Part One: How Eliza Fraser Survived a Shipwreck and Sparked a Genocide

Robert sits down with Jack O'Brien to tell the story about Eliza Fraser, who survived being shipwrecked thanks to the indigenous people of an island her lies helped destroy.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
It's Behind the Bastards, a podcast that I have increasingly
gotten bad at opening. You would think normally when you
do something thousands of times, you get better at it,
but sometimes you just get worse at it, because how
do you keep opening the podcast? You know, I've already
done the what's cracking my peppers? We've already reached the

(00:27):
highest highs that a man can reach, not just in
podcasting but in life in general. So there's there's nowhere
to go.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
But want to I want to try hello and welcome
to Behind the Bastards.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
I don't think that. I don't think any podcast has
ever opened that way?

Speaker 3 (00:44):
Is that?

Speaker 2 (00:45):
Is that why we don't get awarts?

Speaker 3 (00:46):
I prefer ha dah.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
Yeah that was pretty I was like out of a
Sandler status.

Speaker 2 (00:53):
Yeah, there you go, and he got to be in
uncut gems. You know, maybe I'll get to be an
uncut gyms. I could be. I could have a gambling problem, Sophie,
I believe in me.

Speaker 3 (01:02):
I do believe that you.

Speaker 1 (01:03):
Could have a gambling problem. But we don't let you
touch the money.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Oh man, I can put it all on black, Sophie
twenty one black. I think that's a roulette term. Anyway,
speaking of roulette, every time we pick a new guest,
it's roulette, except today, because today we have Jack O'Brien
back on the pod, Jack the Guarantee, switch Jack the

(01:30):
pro Brian.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
That's called a jackpot, and that is my catchphrase.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Now it's nice.

Speaker 3 (01:38):
That's nice saying get back from the dead, and the
dead you all forgot about him. Yeah. Of all the
popular casino names that you could have associated with my name,
roulette is definitely the closest, especially after you had just
said twenty one. There's a game called black jack. I
know they don't let you gamble, but.

Speaker 1 (01:59):
Yeah, money, yeah, you got black jack.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
It's a jackpot. My name really slot slots in nicely
with a lot of a casino lingo.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
Why have you not made a crypto because it's evil?

Speaker 3 (02:13):
Oh right right, I will tell you that is not why.
It's a pure laziness and not willing to learn all
the bullshit that goes along with it.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
I do feel like your co host Miles Gray could
really sell amium coin. Oh hell yeah yeah, like come on,
oh there it is, it's there. You did it.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
We did try and soft launch ZiT coin, and everybody
thought it was a joke.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
Yeah, so I tried to launch bastard coin. You just
wound up making the president a lot of money.

Speaker 3 (02:47):
Basically what we all do every day. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Wow, that that is kind of the point of everyone
else in the country now speaking of making a lot
of money doing evil things. Australia, that's the ship this week.
It's an Australian bastard. Our Ozzie listeners have been begging
for years, why not, Why don't you ever talk about
Australians So many of us are terrible. It's always been

(03:13):
my understanding that Australia is sort of like Texas, the
country in a lot of ways, but just with fucking
desert racing replacing guns and kangaroos replacing whateverdillos.

Speaker 3 (03:29):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
I don't know. I don't think anything replaces kangaroos. Anyway,
We're talking about a lady named Eliza Frasier this week.
That's our our bastard. And so Eliza is a lady
who gets shipwrecked and then tells a bunch of lies
about how the Aboriginal people on the island that she
is shipwrecked on treat her, and those lies wind up

(03:51):
cascading and playing a role in a lot of genocidal bullshit.
So she's the bastard this week, and also the colonial
state of Australia is a bastard. But it's a fascinating
story about a place that I knew nothing about before
I started reading about this. So we're gonna have a
good time, Jack, you did to hear about some genocide.

Speaker 3 (04:11):
I the West? Mate. By the end, I will get
here one good syllable of an Australian accent.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
Well, it's okay because Eliza comes from this era. She's British, right,
Like she's a major figure in Australian history. But like
the Aussies hadn't really figured out that accent yet, right,
they were still just British people on a different place.

Speaker 3 (04:33):
They're not workshop people. I like the idea that they
were just like intentionally in a room somewhere. That is
kind of what happened with the received pronunciation, right, the
British accent.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
Like, yeah, a bunch of rich guys sat around in
a room.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
Yeah. In Shakespeare in Time, the British accent sounded like
the Baltimore accent, Like it was just kind of like
engine birding and.

Speaker 2 (04:55):
Everyone sounded like a character in the wire.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
Yeah that's correct.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
Yeah that sounds about right.

Speaker 3 (05:05):
Yeah, Yen's going down to see Shakespeare at the Globe.

