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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
do you think you'd never be targeted with disinformation well remember hearing about those new australian road rules curfews for drivers over 60 and mandates to keep your lights on that was actually an ai disinformation campaign g'day it's hamish mcdonald here i'm a journalist and i've been learning that online tactics just like this are being used regularly to seed mistrust in government decision making
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Tanya Heaslip was sitting in a pub in London in 1989 when she saw the Berlin Wall come down on the telly. Tanya was at the tail end of a solo backpacking trip, which didn't quite match the expectations of the Europe she'd dreamt up in her head as a kid growing up on a remote cattle station near Alice Springs.
So looking for some excitement, Tanya jumped on a plane to Berlin the very next day, which began an obsession and a fascination with finding out about life behind the old iron curtain as it was. Several years later, Tanya returned to Europe, this time to the Czech Republic or Czechoslovakia as it was then.
And there in fairy tale Prague, not long after the Velvet Revolution, Tanya saw all these unexpected parallels between the magic and isolation of Prague and that of Central Australia, their people and their stories. And Tanya entered into a relationship with an older man, who had very different ideas about love and friendship.
Tanya Heaslip is the author of several memoirs, including Alice to Prague and Alice Girl and Beyond Alice. Dobry den, Tanya. Hello. Dobry den, Richard. Jaksa mas. I feel well. You grew up, as I said, on the family's cattle station, a remote part of the Northern Territory. How big a part was beef in the daily diet of people out on the station? Breakfast, lunch and dinner.
It was beef all day long in every way, every guise. It could be cooked. It was salted, roasted beef. stewed and we had rib bones just as soon as we got our fresh meat and they were on the barbecue. They were delicious. Every way you could have beef all day long. Did this mean you went out and caught and killed your own beef to eat? Yes. That's how everybody lived back then.
You lived off the land literally and ours was a cattle station. So we kids would go out with dad to get a killer and as it was called. You'd go out with your dad. You'd be part of that as kids. Yeah, absolutely. We were the workers. So we were on the back of the Land Rover.
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Chapter 2: What sparked Tanya Heaslip's journey from Alice Springs to Prague?
carve up the beast out there on the flat and then put the quarters back on the back of the Land Rover and hold them on the long, rattly drive back to the homestead. And in between, we got the lungs and blew them up and, you know, kids out in the bush. We just made our own fun. Wow. And didn't even think this was weird.
You butchered it in situ in the open air, right out in the open air like that. Yes. Yeah. And we were busy kids. You know, we had to get mulga branches and continually wave them over the carcass to keep the flies off and to keep it as safe as possible from the elements. You know, if you're a meat eater, when you talk to city friends, do they go, oh, that's horrifying or something?
Do they get a bit worried about that? Absolutely. It was such a normal thing. I didn't even realise it was a strange way to get your own meat until probably I went to uni and really started hearing from city folk that this was odd. They went to the butcher or the supermarket and didn't even know really how the meat got there. Right. It just sort of arrived somehow magically under the cling wrap.
Yeah. If they ate meat at all. If they ate meat at all. Tell me about that country near Alice Springs. I've been out there. Can you describe what it looks like, what it sounds like, what it smells like? Oh, it's just magnificent. Huge blue skies, enormous red rocky ranges everywhere.
The other Macdonald Ranges that run east to west, they're enormous and they're ancient and craggy and there's this big split between them that the dry Todd River runs through where Alice Springs is situated. It's usually dry. The Todd's full of water at the moment, but we've had rain.
But the smell, that dry air of the desert and then the eucalypt from the gum trees along the creek beds and the sound of crickets and cicadas at night, stars, huge starry skies. It's just magical. It's a very mystical ancient land. It's hard to describe what the air feels like in the outback.
And that's a strange thing to say what the air feels like, but it feels distinctly different than it does in coastal Australia. I don't know, you sense the expanse of the world and the quietness of it and the dryness of the air. And you feel like it sort of goes like that all the way up into space or something. Just space and expanse is the feel I get when I'm out there.
