Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, I'm Annabelle Crabb. Now, I wouldn't say I'm a hoarder exactly, but I do hang on to things. It's not just you and me. Australia's oldest library is crammed with stuff that isn't books. Terrible paintings, old menus, human hair. Is this history or hoarding? Come and have a rummage through the story of us told by our stuff.
Search for the History or Hoarding podcast on ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts.
In the United States, they've got this national holiday called Columbus Day to commemorate the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, who it was said discovered America in 1492. Except that America didn't need discovering because people had been living there for thousands of years. And Columbus wasn't the first European to get there anyway.
A Viking named Leif Erikson made the voyage from Iceland to North America a full 500 years before that. And Columbus didn't even land on the North American mainland. He set foot on a Caribbean island. And I think that in the end, the Leif Erikson saga is way more fun than the Columbus story, which ends in disease and mass slavery. Matt Bevan is with me today.
Matt loves fact-checking these kinds of claims that sort of stick in the mind that aren't really quite true. He admits in his new book that he can be a bit of a buzzkill, but I love this stuff. And so do Matt's legions of listeners and viewers.
Matt, as many of you will know, is the presenter and writer of the brilliant podcast and TV show If You're Listening, which he describes as a show where he explains the biggest story in world news while hiding in his basement from assassins and authoritarian regimes.
Now, Matt has a very entertaining book that's packed with stories behind the stories about things that might have happened the way you think they happened but probably didn't, like what became of that teenager who flew a Cessna into the car park of Red Square? And was Alexander Downer really at the centre of a massive plot to discredit Donald Trump?
And why do human beings perceive vertical lines to be longer than horizontal ones? Matt's book is called If You're Listening, Declassified. Hello, Matt. Hello, Richard. Are you really making that show in your basement?
Yes, I live in Newcastle and we bought this house in 2020 there when we realised we couldn't afford to live in Sydney anymore and moved home to where I'm from in Newcastle. and we bought this house that had a downstairs room that didn't really have a purpose.
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Chapter 2: What is the significance of Columbus Day and its misconceptions?
You know, storage rooms, garage, that kind of thing. Can't really use it as a bedroom. The kids would never use it as a playroom. It's a little bit too big to be an office. It's kind of odd. And then someone made the suggestion that we should start turning, if you're listening, our podcast into a video and TV product as well as being an audio podcast. And we were sort of going...
Am I going to need to come down to Sydney to film it in a studio? Am I going to need to, you know, monopolise part of the ABC Newcastle office, which, as you know, Richard, is not massive and they probably wouldn't be super keen on me turning a big section of it into a TV studio. No, workers are pretty much stacked vertically on top of each other in Newcastle. That's right.
And I went, you know what, I've got this strange shaped room that doesn't have any purpose in my house. Can we try that? And so we've given over one room of my house, which is not a large house, to be this downstairs strange sort of semi-basement room to be a TV studio. And that's where If You're Listening is made.
A large part of your book is about how unstable history is. And this is very, very true. People who write history... know very well that they often sound more confident relating events than they really feel because everything is really quite unstable. Events are often told through a whole lot of different voices that rarely agree on things. People's memories are very unreliable.
There's a lovely story that illustrates this very nicely at the start of your book about a lemon tree that appeared in a palace in the Crimean city of Yalta during the Yalta Conference of 1944. It's a lovely story because it involves these great world leaders like Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. Tell me about this palace where the conference took place.
So, obviously, it was 1944, so the Soviets have retaken the Crimean Peninsula from the Nazis, and it was clear at this stage that the Allies were going to defeat the Nazis, and it was decided that they needed to have a meeting of the major Allied powers to basically decide, what are we going to do with Germany? Once we beat them, what are we going to do?
And Stalin managed to convince the others that he would be the host of this meeting. And for very Stalin-y reasons, he decided that he would have this meeting not in Moscow, not in St. Petersburg, but in Yalta, this city that had been recaptured just weeks earlier from the Nazis. This is like a resort town, wasn't it? Yeah, absolutely, it was a resort town.
The Crimean Peninsula is basically the resort... area of the Russian Empire and the USSR. It's where all the Tsars would go for summertime retreats. The Sea of Azov is there and the Sea of Azov is unusually warm. It's a fantastic place to visit. And they had retaken it. And so Stalin wanted to have this meeting in Yalta. But the thing was, Yalta was a ruin.