Speaker 2 (05:08):
That that's exactly how Shakespeare sounded.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
Yes, that's so much of your tb or not to be.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
Yes, thankfully, Denzel's version of Macbeth really really delivered on that.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
But then they were like, we should sound fancy, and
that's where we got to receive pronunciation. I don't think
this is like exactly what happened. I don't think they
had like a meeting where they were like, should we
fancy it up? But they were just like it kind
of sounds cool when we talk like this.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
Yeah, I've missed you, buddy.

Speaker 3 (05:37):
My accent works so good. You've missed me and my
accent work.

Speaker 2 (05:42):
That's also part of the the thing is like we
could be shitty to everyone who doesn't talk right because
they didn't go to Eton or wherever. Yes, why you
have like received if you if you know British people,
they can always tell you, oh yeah, that guy's rich,
just by like hearing him. I know, whereas in America
everyone just sounds like a California now.

Speaker 3 (06:02):
As we did it.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Joe all up, speaker, let's talk about Eliza Frasier and
this series of genocides. It's great stuff. Now, this is
also kind of a story about conflicting versions of events
can sort of spread through popular media because one of

(06:26):
the things that's happens here is this lady gets rescued
from being shipwrecked and starts telling a story that she
changes several times, and a whole industry arises around telling
that story because there's just a lot of money in
lying about this, because it gets white people titillated, and
so there's just a whole it like literally like a
like it's almost like its own cinematic universe of lying

(06:49):
about this lady being shipwrecked that starts out in the
mid eighteen hundreds. It's very fun. But every version of
events starts the same way, which is that Eliza Fraser
sets sail on a boat called the Sterling Castle in
eighteen thirty six. Her husband is the captain, and according
to most versions of the story, although not all of them,

(07:11):
she is Preger's, which I don't think i've ever set
on the show.

Speaker 1 (07:15):
I hate it, I.

Speaker 3 (07:16):
Really love it.

Speaker 2 (07:18):
I'm getting mixed reacts.

Speaker 3 (07:19):
The goosebumps that I have on my arms right now
are because it felt so good and natural. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Preger's Preger's McGregor's.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Bereggor's McGregor's off. Only her last name had been McGregor.
That would really have worked.

Speaker 3 (07:34):
I'm sure one of the people on the on the
ship was named McGregor.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
It's god, anytime there's a British ship at sea, there's
a McGregor somewhere on that motherfucker. So in May of
eighteen thirty six, several months after setting sail, the Sterling
Castle runs aground, not all that far from an island
that at that point Europeans called it the Great Sandy Island.

(07:57):
It's going to be called Fraser Island. Uh and uh
yeah yeah yeah right. They name it after this lady
who lies about it. It is to this day the
world's largest sand island. So it's it's a pretty sizable island.
It's about one hundred and eighty six miles north of
Brisbane and today it's called Gharri. It is spelled k

(08:21):
apostrophe j r I and if you go to like Wikipedia,
it'll say it's pronounced gury or gury like g U
r r i E. But I pulled up a video
of like people who come from like the tribes that
are indigenous to the island saying it, and they say
it more like ghuri.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (08:39):
So that's how I'm going to try to say it.
Because they're rter than Wikipedia. It's also possible that maybe
there's some like dialect differences and people. Yeah, anyway, I'm
going to try to call it gary because that's what
it sounded like in the video that I saw.

Speaker 3 (08:56):
Is Sandy Island like just sand? Is that uncommon? I guess?
Is my question? Like I've been to islands that have
sand on them, but like I did not realize that
they were.

Speaker 2 (09:08):
It's common, but not for them to be this big, right,
Like there's a bunch of sandy islands, but the Great
Sandy Island is the biggest. One thing you got to
give the first name Europeans give it is that it's
at least accurate where they're like, well this is a
fucking huge sandy island. Son of a bitch is big.

Speaker 1 (09:23):
Jack Imagine island but like more sand yeah.

Speaker 3 (09:26):
Well like even Sandier yeah, and even Sandier Island the
sand you could call it the sandyst island the sandiest
of Anakin Skywalker would hate this fucking island as a colonizer,
I guess makes sense, so that people have been living
on Gari for a very very long time, and at

(09:48):
least some of what I've read, although I always take
like European anthropology about Aboriginal people, a lot of which
is written in like the sixties and seventies, with a
grain of salt here, a lot of that kind of
stuff that I've read said that in antiquity, at least
the people who lived on this island did not conceive
of a world outside of this island and this little

(10:09):
chunk of the mainland that they kind of moved between,
because they were like a lot of the people who
lived on Ghari lived on Gary like part time and
then would be on the mainland near the coast part time,
would kind of move between the two right based on
like the what kind of food was available in what season.
Not uncommon around the world, most people who were like
quote unquote hunter gathers or whatnot, were more like semi

(10:30):
nomadic right where they would have places that they would
like settle down in places where they kind of would
grow food, but they would also move around based on
you know, what the climate's doing and what kind of
you know, food is available different chunks of the year. Anyway,
I should start with some deep history of this island,
which is again very imperfect, but it's it's better than
not doing it at all. The peoples who lived on

(10:53):
this island tended to pass on knowledge orally through song,
So we don't have a complete understanding of their history
because not all of the people who knew all of
the songs survived to pass them down, right, because there's
a genocide, right, But we do have quite a lot
of information from these people in that restitution shadow by
the way.

Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yes, a sizeable amount of their records, like we have
their records of their very first European contract contact, which
has been passed down four hundred like several hundred years
through songs. Human beings have lived on what is today
Ghari for more than fifty thousand years. There's no real
way to get much more precise than that. And human

(11:32):
civilization on the island in fact predates it being an island,
because until about six thousand years ago it was still
directly connected to the Australian mainland. Rising sea levels put
an end to that in the fertile climate and bounty
of aquatic protein enable it to support a meaningful permanent
population of like several thousand people. Most casual histories of

(11:54):
Ghuri tend to emphasize the isolation that the people there
had from other groups of people. This does not seem
to be entirely accurate. By the time Europeans arrived there,
there were three broad tribal groups on the island, one
of them the Bochola, which is usually spelled butcha La,

(12:14):
but there's like three different spellings that are all correct
because it's like an anglicization, right. So the Bachola lived
on the mainland across from the Great Sandy Strait and
in the central part of the island, right, so they
would kind of go between different like the mainland and
the island. And then there's the Dulungbara who occupied much

(12:35):
of the south, and the Nulungbara in the north. And
I was not able to find pronunciations for those latter two,
so I'm doing my best on those. I'm pretty sure
I've got Bachola right to some extent. Ghuri like occupation
of Ghuri varied with the season. Mullet fishing was the
major source of food, and during the height of the
harvest there might be as many as three thousand people

(12:57):
on the island, right, and then it's kind of like
a snowbird situation, where like your full timers are a
smaller chunk of the population. I don't think they had
our vs. But otherwise that's more.

Speaker 3 (13:05):
Like anyways, Eastern like East Coast retirees are living the
most similar lives to indigenous peoples of long ago.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
But right, right, traveling Florida and.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
Yeah, going between the Jersey Shore and Florida.

Speaker 2 (13:23):
I mean there are some ways in which that's right, right, right, people,
like the idea that people would just live one place
all the time is new.

Speaker 3 (13:30):
It is, And it's also like not that book The
Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and Weng Grove, like
they talk about how one of the key freedoms that
they used to have that we don't really have as
much anymore and don't really value is just the ability
to be like, well this sucked, and like leave down,
Like that was always the thing that people were just

(13:53):
able to do, and then like entire communities would just
like move if things got shitty.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Yeah, it seems like it sucks here. Let's go calling
himself King timed to bounce. Yeah yeah, Oh if only
we could still do that. Buy an RV, become free everyone.
That's the message of this podcast, Live on the Road.
You know, there's no downsides. Everyone I know who lives
in an RV is happy. It always goes well, it

(14:19):
never goes badly. RVs are well made, they don't break immediately.

Speaker 1 (14:24):
I can't tell you the amount of times Robert suggested
we get in a podcast.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
I think I think we should get a fleet of
RV Could I could be a podcast commodore, Thank you Jack.

Speaker 3 (14:35):
Yes, just like a moving podcast studio. You just need
like a small podcast studio to justify it, and then
everything else is just sorry. Sophie is so mad at
me for entertaining this.

Speaker 2 (14:46):
Like, oh, I love this idea we can cook lizards
over open fires, Like mad Max. I think it's a
good idea.

Speaker 3 (14:52):
It's just a thing that I can't get my wife
to agree to, and so I'm like, oh, you should
expense it.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
I mean, people, a lot of people are really hesitant
to let their children live in a roaming RV. Come, okay, excellent, no,
very good. So most of the sources I have found
identify the islands Gari's first contact with Europeans as coming
with the arrival of the notorious Captain James Cook. That said,

(15:20):
there's evidence of several centuries of a regular contact with
Europeans prior to James Cook showing up. This would have
begun with Portuguese sailors around fifteen hundred, and there's evidence
of some trade or other exchange of materials in Spanish
lead that was found on the island, also dating from
around fifteen hundred. It's a little hard to say. There's
also like clay pipes that were made by the Dutch

(15:42):
that would have come from the sixteen hundreds, but we
don't really know. Does that mean that those people like
Europeans were landing on the island and training directly, or
that people who lived on the island who we know
went back to the mainland periodically throughout the year. We're
trading with other different groups of Aboriginal people who were
themselves trading with these other Europeans, right, we don't really

(16:03):
know that. As one of my sources, an article by
the Fraser Island Defenders Association notes this could simply be
yet evidence of trade between Gari and people with other
parts of Australia. Over the generation, some of the peoples
of this island developed a spiritual cosmology and a set
of rituals around death that would later get them slandered
as cannibals. And this is again something that I found

(16:25):
in sort of anthropological studies. I don't think this is
something that is known to at there's some debate on this,
but there's some evidence that here, as well as in
other places, when people's loved ones died, there was a
degree of funerary cannibalism practiced, right. And another thing that

(16:45):
was done that we know that was done was that
like when people's loved ones died, they would be skinned
by their family members before being buried, leaving what was
called the true skin behind, which is like, as best
as I can tell, like the fascia underneath your skin,
which is kind of a shade of white.

