Learn Australian English in this Walking With Pete Story Time episode of Aussie English where I tell you about that time I caught a deadly snake!
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AE 363 – WWP Story Time:
That Time I Caught A Deadly Snake!
G’day guys, how’s it going? Welcome to this episode of Story Time, Walking with Pete. I am walking around, I think it’s Princes Park, Princes Park, which is a park across the road from Melbourne University to the north of the CBD in Melbourne. (It’s a) really beautiful park. (There are) loads of people walking around, running around.
But today, I want to talk to about that time I caught the second most deadly snake in the world. This was an eastern brown snake, when I was probably nine or 10 years old. So, I was a very stupid kid.
But, yeah, so Story Time! I thought, again, just to remind you I’m trying to do these episodes to mix it up a little, give you give me some different vocab, tell me some stories about me. But, when I was a kid I used to love fossicking. I used to absolutely love fossicking. And “to fossick” is to, like, look for things. So, I used to lift rocks up, push logs over, lift logs up, pull bark off trees up at the farm, where my grandparents had a farm. And there were loads of animals. There were always heaps and heaps of really cool little animals hanging around the cabin. We had a wooden cabin up there that my parents used to drive us up to with the whole family. And, yeah, it used to be amazing. So, we had this cabin because my grandparents, probably back in the 50s or 60s, I’m not exactly sure when but probably the 60s. They bought this log cabin and built it on a piece of land near Bendigo, up in the northwest of Victoria. I think it’s sort of central Victoria really.
But, it was a beautiful bit of land. And they used to have sheep on the land. They used to have the sheep shorn once a year before summer. So, they’d get all the wool from the sheep and my grandfather would sell it. This was his sort of little hobby.
And so, it used to be a full family event. The whole family would go up. I’d have cousins, uncles, aunties there, my parents, my sister would be there, my grandparents, obviously. And my grandfather used to hire a shearman, or a shearer*, to come to the farm to shear the sheep. And we’d do it all in a weekend. I think it’d usually be one or two days. I think my grandfather only had maybe 200 sheep, and so a good shearer could probably get through that in a day or two, obviously.
And so, yeah, the guy we had used to smash it out in a day, and it was a really good fun event. We’d be collecting the wool and everything, but usually the kids would be off doing stuff, entertaining themselves, hanging around the farm, whilst the parents or the adults were all involved in the shearing process.
So, we had,