, all of these people have survived to at least over 20.

And the chances are, you know, they will survive to live long and healthy lives.

Most of the stories you hear are, you know, sensationalized.

Yes, there's funnel web spiders.

Yes, there's brown snakes.

Yes, there's all these,

you know, some more deadly than others.

but generally speaking they just want to live in their world and as long as we don't upset them they won't be that upset with us I've seen footage of you like just just jumping into the soil

like no see like I've seen

ai

but I've seen he was

really like getting involved in stuff

I mean surely with all of that extreme enthusiasm for the art,

you've got,

surely you've gone, I shouldn't have done that.

There's a big spider.

Just entertain the paddy here.

Tell me some good shit.

Because

I'd be having a pint.

I'd be sitting having a pint.

And all of a sudden, I'm like, uh-oh, I better not put my hand underneath this chair.

Or what we hear back in Ireland, the stories that we get back in Ireland, the big one, and it's probably bullshit, but a lot of Irish lads come here to work on building sites.

And yeah, and back home, lads who work on building sites, they don't wear gloves, they don't have to.

But then they come here

and they don't wear gloves and they pick up the cinder block and then they get bitten by a spider and if they don't go to hospital within a half an hour, they're dead.

This is what people speak about at home.

But they're still speaking about it, so they're not dead.

That's true.

Come on, surely you've

something's happened here when you've been in a garden.

Come on.

Yeah, yeah.

Look, no, she's happened, that's for sure.

Give me a good one.

Okay, I remember I was filming a friend's film.

He was doing a

cinematography film at UTS, University of Technology.

And I was a man who became a plant, funnily enough, and that was ahead of me being involved more publicly in this stuff.

And I had to roll around because I got fertilized.

And so I had to roll around on the ground in the dark in a garden, funnily enough here in Newtown.

And I was rolling around, rolling around.

And they got all this footage and it was all fine.

And then I remember I went home and I had a shower and I came out of the shower and I just had red welts like from my neck down to my toes

after I had the hot water on it.

And I looked in the the mirror and I went oh that's not good

but it didn't kill me and I lived to tell the story you don't even know what it was so I don't know what it was but that something was having a good old bite

and it must have got caught in the chest there so I mean that's pretty good like

It's just you outside of Australia, like we think that just everyone's getting bitten and killed every single day.

But if you're if you're diving into things as your job, and that's the worst story, you've got,

yeah, no, no, that, that, that, that's pretty much the worst story.

I mean, the other ones are more accidents that I've done, you know, damaging myself.

But, but that's look,

you know, back to what you're saying, that idea about building something, putting something in.

I built a pond at my local primary school the other day, or a couple of months ago, and we literally refurbished the one that was there.

And the kids came back out at recess and we just filled it.

And within 15 seconds of them all coming out, there was about 40 kids standing around the pond.

And

this was one of those moments I'll never forget because you can't plan it and it's just nature.

All the kids were there and they were looking and they're going, Wow, the pond's got water in it again.

They're all excited.

Three dragonflies came from

wherever.

They They just knew.

They had their GPS on and someone's gone, buddy, A,

the new pond, get down there.

And they did this, they did three laps of the pond, like circumnavigate it.

The three of them, there was a red one and two blue ones.

So

they were representing all the genres of dragonfly.

or at least a couple.

And seriously, if you could have heard, you know that primary school pitch of cheer where it's just coming from the depth of childhood.

Yeah.

And they were just going, ray,

rage.

And the dragonflies must have been going, wow, they're liking us.

And they did another couple of laps and then they went.

And

if I could reflect to you what I saw in their eyes at that point, and you go, that's why we do it.

You know, not only will nature respond, but the children, you know, the children have that memory, and now it's highly hope, it's pure hope because so much of climate news is utter hopelessness.

And it's, it's the thing as well, like I said, when I when I saw these insects showing up, it's like hope.

I have hope.

I did something tiny.

I didn't expect anything would happen.

Now there's insects I've never seen in my whole life because a six foot of fucking wildflower.

Yeah.

And you're saying the same thing.