Speaker 3 (17:02):
Right.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
It's this like white colored substance between your skin and muscles.
And as a result, white skin became associated with the dead. Right,
So this is like part of a ritual for you know,
burying your loved ones, and this kind of like whiteness,
and when they see white people later they will be
associated with the dead right and with death. Not entirely wrong,

(17:25):
not entirely accurate. Kind of a helpful coincidence, yeah, in
some ways. Yeah, As a paper from the Anthropological Museum
of Queensland, edited by doctor Peter Lower describes, after this
ritual was finished, quote, certain sacred portions of the deceased
had been ceremoniously consumed by relatives. Carefully executed funeral rights
would ensure that the spirit, like a cold wind, left

(17:47):
the body before it was interred. According to Aboriginal informant Geyerbau,
the Butchalla believe that on the following day the spirit returned,
then the relatives would accompany it to a certain rock
at bari Eba, which bore the impress of the foot
of Bahraal, their ancestral being left behind when he had
leapt out over the sea on his way to the sky,
and from which place the spirits of their dead also

(18:09):
followed him to the sky country. Two men, specially posted
one at either side of the rock, would watch for
the spirits release. If they witnessed the spirits jumping off,
they would light a fire to make smoke in order
to prevent the spirit from coming back to frighten the people.
They believe that everyone went to the same place, and
that apart from their homeland and the lands of other tribes,
they knew there was no other place. So again, this

(18:31):
is like you know, some older anthropology, but it corresponds
with a lot of other stuff in history right now.
And there's some controversy here because allegations of cannibalism, not
just for the people of Ghari, but for like all
of the different Aboriginal peoples in Australia will be used
by Europeans as justifications for some pretty hideous acts of genocide,

(18:55):
which has led to understandable pushback by modern day descendants
of these people to assert that this is not an
or accurate characterization of their ancestors. And usually what the
Europeans are accusing them of doing is like hunting and
eating white people right like a as like a predatory act.
And this is like basically, all of these accounts are

(19:17):
our lives, and we'll talk a little bit about how
a lot of these lives come up that said funerary
cannibalism was engaged in by many peoples of this area
and all over the world. It is in fact nearly
a universal human practice if you go back far enough
anywhere on Earth. This is not the act of consuming
people for food or even eating defeated enemies, both of
which you can find different civilizations engaged in throughout history.

(19:39):
Funerary cannibalism is something very different, and you might best
compare it to something that many people in the West,
including some people that I know, do today, which is
having their body composted. It used to soil to grow things. Right,
there are services people use that for today, and there's
there's something kind of powerful here, both in a refusal
to totally let go of a dead loved one and

(20:01):
a desire to keep a piece of them alive with
you in some way. Funerary cannibalism was a common practice
in England about fifteen thousand years ago, and evidence of
similar practices has been found in Ireland and Germany, in
the UK and Russia, Belgium, Portugal, basically everywhere. Right, you
can find evidence of this in almost every like human

(20:24):
civilization on Earth if you go back far.

Speaker 3 (20:26):
And it kind of seems like a somewhat sophisticated idea,
the idea of like you are turned into energy, like
it's not necessarily like dust to dust, as the Whites
like to say, you actually could be turned into energy,
and you know, you became a part of us that
a plant grows out of that gets eaten. And you know,

(20:46):
I will say also as somebody who grew up in
a strict Catholic household, cannibalism is not uncommon in the
Western world, like they live for people who don't know Catholicism,
Like they believe that they're you know, they're they're doing
the sacrament up on the altar. Uh, they ring a

(21:07):
little bell and at that point, the bread and wine
literally turns into Jesus' like body and blood. Yeah, like
that's what they think is happening. Yeah, I've tasted it.
It's not Actually I don't want to anything for anybody,
but it's uh yeah yeah, So I don't know, like

(21:31):
like having fantasies of cannibalism that are supposed to be
literal cannibalism at the center of your spiritual beliefs. But
then every.

Speaker 2 (21:43):
Right, the way they do it's bad though. Is it
just like a small piece of like a love That's
what it sounds like based on the reading that I've done. Uh,
And I mean it varies from place to place.