It had been invaded first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets in the opposite direction. And it had basically been destroyed. And the palace, the Lavardia Palace, is where Stalin wanted to have this meeting. And it was a total wreck. I mean, the Soviets hadn't been looking after it because it was a, you know, czarist sort of decadent, ridiculous czarist era relic.
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Chapter 3: How does Matt Bevan challenge historical narratives?
I mean, there were a couple of toilets that worked. They decided to put Roosevelt in a room that had a working toilet. But we're talking about the absolute high command of the Allied military is there, and they are being put in rooms that don't have toilets and don't have any access to toilets. And so every morning there would be a massive queue of...
Outside the one working toilet on the ground floor of the Lavardia Palace, many generals and admirals were forced to relieve themselves outdoors. There was mosquitoes everywhere. There was not proper running water. It was an absolute tip. But one thing they did have, though... Was lots of alcohol, right? They did, absolutely. And Roosevelt and Churchill both did love a cocktail.
And so in a meeting, one of the stories that comes out of this is that Roosevelt had a meeting with Stalin one night. And, well, I'll read you the account that comes from Robert Hopkins, who was a photographer who was with the American delegation. He says...
At six o'clock the following morning, when I came down to the main entrance hall, I was astonished to find, just outside the door to the ante room, a huge lemon tree. I counted some 200 pieces of fruit on it, which Stalin had ordered flown in from his native Georgia, so the president could serve his martinis with a twist.
Now, I like that story very much. Me too. And even though it's kind of odd, it's really quite plausible. We do know for a fact that Roosevelt loved to make pictures of martinis in the White House. We do know that when Stalin gave an order, it was often obeyed. And so it's wacky, like there's suddenly a lemon tree out of nowhere with 200 lemons hanging from it.
But then what did the British say happened with this lemon tree?
Yeah, well, that's the fascinating thing. So the British were staying in a nearby palace, not the same Lavardia Palace. They were in the Vorontsov Palace, which is nearby. And Churchill then, after the whole thing, returned to England and then told a story about what had happened there. And one of the stories was written down from Churchill's report of what he had experienced in Yalta.
He gave a vivid picture of Yalta. The Russians had made a tremendous effort to prepare for their reception in two of the old palaces of the nobility of Tsarist times. All right, now this is a very different story now. It is. So we've got two lemon trees here. Different palaces as well. And a different palace. Yes.
And it comes out of a request for an orange, not something to stick in a cocktail.
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Chapter 4: What bizarre story illustrates the instability of history?
They had one or two G&Ts. They had not a particularly interesting conversation to start with, But then, Downer says, George Papadopoulos told him that the Russians had a large trove of dirt on Hillary Clinton. This was during the campaign between Trump and Hillary Clinton and that they were going to release this information at some point. And this was something worthy of a sort of a note.
Downer went, oh, that's interesting. I'll, you know, keep... I'll remember that. But didn't think all that much of it at the time. It was only after the campaign emails started to be released online... That Downer went, oh, hang on. Someone told me that this was going to happen a couple of weeks ago. That guy works in the Trump campaign. That's something that's probably interesting.
And reported this back to the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra. And the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra went, whoa, that's... Well, not well above our pay grade. We don't know what to do with that. We're going to tell the Americans. And so they called up the FBI and informed the basically informed the Americans of what Downer had heard.
Because this is still the Obama administration at this point, isn't it? The election hasn't happened yet. And Barack Obama and his people are still running the United States administration.
Yes, so this is about midway through 2016. There is still seven months to go of the Obama administration and the FBI have received this report that someone on the Trump campaign knew ahead of schedule about the Russians having information from inside of the Hillary Clinton campaign and it was told to us by the Australians.
So what happened when the New York Times got word that Alexander had had a meeting with this Trump advisor and this had been disclosed to him?
Well, the New York Times found out about it a year and a half later. They sort of went, oh, this is an odd thing. The context was, of course, that by the end of 2017, so this is when the New York Times started reporting on it, there was now already a massive conspiracy
government investigation into the Trump campaign's connections or alleged connections with the Russian government during the presidential campaign of 2016.
Right, because you have to ask yourself the question, if what Papadopoulos was saying was true, how did the Trump campaign know that Russia had done this?
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