Like like the dragonflies just knew they knew the pond was there and you know culturally he's when i was on my way here from the airport just before i got a text and one of the local preschools said oh we want to go up to the school because we want to build a pond in our preschool you know that's where you build it and they will come elsewhere and they will come from elsewhere to want the same thing so we're going to build another one at the local preschool But the thing, I got this in my pocket.

I've always got shit in my pockets,

but this

when I was

so I was

you have to, they're at a great distance here, so that's all they're seeing is a fucking man with a bag of drugs.

It is.

It's nature drugs.

It is.

It is.

It's drugs.

So,

okay, I'll explain.

I'll explain.

So I was at an event the other day.

Where was I?

I think.

No, I was down in Melbourne.

That's right.

For the flower and garden show.

You just missed it.

There was some

garden show.

Garden shows.

Oh, sorry.

Flower and garden shows.

Yeah, that's breaking barriers yeah um so anyway i was given this now there's a lime and this was that's not the best word to be used

there's a line is there no a lime a lime a lime okay

there's a lime it's not a lime

So there's a citrus fruit.

I'll be more specific.

And there's a whole lot of

parsley seeds, right?

And this was given to me by a little boy,

and

he wanted me to have this first lime.

Sorry, sorry, I'm doing my best.

He wanted, like, this.

Look, I'm laughing so much, I'm going to cry now because this is how much it means.

Like, he wanted me to have this

very first citrus,

but he also wanted me to have some of this parsley seed that he'd grown and saved the seed.

Now, you're talking about seed, like seed bank.

This is the most powerful bank we can get our children to invest in when it comes to understanding nature.

And so the fact that he was giving me some of this and it reminded me of when I had some parsley growing on my nature strip on the garden out on the street, which is all full of wild.

And you know, it's even made one of the tabloids

that

so wild.

And he's a hoax because travels a country telling how to people garden.

And his garden looks feral.

Odds.

Silly billies.

So I was very happy about that.

That was a grand compliment.

But anyway, it reminded me, I had some parsley and I'd just thrown the seed there and allowed it to grow up along this edge so that people coming home can just pick something and take it.

I then let it go to head like to dry and go to seed and then I thought yes and then those seeds will drop there and it just so what we're doing is we're going from annual to perennial

which is perpetual because you just and that's what your flowers are doing that's right

you know like gonna go somewhere else yeah that's right and they're gonna blow and and and and you know you'll see you'll see with your flowers and i saw this up at manly with the flannel flowers um when i looked at them and you can see where the wind was blowing at that time of the year because the drift goes that way and follows where the seeds were blown.

So anyway, I let it go to seed head.

And this is like this cycle of life that you're talking about.

And

it's also death.

And we don't do death.

Like we go, oh, well, it's dead.

Just cut it.

You know, this is, oh, close the sphincter.

Close the sphincter.

The garden's got to look like a room.

It's not a room.

It's outside its nature.

It has has to live like that.

And so the seeds have all dropped, but I just left it there.

I thought, I'm going to leave it there because it's the architecture of death and we need to celebrate it.

And so I left it there.

And then one day I came home and I pulled up and I thought, oh, go and empty the community compost bins.

I emptied them.

And then I saw what I thought was a plastic dog poo bag caught on the head of the Corian of the

and yeah, I know I hate plastic dog poo bags.

Yeah, it's fucking it's middle-class vernacular art.

Yeah, I call it.

And I was like, I don't want that.

Listen.

It doesn't work like that.

There's going to be a microphone at the end and we can give it to you.

But go on.

And so anyway,

I thought it was a piece of plastic and I went up and it was Austronomia, which is native bees.

It's like a cluster bee.

And it was a cluster of bees and the smaller ones are in the middle.

and then as they get bigger they they are on the outside so they're holding their temperature.

These are Australian native bees, right?

They're not introduced invasively.

I mean holding their temperature because they all gather around the little ones.

They're all clustered up.

And as they get bigger, they fly off because they're loner bees.

They're not a hive.

So I looked at that and I was like, oh, geez,

that's unreal.

And I was so pumped because I thought, I can't pay for that.

I can't be murdered.

You can't Download that and fucking

you can't own them, right?