Speaker 3 (21:55):
Right.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
Again, this is something that we found evidence of in
every continent, right, so, like you know, different and different
groups of people probably had different attitudes is like which
parts and how you do it, But it's a thing
that occurs basically everywhere, right, And so this real practice
is going to be part of like what gets spun
out into these lurid stories of like predatory cannibalistic behavior

(22:16):
that are one of the pretexts for the genocide that's
going to come, right, Which is why talking about this
at all. There's a lot of aspects of this that
are really problematic, and there's some other real practices that
get misinterpreted and exaggerated. For one thing, infanticide, right, there
were like during times of starvation, and again this is
not just something that Aboriginal people did in Australia. This

(22:39):
is something all throughout human civilization. When everyone is starving
to death, sometimes you kill a newborn baby because it's
not going to be able to survive. Right, Yeah, Like
we are talking about people who are living and with
wildly different margins than we can conceive of, and the
purpose here is not cruelty or some dark ritual which
is again what it often got spun out that they're

(23:00):
doing this for some sort of magic purpose. This is survival, right,
there's simply not enough food.

Speaker 3 (23:05):
Right.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
Everyone who has ever lived has relatives, if you go
far back enough, who had to make choices like this
because it's it's hard to live as a fucking like yeah,
and almost like a.

Speaker 3 (23:17):
Mercier kissing in some cases, right, like like they're going
to starve to death.

Speaker 2 (23:21):
I don't know if we're going to live. This baby
certainly can't, right, and so you you know, but what
you have is you have these people who are calling
themselves anthropologists, these Europeans traveling you know, through the continent,
and who find evidence of this, and they're not really anthropologists.
They're usually just like people with who are kind of
rich and so decide they do that as a hobby

(23:43):
and they wind up having their own biases or their
own bigotry, and they just kind of like weave this
story into ongoing narratives about how dangerous these people are, right,
And so this thing that's like, well, yeah, sometimes people
who are starving have to make hard choices gets turned
into something else. I found an article on aboriginal Cannibalism

(24:04):
in Queensland on the University of Queensland's website, written by E. G.
Heap in nineteen sixty seven, so this would have been
published at close to the peak of days of racist
anthropology on this matter. And even in this article the
author repeatedly points out how incredibly thin the actual evidence
is for many of the cannibalistic practices that were claimed
to be universal. Quote Thomas, who's one of the anthropologists

(24:28):
in this period, recorded a case on the Gascoyne River
in Western Australia where an Aboriginal girl was eaten and
killed and eaten by a native who decoyed her away.
She was very plump. The object of killing her was
to acquire this desirable quality. Bleekel, who's another scientist, also
referred to rare cases of the killing and eating of
a young girl on a special ritual occasion. But his
information is not documented. And that's the thing that you

(24:50):
find over and over again is like, here's this lurid
claim of someone being like eaten for this like ritual purpose.
There's no evidence that this happened, right, Look.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
It's actually no.

Speaker 2 (25:00):
Yeah, we got to put this in some art, some
newspaper articles, right yeah. And it's the same thing with
like these claims about the killing and eating of white
settlers by by these people, right, like, where a lot
of these claims there's simply like not any evidence of
there's evidence of like sometimes like people will be killed
and their bodies will be left out and animals will

(25:22):
get to them. But people will be like, oh, well,
they must have been eaten after they were murdered, right, Like,
stuff like that happens a lot too. I presume there
are some cases of like people eating parts of defeated enemies,
and because that happens in various parts of the world,
so maybe that's the case. But again, over and over
again reading this paper, it's just here's this like lurid
story and there's no evidence.

Speaker 3 (25:43):
Those animals are so fucked up, I can't believe they
did that.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
Yeah, it's like the explanation behind the dial ato paths.

Speaker 3 (25:53):
Yeah yeah, right, like monster must have eaten them. Their
tongues were missing, yeah, eyes were missing. It's like, yeah,
those are the soft there's animals.

Speaker 2 (26:02):
And they're hungry because it's snowy.

Speaker 3 (26:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
And when I looked into this paper more because like
I found a bunch of cases where it's like, Okay,
here's a larid story and he says and there's no evidence.
So I decided to look at more into some of
the sources for this paper who were making claims about cannibalism.
And a major source in this paper is a woman
named Daisy May Bates. Bates was an Irish woman and
again a self taught anthropologist who expressed a mystic the

(26:30):
best kind. And she's kind of wandering around in like
the eighteen hundreds, oh sorry, in the late eighteen hundreds
and early nineteen hundreds, and she's this mix of this
kind of like paternalistic sympathy towards aboriginal people, right, but
also a lot of bigotry. And she becomes maybe the
primary source during this period of claims about cannibalism. And

(26:54):
it sounds reliable, sounds reliable. It's one of those things,
and this is awful. What's frustrating. Discard everything she says,
because she is one of the only sources of like
ethnographic research we have on some some of these groups
of people from this period of time. But we also
know that she lies a lot. And in fact, I
found historian Bob Reese is like, she does good work

(27:16):
in some things quote with the notable exception of cannibalism. Basically,
you can't listen to anything she says when she brings
up cannibalism, right, like the stuff she has to say about,
like languages and stuff that's useful with the second she
brings up cannibalism, turn your brain off. She's full of shit,
which kind of makes me question the other stuff. But
I'm not an anthropologist like her, so baits this. This lady,

(27:40):
this cannibalism obsessed lady is a monarchist and an anti
union activist as well, so I'm not primed to like her.
She seems to have grown up obsession, act like she's
one of these people. Maybe I'll do another I might
want to do an episode on her at some point.
She's got a long history of like lying about her background,
like pretending to have come from a different place than

(28:02):
she did and be a different person that she is.
And she's got like she's obsessed with cannibalism. Kind of
later in life it becomes One historian describes it as
a fixation, which gets worse as she ages and she
starts to suffer from dementia. So she's like continuing to
work as an elderly woman getting increasingly crazy and obsessed

(28:23):
with cannibalism.