It's a very good description. You're in the middle of nowhere. 1,600 k's to the south and to the north from any other major city, more to the east and west. There's just nothing. There's hundreds and hundreds of miles of... of space and emptiness and this ancient Indigenous land. And this land was once the bottom of the sea.
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Chapter 3: What was Tanya's initial impression of Prague after the Velvet Revolution?
So it's so old and all these ranges that are craggy and folded have been folded by the geology of time and it feels ancient and isolated. And there's such an insignificance to yourself as a person standing in that land and yet such a huge connection to what's greater than you.
I tend to amuse people when I'm out there because I can't walk two steps without wanting to take a photo or take in a scene or something because it's so majestic and astonishing and beautiful. One scene after another unfolds before your eyes and you can't believe how beautiful and weirdly beautiful it is to someone who's grown up on the coast like me.
But to people who live there, it's just, I don't know, part of the warp and weft of everyday life. Do you have to go away and come back to appreciate it or do you appreciate it as a kid growing up? I loved it as a kid. I didn't know it was unusual. I just, I didn't, we were so isolated. This was the 60s and 70s.
We didn't go anywhere and we only had two-way radio for communication with the outside world. There was no television. But it was definitely, it was then so imbued in me as this place where I felt strong and whole. But when I went away and went to different places, I never felt that sense of wholeness and strength. And it was going back there. I was like, yes, my feet are back on this red earth.
I'm looking at those magnificent white gum trees that rise up into the blue sky. There's a wholeness and a strength I feel when I'm back there. Now, this isn't desert, but it is semi-arid. What kind of wildlife are you constantly running into out there? Oh, well, roos, constant kangaroos everywhere.
But the most gorgeous ones are the little wallabies, the rock wallabies that live in all the gorges and anywhere along the top of hillsides. Just these sweet little rock wallabies and they scuttle away when they see you, but they're very curious and they rarely come out during daytime, just at dawn. You see them when you're out walking at dawn.
Then, of course, there's the predator, the dingo, who has no natural... predator above it. So they're the wolves, they're the wild creatures there that the rock wallabies hide from as well. And what are the birds there? Because I have these images in my mind of flocks of white birds and what are they, cockatoos?
Flocks and flocks of cockatoos, wild, you know, galahs, cockies, whatever you want to call them, the farmer's curse. There's squillions of them there, you know, packs of them squawking and screeching, crows, of course. And we also have the red and green parrots, are gorgeous.
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Chapter 4: How did Tanya's experiences in Central Australia shape her perspective on life?
I'm not quite as screechy. We have butcher birds that sing in the morning that are just divine. We have little babblers. And then when it rains, we have flocks of tiny wrens, loads of them just all over the water holes. So growing up there in the, what, the 60s and 70s, you say, what was daily routine like for your mum and dad? Work, just non-stop work.
They were up at five to turn on the old generator to get the electricity going so mum could have a light to cook masses of meat and eggs from our chooks for breakfast for all the stockmen, for us kids. then mum would spend all day cooking because there'd be morning smoko, afternoon smoko. She'd use baking trays to cook cakes that would be devoured in one setting.
So mum's day was basically providing for all. We had up to 30 people living there at any one time. And then dad's was out with the cattle on horseback, mustering, drafting, trucking. They were sort of like the classic... Division of roles of people on the land. Mum kept the homestead running. Dad ran the property. And then we kids did all the work. Like what kind of work? Well, mustering cattle.
We were the core of Dad's stock camp. All bush kids are the core of their parents' stock camp. Like for what age are you mustering cattle on horseback? Six, seven. The minute we could ride, we were out. But even before we could ride, we were in the cattle yards, drafting cattle, watching cattle, feeding cattle, looking after the horses, fixing up fences, helping Dad with bores.
From as young as I can remember, we were in the back of the Land Rover off working cattle. See, I think most people, I would imagine it's a life of isolation, but it sounds to me like you have like hordes of stockmen coming in and out of the house at all hours of the day. Is that right?