And they'd come to my garden, but they'd only come to my garden because I'd allowed the architecture of death to play out its full life.

Sorry, play on words.

That was dead parsley, was it?

Yeah, yeah, they're dead parsley.

Wow.

And

here's the thing.

The next day I came back and I went there and they were gone.

And I really loved this thought because I absolutely hammered myself.

I said, oh, my bees, where have they gone?

And I said, you numpty, they're not yours.

Yes.

They never were yours.

So just flush that thought, right?

And I said, yeah, you were never mine.

Thank you for coming.

That's the first time I've ever seen them in my life.

It may well be the last time.

But anyway, I let go of that thought and I thought, what a joy.

I thought that's just fantastic.

So they were there and I walked here and then I walked up there and there they were hanging in the bottle brush tree on the street and I thought that's how we have to approach our

integration with nature we are nature like it's not ours it's us and and when we think like that

when we understand that we are nature we're not apart from it it's not this thing that that's that's over there that we go and visit it's all around us and your seed bombs or these

these seeds or that tree, like every opportunity we can get people to

put down that guard and understand that we're at home, nature's home, then

it just gives it meaning.

There's something I speak about an awful lot on my podcast, right?

Which is,

so I believe that

Mythology and folklore exist to keep the human animal in line with systems of biodiversity.

Now what I mean by that is nice.

And

my thing is fucking

Irish mythology, right?

So we in Ireland we have mythology that goes back thousands and thousands of years, oral and then eventually written down, okay?

But within Irish mythology, like in the sixth century,

we wrote down a book that's like that big called the bee judgments.

It's nothing but thousands of laws about bees and how they should be treated.

And we like

up until the 16th century in Ireland, it was illegal to kill a white butterfly because people believed that white butterflies contained the souls of dead children.

This was their belief.

But also, it's a good idea not to fuck with butterflies.

Regarding bees,

we have, you know, St.

Bridget's Day.

Before St.

Bridget's, there was the pagan goddess Bridget.

And in Irish mythology, so before Christianity,

we don't have heaven or hell.

What we have is the other world.

So it's much more like a parallel universe.

And

deities, we can float in and out of the parallel universe.

So the explanation for bees was the goddess Bridget,

she tends to these bees in the other world, in the other shimmer of reality.

And then, when a mist comes in the morning, the bees fly through the mist, and that's how they're able to magically impregnate the flowers and create fruit and create everything we see.

But when you genuinely believe that, you're not fucking with bees.

You're terrified of bees.

And you see all this.

It's not just fucking Irish mythology.

You see this in the mythology all over the world.

Like, I'm sure you're familiar with the

when they reintroduced the wolf to Yellowstone national park you you know that story obviously so this very famous story yellowstone was

right it's this huge huge national park the rivers were sick everything was dying and then they figured let's bring back the wolf let's see what happens if we bring back the apex predator and as soon as they brought back the wolf what had happened was

the deer that were hanging around the rivers, their hooves were fucking up the riverbeds.

The deer were eating all the shoots and it was causing the integrity of the riverbed to fall apart so then the river became poisoned as soon as you brought the wolf back the deer were scared again and they started to move and then the river became healthy and then fish became healthy so it was the whole ecosystem was restored because you brought back the apex predator and when i heard that

for the crack i decided I want to read about the mythology of the indigenous people to that area.

and when i did read the indigenous mythology in that area of those people i think it was the blackfoot people i think it was the blackfoot

their creator god is is a wolf their indigenous mythology is a wolf created the the world so they knew it all along scientists came and said let's bring back the wolf but the indigenous mythology knew that the wolf was the most important thing and

we are fucking animals human we are animals the same as everything else but we're animals with language we are animals with the capacity to share ideas and like i don't think any other animal can i can i can say the word apple and now everyone in this room we're all looking at an apple and thinking about it i don't think other animals can do that we can do that that's language that's culture

but mythology That keeps us terrified of nature.

That means that we don't fuck with it.

We work with the system.

But something went wrong.

I blame Christianity personally.

Well,

that whole business of the Garden of Eden, God created this thing and you're very special and you are not part of nature and this is yours to exploit.

Christianity is a bit unfair.