Speaker 3 (28:25):
She could literally be the president right now. Yes, monarchist, racist,
like fucking making things up about her background, like was
she a time traveler?

Speaker 2 (28:37):
No, No, she's just a very modern figure administration from dementia.

Speaker 3 (28:41):
Jesus, he would have made.

Speaker 2 (28:43):
Her the fucking ambassador to Australia.

Speaker 3 (28:46):
Believes that she's qualified to do a job that she
is in no way qualified.

Speaker 2 (28:50):
To do, honestly iconic, so ahead of her time. I
talked to you a little bit earlier about how some
like some of these peoples during times of starvation would
practice and fans decide right, which is again the thing
you see all over the world. Baits is the person
who spins that into claiming that they're doing infant cannibalism, right,
and she is the primary source in this period, is
like claiming that that is a thing that's happening. She

(29:12):
writes dozens of articles in newspapers about this practice, and
in nineteen twenty came claimed to have received the bones
of a baby that had been cooked and eaten by
its pregnant Aboriginal mother. Right the bones were you want
to guess what the bones came from?

Speaker 3 (29:29):
Ooh dog cat?

Speaker 2 (29:31):
Ah, you were close your quest Jack, Yeah, fucking cat bones.
She's lying about a cat bones being a cannibalized baby,
speaking of eating cats. Don't do that. Listen to these ads.

Speaker 3 (29:46):
I thought the advertiser was.

Speaker 2 (29:50):
Hello Fresh as a new product line. We're back and
our lawyers have sent I I'm not a loud to
accuse HelloFresh of serving cat meat.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
You know, until the court case finishes one way or
the other, we can't prove that they ate cat meat. Uh,
certainly can't prove it. And you know, are their allegations
that they serve cat meat are now absolutely now there
are for sure your cat. We can't prove it.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
Your cats just sent me a text message and they're
uncomfortable with this conversation.

Speaker 2 (30:32):
Yeah, well they do look delicious.

Speaker 3 (30:35):
O my god.

Speaker 1 (30:36):
Leaves the diamonds best friend.

Speaker 2 (30:38):
Although well they've gotten fat lately. You know, they have
a good diet.

Speaker 3 (30:43):
I'm just saying, yeah, I think they look great in
your meen.

Speaker 2 (30:49):
That's right, that's I am.

Speaker 3 (30:50):
And when Sophie says they look great, she means they
look like big cartoon hamlegs.

Speaker 2 (30:55):
Yeah, that's that's what they look to me. I didn't
have breakfast today, so I'm just I'm just looking at
everything that way.

Speaker 3 (31:01):
So, by the way, it's three in the afternoon, everybody,
just so you know what, what kind of hours Robert
Keeves the audience.

Speaker 2 (31:10):
Yeah, they're aware by this point.

Speaker 3 (31:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:13):
For an example of the kind of shit Baits was
writing in newspapers at this period of time, here's a
direct quote from her. I use the word cannibal advisedly.
Every one of these natives was a cannibal. Cannibalism had
its local name from Kimberly to Ucla and through all
the unoccupied country east of it, and there were many
grisly rights attached there too. Human meat had always been
their favorite food, and there were killing vendettas from time immemorial.

(31:36):
In order that the killing should be safe murderers, slippers
or pads were made Emu feathers twisted and twined together,
bound to the foot with human hair, on which the
natives walk and run as easily as a white man,
and running shoes their feet leaving no track.

Speaker 3 (31:49):
So what does that have to do with Like, she's
just describing things that they have, like tools that they
have and being like, yeah, I'm sure they have like
shoes that allow them to move quiet, because that's useful
when you're hunting or in war. She's just like that
must be because they are trying to eat people.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
And like, again you can find like actual debate between
you know, actual anthropologists about the different kinds of cannibalism
that may or may not have been practiced here. No
one agrees everyone was a cannibal. It was not the norm.
It was not wildly common, it was not certainly not
like your favorite it was normal, right, like whether it

(32:29):
was practiced in some groups or not. Again, there's there's
argument there, but it was like what she is saying
is a complete lie that she's made up because she's
gone crazy, and it's very racist.

Speaker 3 (32:39):
They like cannibalism so much, they like try and marry it.
They weren't very cannibalism. It's their best friend.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
She she would have married cannibalism. Yes, yes, she's she's
a cannibalism influencer. Yeah, like what Joe Rogan is to
fucking iyahuasca, this Baits Lady is to cannibalism and allegations
of cannibalism.