Well, they weren't always there because in the 60s and the 70s, the stock camp went out for often for months on end. And so mum would be having to prepare food and take it out. Then dad got very smart and put in a lot of fences and more yards and more waters. So it meant that the stock camp wasn't out for as long. But our friends as kids, we had the stockmen who were all older blokes.
And then the horses, little joeys, little calves, potty calves, they were our friends for my sister and my two brothers and me. Yeah. And so life was horses and cattle and mustering when we weren't in the schoolroom doing correspondence school. All sorts of people fetch up in that part of the world who find themselves unable to live in what I suppose we'd call suburbia or normal life. Yeah.
These were characters, they were almost all loner men. They were silent men. They lived with horses and cattle. They rarely spoke, but they were good to kids. They were so good to us. They'd have an old rollie and, you know, let us have a puff when Dad wasn't looking. They'd look after us when we fell off our horses. They were devoted to their horses and to cattle.
They were the kind of men that, you know, you imagine of the old Henry Lawson, Banjo Patterson, Slim Dusty stories of sitting around a campfire at night on a swag, playing their guitars, singing all those old country songs and Were some of them traumatised, like veterans or something, and then trying to recover in the outback? Possibly, but as kids, we didn't know that.
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Chapter 5: How did Tanya's relationship with Karel influence her life in Prague?
So, Tanya, at some point it was time to send you to boarding school and this girl who's grown up in the outback who knows how to disembowel a slaughtered cow is going to a posh boarding school in Adelaide. Can I go out on a limb here and say it was probably awful to begin with? It was just hideous. It was... hideous.
I think most kids who go to boarding school at age 12, especially if you're a child of the outback and you know nothing about the outside world, you've never been in a classroom, you've never been in a city, you've never been in four walls of an institution. It was like being in prison. It was hideous. And how about those nice Adelaide girls from nice homes, nice hams in Adelaide?
How did they treat you as the roughest guts girl? Well, yeah, and I was rough as guts. Interestingly, the boarders were all from South Australian country. So they were the girls I spent most of my time with. It was, you know, the daybugs, as we called them, in the classroom didn't really mix with us. It took several years, I guess, before we started really intermingling and they...
I thought these rough-as-guts bush kids were okay to talk to. But the country kids were all, I mean, they were much better adapted anyway. They'd all been to, you know, mid-north schools and, you know. Yeah, coming there from Mount Gambier is a big difference than coming there from Central Australia. Yeah, yeah. So I was an absolute fish out of water.
We were in a dormitory, 14 girls, and a little window above my bed and I'd look through it and I couldn't see the stars. And all I could hear was traffic on Green Hill Road. And I'd only seen night skies full of stars and I'd never seen or spent time or gone to sleep next to a road full of traffic. And it was like being on another planet. Not being able to see the stars was traumatising.
For a bush kid. What about the beach, though? Was Glenelg kind of a culture shock for you? Yeah, Glenelg, yeah, I have never really much been into the beach since then. So were you victimised a bit by the day girls at that school? Not the day. The day girls really were quite separate. They, you know, they came to school.
They all had these interesting packed lunches and we'd have to go to the dining room for something. And then they'd all get on the tram or bus and go home. And so, no, but the girl, there were quite a few bullies in the boarding house. The boarding house was like a military system. You know, you crush the spirits of the kids. You get them to just a uniform mass.
But there's always bullies in that kind of system. And especially if you had no social skills, which I didn't. So you go from a life of freedom to one of constraint. Yes. You feel the walls around you a bit. I was just used to running free. And also bush kids grow up from a very young age to do adult tasks.
My brother at age 11 was sent out at 3am, 15 miles away to muster cattle and get them back to the station by dawn so they could be trucked and Dad was waiting. That's the kind of responsibility that bush kids were given and in a boarding school you're treated like just a naughty little girl who has no rights. It's very confronting as well. So the friendships that you do make there,
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