It's when Christianity intersected with capitalism.

It's when capitalism came about and said, this is how you do things.

That took us away from that fear and respect and seeing us, as you just said, there, we're fucking nature too.

And nature doesn't get like climate collapse, right?

That's just gonna fucking kill us.

Nature's gonna carry on, it'll be grand.

It'll talk about us the way it does the dinosaurs.

Yeah, exactly.

And

that's where, I mean, there's

such an opportunity to

see through

all of this and actually,

as you said, going back to that paganism,

that was all about what were the celebrations, the annual celebrations were all to do with animism around nature, you know,

the shorter stay, the longest stay, all of these things.

And when you start to go into First Nations stories, like these are, and I mean, I only know so many, but I want to learn more.

And the more time I spend

on country with communities, I mean, three weeks, two weeks ago, I was out in the central desert, which is northeast of Alice Springs, visiting communities.

And just to have that time and to be with elders and to see the stories that they're passing down.

For most of us here, our perception of what's going on out there is very limited and it comes through a very

small media hole that that uses its power to paint a picture.

And until you're out there and you're with them, and you know, we had the chance to go there and we actually planted a couple of trees in

the communities where we went.

We planted a fig tree and a mulberry and we had to prepare the holes.

You know, many people have come and gone and done things in community,

but to grow a tree is a very powerful thing, but it's got to be grown with the community.

So to get the community involved, we went to the women and the women elders who

then

actually gave the tree a skin name.

So when it has a skin name name.

What's a skin name?

So a skin name is like it then becomes...

So

if you are in a community for long enough, you'll get a skin name, which means you're part of the mob, you're part of the community.

So the tree gets a skin name.

And then that becomes that responsibility, that care.

And so one of the elders planted it with her granddaughter.

And I was talking to them about that idea that imagine when that fig tree bears fruit and you're sitting under the shade of that tree, but better still, when you've learnt and you've all taken cuttings and planted a fig tree or two in in every house in the community, all 40 houses.

And then the mulberry is the same and we,

you know, grow it in a way that it creates shade in the playground and create this significance.

But, you know, that's how,

that's how that deep connection to nature was

established across so many continuously connected generations.

It was that story and that story has burned bright and consistently be passed on.

So, you know, that little detail of making the connection and then now, you know, the students and the community are involved with that.

They have an inn, that's theirs.

And then each visit, we go, we'll do more with them.

We'll come up with new ideas, work out what else we're going to plant.

And, you know,

that's what we can do,

maybe not with a skin name, like that's not our culture, but

we can give that connection through the stories that we make with the trees, you know,

and,

you know,

for that young boy to

give me his citrus,

there's a story.

And it's

story.

I think I'd sum it up like this.

We've got the science that's in.

Like what we need, so the head is fine.

The science is in.

What we need is the heart and then the hands.

And when I think when

story connects the heart to the science and the action, and

that's what

that's what motivates me right back to what you said about that action with a seed ball or that action with growing a plant and sharing it with someone, or joining your local group, or going to your community garden, or

doing these things.

The local action with the heart-that's the story we need now more than ever, because people are overloaded with the head, the head's full.

We need the heart stuff to

draw people.

And story is heart, yeah,

because story is connection.

Yik.

One thing that concerns me too is

when I get asked all the time, like I speak about Irish mythology frequently, and when I get asked why, what's the point of these stories that are a thousand years old, I always say because they're about biodiversity.

And something that

I find a bit chilling a little bit is

like, put it this way, what date is today?

Is it like the 2nd of April, right?

2nd of April.

So in Irish myth, right now, the first 10 days of April, they're called the days of the brindled cow.

And what this means is,

so a brindled cow is, it's a cow that was like indigenous to Ireland.

It's just a weird little ox.

But anyway, this story is fucking thousands of years old.

And the days of the brindled cow are the first 10 days of April.

And what it means is

we have the winter goddess called the Kylock.

So she's the goddess of winter.

And then we have the summer goddess called Bridget.

She's the one with the bees that I mentioned, okay?

And in Irish myth, how winter transitions to summer is the winter goddess goes to the summer goddess and says, here you go, your turn now.