Speaker 3 (33:00):
So frustrating that he is the psychedelics person.

Speaker 2 (33:03):
I know, I know, I've done way more fucking.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
You're so much better at psychedelics, thinking you need to
take it back. This is this is our psychedelics guy,
not fucking Joe Joe Roe, Jesus Christ. Did you see a.

Speaker 1 (33:16):
Special forget being the Joe Rogan of the Left? Robert's
the Psychedelics of the Left.

Speaker 3 (33:22):
The psychedelics guy. Yeah, I could take steroids.

Speaker 2 (33:26):
I believe in me. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (33:28):
Did you see his stand up special? Or better yet,
did you see the elephant Graveyard analysis of his stand
up special? No, I will send that link to you.

Speaker 2 (33:38):
I assume it's a literal elephant graveyard you're talking about.
I'm not gonna look in that more.

Speaker 3 (33:43):
That's the name of the channel. But they just like
go through there like we're really excited about Joe Rogan's
stand up special and then just like go joke for
joke and they're like, oh, no, show, what.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
Things have gone downhill? Since? What was he? He wasn't
on The Man Show?

Speaker 1 (33:59):
Was he fear Fact here?

Speaker 3 (34:02):
No fear Factor? It was Adam Carolla?

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was on that show with Andy Dick.

Speaker 1 (34:08):
Frankly, too much time on Joe Rogan, continue with the script.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Please, anyway, speaking of Andy Dick, the Andy Dick of
old timey European colonizers was Captain James Cook, who was
the first Englishman to enter the recorded history of the
people of Ghari. In seventeen seventy, he first sighted the
island and reported spotting several people on the shore. He

(34:31):
regarded them all as Indians, and he gave the island
the name Indian Head. So this is its name after
the Great Sandy Island. So we go from well, that's
at least accurate too. Okay, we're just being racist now great,
He in a colleague debated whether or not because again
there's like notes taken on board the ship, and the
notes are that James Cook is debating with like a colleague,

(34:53):
whether or not the skin color of these people meant
they were a new race of humans. He was kind
of tripped up by their hair, which he was surprised
to see was quote very much like ours. Wh yeah,
out of the same stuff, yeah yeah, wow, the same
kind of hair as same dang hair.

Speaker 3 (35:13):
Do you remember this article that we did at Cracked
about like the great explorers and all the just insane
lies that they told, like, well, because.

Speaker 2 (35:21):
You you have to be out of your mind, and
if you're not out of your mind when you start
becoming an explorer, the months you spend dying at sea
are going to make you lose your mind.

Speaker 3 (35:32):
Yeah, they would be. Like I saw the person like
one of them was. I think they said they have
like eyes where their shoulders were, and like mouths in
the middle of their between their niggas.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
The anthropophagy, I think are the is the name of
those that circulture.

Speaker 3 (35:51):
Yes, yeah, yes, yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:53):
I still think they're real somewhere, but they just live
I saw one down the street from them as a kid.
Yeah yeah, they just live here.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
Yeah, it was.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
These are just like the world's best liars, Like, yeah,
I guess I would as a successful imagine because you,
like you wind up in like the center of like
a European capital, effectively in the center of their entire
media ecosystem. And you're like, so, have any of you
guys been to China? All right, I'm gonna just say
some shit. Nope, I get I can I can make

(36:24):
you guys believe anything.

Speaker 3 (36:25):
Good news for me? They me as a God. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (36:28):
Yeah, uh so. The Butchola are the tribe that Cook
most likely saw first because they saw him as well,
and we have This is one of the things I
find so interesting about how kind of how much fidelity
there is with their oral tradition, how good it actually
is at at getting down history. We have their record
of seeing him right. So he's writing, he's got people

(36:49):
on his boat writing about seeing these people, and we
have them singing about seeing his ship. Per an article
by Fiona Foley, Ala artist and scholar right for the
Queensland College of Art at Griffith University. The Boschula people
were unique because not many people in the world would
be aware. They created a song recounting what was happening
when the ship passed by our country on May twentieth

(37:11):
of that year. The song takes place on a volcanic
headland of Ghari to the known in Bochula as Takiwaru.
What I love about this song are the layers of
metaphors contained within one verse. The ship rose out of
the sea like a cloud and kept near land for
three or four days. One day it came in very
close to Takiwaru, and they saw many men walking around
on it. They asked each other who are these strangers?

(37:33):
And where are they going? So you actually get like
a little bit of you know, like this record of
like a conversation of both sides of it in this stase,
which is fairly rare when you're talking about story like
things like this, like first contact between you know, in
a digitous group and Europeans that you have like both
sides of like the very first conversation about seeing each other,

(37:55):
which I find really interesting.