But you can never trust the first 10 days of April in Ireland.

Technically, you're like, it's spring, but in Ireland, you can't predict it.

The first 10 days of April, sometimes they're like winter.

So the story is: there's this cow, and this cow, she's real cocky.

And it's the first of April, and the cow goes out into the field, and she says, Ah, look at it, it's fucking, it's spring now, it's into summer.

Fuck winter.

Winter can go, fuck itself.

But then the goddess of winter hears this, the Kylock hears this, and she says, How dare you?

How dare you, cow?

I'm going to show you a lesson.

So the goddess of winter goes to the goddess of summer and says, can I have 10 days back for the crack?

Can you just, yeah, can I have the 10 days of April for winter just for some fun?

And then Bridget, the goddess of summer, says, why?

Because there's a cow down there being a fucking prick.

And I need to show this cow.

So Bridget, the goddess of summer, says, okay, here you go.

Here's the first 10 days of April, winter.

You can have them.

And then, on the first 10 days of April, there's a massive storm.

And this storm kills the cow.

Yeah, kills her dead because she was cocky.

But what we have, we have this story exists because Ireland before colonization, we didn't have towns.

People moved with cattle and people would do a thing called bullying, where you'd take your cattle from lower ground up into the mountains for

the grass was higher.

And

people had this story because if you wanted to move your cows up to the mountain, people were looking for the best spot, so some people would go really early, but then their cattle would die because the wind would come.

So, we have this story that goes, beware the first 10 to the 10 days of April, it can be harsh, even though it's summer.

But here's the thing: that story is thousands of years old.

We are living at a time where that's going to become meaningless because of climate change.

For the first time in thousands of years, that story

right now, where it's

April doesn't feel like April in Ireland anymore.

April is a little bit sweatier.

These stories that we have about specific

a story about the first 10 days of April, because you can rely upon the seasons so perfectly every year, that's now becoming irrelevant in my lifetime.

You know, and it's something older than the pyramids because climate change is happening right now, and that breaks my fucking heart.

Yeah, it's it's interesting what you talk about, the seasons, because, you know, for the whole time of

occupation here,

the seasons were just flipped and they weren't the seasons of this land.

First Nations people have, in different parts of the country, there's eight seasons, six seasons,

anywhere, sometimes even more, up to ten.

But that,

what has that come from?

That's come from an incredibly observant

knowledge, you know, like observing, well, when,

what's happening, you know, across this period.

It's not spring.

And, you know, in botanical terms,

there's been some work done

in the botanic gardens around, you know, Sprinter and Sprummer, you know, this period where it's kind of going into

Pacific?

Yeah, Australia-Pacific.

Yeah, Sprummer is sort of like a period between spring and summer.

And, you know, these

Spring was forced to have European seasons.

Yeah.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah,

they just reverted it.

I'm sure we went along with it, but you know what I mean?

Yeah.

So I suppose

what I'd take out of your comment there is that there's already these seasons that have existed for a long time.

And

when we start to, well, get to know them, get to understand that, then we can really start to see that change that you're experiencing in that one myth or fable about, you know, the first weeks

of April.

Because, yes, there is change and it is happening.

And, you know, if we can start to interpret that within the true seasons of country,

then, you know, it will give us a slightly better guide, even though there's still that element of, well, you know,

if you're up in Brisbane recently, you know,

they had a weather pattern come in, which

was pretty extreme.

And these are the things that are happening.

I mean,

they've had 480 mil on the Sunshine Coast in the last week.

Like, that's strange.

Well, that's a lot.

That's a lot in one week.

And, you know, and that's off the back of a few weeks before that.

So we can't just

cherry pick for, you know, a case.

We have to look at it across the board and say, look, look at these impacts.

And

the big challenge we face is.

You know, for too long, people have been looking at it and say, oh, look at it across the year.

It's the same.

No, it's all now condensed into one period.

So, you're getting certain climatic areas where they're getting all their rain in the space of two weeks, and then it's dry for the rest of the year.

That impacts pollination, that impacts flowering, that impacts,

you know, the moisture content in the soil for everything to do with, you know, not only nature and the ecology, but also food and food growing systems.

So, it's everyone's business to understand

climate and to understand where they live to observe and record and get to know what's going on so that you're not ebbing and flowing like a dunny door off what you're told

you really need to know what's going on where you are so that you can garner that information and and and I constantly talk to people about saying write have a have a log have a journal have a garden log if whether you've got a garden or not you know record what's doing

When did the temperature start to warm up?

Because the only way you get to.

Do you have a national database?

Like in Ireland, we have a website called biodiversity.ie.

So,

I don't know, if you see giant hogwheat,

you can go to this website and you go, I saw it here, here's my photograph.

Yeah, and everyone can go in and

brilliant resource.

Have you got something like that here?

Yeah, we've got iNaturalist,

we've got the Atlas of Living Australia,

and then we've got a whole lot of other citizen science projects which, you know,

they are such a wonderful way to build that bridge of connection.

We can't protect what we don't love and we can't love what we don't understand.

And so these citizen science projects are a brilliant opportunity.

So the backyard bird count, like the Aussie bird count, I think they call it the Aussie bird count now.

You know, people, people can, can, you know, on your phone app.

Yeah, yeah.

You know,

you can get on and be part of a really big community right around the country recording birds.

And then that data goes in so that now we've got year on year on year on, you know, it's getting to decades now where we can look at that data.

We've got frog ID.

You can just go with an app and you hear a frog when you're walking down, you know, Enmore Road.

You can just

hit the thing, record it, and it pins it and it sends it to the Australian Museum for an ID.

And it's also, I'm assuming, to protect Australia so you don't get any new mad frogs.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and see what our native frogs are doing.

You know, my backyard pond, which I

transformed the pool into a nature pond, it would be pumping out minimum 5,000.

native Perrons tree frogs into my local community every year.

And I'm not doing anything other than just

keeping the plants in there, keeping the well, nature's taking it over.

It operates itself now.

And I got people from streets and streets and streets away.

A friend of mine built a pond about five blocks away, and it was this nice designer pond.

And my, no, not my frogs, frogs from the community, see

frogs that are grown in a facility that I had a hand in,

they went up there and filled it.

And then the guy that, my friend who built it, he said, oh, he said,

the client's complaining about the frogs.

I said, complaining about the frogs?

I said, FOC,

free of charge, they came.

And yeah, so that's what I mean.

We can build this.

We can build this and be part of it.

And then other people are going to be recording these things.

So, be it the bird count, the frog count.

There's wild pollinator count.

You can go count the pollinators, and that to me is one of my favorite activities.

You mean bees and butterflies now are the flowers or the paranatars, the pollinators, yeah.

Okay, so you and basically, you know what you have to do there?

You get it, you're gonna have a chair where you can just stand there, and you go to a flower,

you watch it,

and you watch it for 20 minutes and then you record what you see.

What a beautiful act of mindfulness.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And then you hear.

So then, when you become,

it's so interesting.

One of the best things I learned last year was from a bird specialist.

I went on a bio blitz, which is where all these specialists come.

People that are specialists in marsupials, people specialists in birds, people specialists in everything and they just assess a land area over a weekend and you can go along and walk with them and i went with this birder and they said you know the most important thing about birding is not seeing them hearing them so you go birding you listen because half of the birds you're gonna record you're gonna hear but if you see them you're lucky but if you hear them and you know that's that's what's so beautiful about what I was saying before about you can't love it unless you get to know it.

And then when you get to know it, you can protect it because, you know, we have the most amazing like orchids, wild flowers, wild orchids.

But if you go walking in the Blue Mountains or anywhere, you need to understand what the conditions are.

And so, oh, it's going to be south facing.

And then there might be a log with a little bit of water.

And sure enough, you have a little look and boom, there's a greenhood orchid.

And they're this big.

But you know what you learn about doing something like that?

And this is what I love, pushing ourselves, disturbing ourselves about how we connect with nature and stepping out of that idea of, oh, like I'm out in nature, so I'm just looking at the view.

When you're looking for orchids,

you're walking through the bush like this.

I don't know that anyone's there.

I can't see them.

And then you see it and it's like, wow.

And this is only there for a little while.

They have incredible mechanisms that trap the pollinator inside.

The pollinator is going, ah, shit, I can't get out.

Ah, I just run around like, and then it pollinates and then it comes out.

You know, like these mechanisms that trigger release and out they come.

Like

West Australian plants, they've developed in such hot climate that they go, well, why would you put a flower up to the sun?

So they hang the flowers down.

Like these things.

Yeah, we could really fuck with you if we took you for a solid walk

in the bushland.

But yeah, these are what I love about all of that, everything you're describing too,

is how you manage your mental health as a human being.

Like

there's nothing that you have not described that is not also a mindfulness exercise.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Because we're nature.

Yeah.

we just happen to be have these mad brains you know what i mean

there's this wonderful project that's going around to to landscapes and schools and bushland and gardens where um

basically you do different things at different stations so you get to one and you stop you have to listen get to the next one

you have to look and i love that one because it's all about fractals.

And fractals are those repetitive patterns of nature.

You know, the veins in a leaf are repeated by the leaf on the stem, and then the stems repeated on the

all of that.

Yeah, and you know, the science on that says that

when you're around fractals, that's the same as listening to

symphony music.

Off

so because music is symmetrical vibrations of air.

Wow.

That's it.

So imagine that.

When we talk about nature being home, like nature's set us up in quadraphonic sound.

Yeah.

Like sort of just observe your sound and feel your sound by having that around you.

So whether you do a bathroom grenovation and get some plants in your bathroom or your bedroom, or whether it's vertical garden on your balcony and using all that vertical space.

If you don't have a particular garden space or the area around the apartment you live in, or if you've got a garden or whether you go to the community garden, it doesn't matter.

The more plants you can get in your life, the more music you're absorbing in your soul.

Like the more therapeutic, that therapeutic aspect of horticulture is something that you know you can nerd nerd out on.

Fair fucking player to you, Costa.

That's amazing.

This man is so interesting that we actually went over time a little bit, right?

So, can I bring the house lights up and we get a few questions?

Also, I have to get a photograph of Eve for my mother because she doesn't believe that this many people have come to see me in Australia.

Thanks, lads.

That's very kind.

Where's he got?

Oh, thank you so much.

Jesus, there's loads of you.

2000s RB singer Usher has kindly come along to pass out a microphone tonight.

Is Usher around?

Is he?

We got an Usher with a mic.

I'll take a question from down here.

if you can put your hand up it can be about anything in the whole world

up here at the front yeah hold on two seconds now I'll get you the while we're waiting can I just say I didn't learn until

sort of

Bombo told me earlier that

sort of he because I said how did I end up in blind boy's orbit

And then he said, oh, well, he puts it out there.

And all of you said to get me.

Yeah, they all said to me.

Can I just say thank you?

Because

I was blown away by that.

And what an amazing...

They all see that me and you have the exact type of way of thinking about things and that we'd get along with each other.

I think they were right.

Up here at the front, if we could get a microphone, please, Usher, if you wouldn't mind, just at the very front.

We got one here.

We got one over here.

Oh, no, no, down here first.

Because someone is spinning around.

There you go, Usher.

Usher's taking his time.

Awio, what's your question?

I was wondering if you could sign my ocarina.

Of course, I can.

I play an ocarina during my podcast.

Do we have any other questions?

I hope you're not under 18.

I said the C word quite a lot tonight.

In Melbourne, tomorrow I'm going to be chatting with a fella called Tyson Yunkoporta.

Oh, who's and I'm going to be burning his ear asking all of these type of questions.

We've gone over curfew because that was such an interesting chat.

Curfew?

What's curfew?

It's us getting the fuck out of here or else we get in trouble.

Oh,

Costa Giordiadas.

Did I pronounce that correct?

I've never had to pronounce a Greek man's name before.

Pronounce like a true...

Is that correct?

Like a true villager.

Georgiadis.

Georgiadas.

God, that's...

You got the role.

We don't, we don't, there's no Greek people in Ireland.

We've never had to pronounce these names.

There was nothing there.

Why would you bother coming to Ireland?

Actually, that's the last question.

Why are there so many Greek people in Australia?

Well,

if there's a waterway, the Greeks travel on it like those eels.

Really?

You've lots of Greek people here, don't you?

Yeah, there's lots.

Sydney's got a big population.

Melbourne's even bigger.

Wow.

Ah, all the listeners, you didn't see what happened.

I know.

Fucking perfect timing.

That's how you know the night is over.

The mic goes flaccid.

All right, listen, go in peace, everybody.

Thank you so much for coming out.

Thank you, Costa.

That was wonderful, crack.

Have a good night.

I had a lot of fun.

I had to leave in that at the end.

That little kid, who I don't know how they got to the gig.

They must have been 11 or 12.

I didn't know there was under 18s at the gig.

I wasn't aware that was happening.

I shouldn't have said cunt as much.

I kept saying it afterwards.

So what am I going to do?

I'll blame it on autism.

Alright.

Fucking.

Alright, I got an air.

I have to go to fly to Ireland now.

I have to get on a big, a big airplane.

I packed correctly this time.

I'm prepared.

I'm ready to have my wash in Dubai airport.

I'm going to shower myself.

I'll fill you in next week on what my Dubai shower was like.

You don't need to know that.

Listen, next week...

We're going to be back to regularly scheduled programming, right?

I'm going to get into fucking...

I'm going to get into Limerick.

It's going to be a Tuesday, you see.

I'm going to be knocked out.

I'm going to have to sleep.

That's why I couldn't...

That's why I had to pre-record this podcast.

I'm going to sleep on Wednesday, Thursday morning.

Boom.

Back into my fucking office.

Back into the office, 9 a.m.

Thursday morning.

Ready to do some research.

for next week's podcast.

Thursday morning is...

Like it's Monday evening here in Perth.

I'm talking about four days away or something.

I've no idea what's going to be going on in the world.

The madness that's happening right now with Trump and his tariffs, I've no idea what the news is going to be on Thursday.

So, hopefully, next week,

I do want to do something hot takey around Trump's tariffs and trade wars, or maybe go into mercantilism or something like that.

Mercantile mercantilism, mercantilism which is

the economic system

between

feudalism and capitalism and what trump is doing reminds me a bit of that right

anyway uh thank you for listening dog bless thinking about what shit i'm gonna watch on the airplane now i watched a piece of shit with liam nason in it

I can't remember the fucking name of it.

It was about Liam Neeson as a Boston Irish gangster with dementia.

Good premise.

But

it felt like a Clint Eastwood movie, but it wasn't.

Clint Eastwood.

Clint Eastwood makes films for old people who are pricks.

There's no other way to describe Clint Eastwood.

It's for old people who, instead of...

Having like being compassionate or having an understanding of their own emotions or other people at the end of their life

Clint Eastwood makes films for all people who are bitter pricks and this film felt like that and Liam Neeson was in it as a Boston gangster with fucking dementia

and the very strange thing about it is

there's there's an early 90s studio Ghibli cartoon called Ponyo and Liam Neeson is in it as a voice actor and this weird film where he's a gangster with dementia has a number of parallels with the cartoon Ponyo.

And it just fucked up my head a bit.

So I don't know what I'm going to watch.

Again, you don't need to hear this.

You don't need to hear about what film I'm thinking of watching on the airplane.

I watched this really

weird ecclesiastical drama with Rayfienz.

Trying to stay awake.

I was.

Listen, fuck off, alright?

Um, I'll catch you next week.

I'm telling myself to fuck off there, not ye.

I'm telling me to fuck off away from the microphone.

I'll catch you next week.

Back to regular programming, okay?

I thank you to my guest, Costa Georgiadis, this week.

Rubber swan, no.

Rubber dog.

Wink at a swan.

Genu fleck to a robin redbreast.

I wish I could read you out the text that my ma sent me during the week about uh she found a robin redbreast's nest with a lot of holes in it in her shed, and then went in trying to plug the holes in the Robin Redbreast's nest.

All right, dog bless.

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You check your feed and your account.

You check the score and the restaurant reviews.

You check your hair and reflective surfaces and the world around you for recession indicators.

So you check all that, but you don't check to see what your ride options are.

In this economy, next time, check Lyft.