Speaker 3 (37:56):
And frequently they're like, and why do these guys smell?
Like shit? Yeah? Wow, the terrible why Like all the
European settlers just smelled. I mean, first of all, the
living off of boat.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
Like they're over the side of this thing, right.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
Just yeah, at first they're shitting over the side of it.
Rob By the end they're just like, I really am
so hungry, I can't even get up to the edge.

Speaker 2 (38:20):
Every one of those sailors is like eighty percent GRDA
by body weights, Like they're just just stomach aller.

Speaker 3 (38:27):
And like and swollen gums. That's the what ninety percent
of their body weights from? Man? Yeah, I mean that's
like even you know, I remember the that article that
I was talking about, like Marco Polo is one of them.
Is like whole claim to fame was going to China
and like becoming a great ruler in China and like
helping them fight a war. And you can go like

(38:51):
they were a way more advanced civilization, the most advanced civilization.
They had a they had a printing press at this point,
like well well ahead of your and so you can
like go go back and look at their written record
and like it's just crickets as far as bar goes.
But we, you know, we just trust whatever. The random
guy who you know sailed around the Bend and then

(39:11):
just like came back five years later and was like
China ever heard of it? Great?

Speaker 2 (39:16):
Yeah? Yeah, nope, Okay, I'm just gonna say, shit, now,
this is why I'm an Iban buttuitas Stan and not
a Marco Polo Stan.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
There. Yeah cool, you always have book.

Speaker 2 (39:26):
Him up, kids. He's cool. So he probably also did
some fucked up shit. Man, I'm not gonna lie. So
Fiona here, who's this Butchulla, scholar and artist who I
just quoted from, describes Cook's attempts to classify the denizens
of Gari in his decision to name the island Indian
Head as quote the first evidence of British racialization in Australia,

(39:48):
and cites Jody Byrd's book The Transitive Empire, which describes
this as part of a process that allowed the Empire
to quote facilitate, justify, and rationalize the state sponsored violence
that tear lane and resources and sovereignty from indigenous people. Right,
And I think that it doesn't start with the actual
colonization or with even the legal code. It starts with

(40:09):
this guy on a boat trying to racially categorize this
people and taking the name of their island away from
them and making it kind of a racist copy. Right
that that's the start of the process of racialization that
ends that well, it leads to genocide. It doesn't end there,
but that's a part of it. Right. So this was
just the beginning of a long process of colonial violence,

(40:30):
and a major chapter in that history brings us back
to the person who is the subject of these episodes,
Eliza Fraser, right to set up the rest of this
so that we could talk about old Eliza. She was
possibly born Elizabeth Slack in Worksworth, Derbyshire, and baptized on
the first of June and seventeen ninety eight, although that
is debated. One writer in the nineteen thirties described her

(40:53):
as coming from the Orkney Islands, and there's a number
of people who will claim she came from the Orkney Islands,
but there's not evidence of that. A great grandson of
hers in New Zealand disputed this, arguing that she was
born in Ceylon in modern Sri Lanka, where her parents
lived at the time. We do not know for certain.
The article I found claiming that she was born Elizabeth
Shack in Derbyshire was like a Derbyshire website claiming her

(41:17):
as like a native daughter of the town. So I
don't know. Maybe they have a little bit of an agenda.

Speaker 3 (41:23):
Anyone famous, you know, we don't care. Why let's just
get someone famous.

Speaker 2 (41:27):
We're scrape in the bottom of the beryl in Derbyshire, Derbyshire.

Speaker 3 (41:32):
Let's go to the genocide insiders. Let's yeah, we don't
have anybody lost.

Speaker 2 (41:36):
The article really gives her like a pass on some
things that I would not. But anyway, we don't know
for sure, although it does look like Derbyshire is one
of the likelier ones. We do have evidence that she
came from at least modest means, and enjoyed a good
education for her time, by which I mean as a
woman she learned to read and write in childhood, which

(41:57):
you know, you're not super poor generally. If that's happening
in England at this period.

Speaker 3 (42:02):
Men thought that that was scientifically and physically impossible.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
It's starting to change. By the time she'd been seventeen
ninety eight, is still pretty dark days for that. She
may have had a husband and at least one child
with someone else before she married Captain James Frasier. Maybe
not again, kind of some conflicting reports there, but she
marries this the sea captain whose boat, the Sterling Castle,
depending on again who you read, was either a crumbling

(42:29):
death trap or a relatively state of the art ship
for its time. The captain himself, her husband, is described
as either a pompous, fat old bore much of demand
by shipowners who had managed to overensure their vessels. In
other words, this guy's so incompetent you you hire him
to be a run your ship, to drunk drive your car, right,

(42:49):
if your insurance is good, He's going to drunk drive
your boat into oblivion. So that's one Claime about him.
I've also heard him described as urbane in his manners
and an attitude and features what is deemed a handsome man.
So either he was a drunk old boy who will
crash a ship, or he was like a handsome, you know,
polite and competent sea captain. You'll hear both stories. He's

(43:11):
been dead a long time. I simply don't know.

Speaker 3 (43:15):
Love how mean the conflicting thing like the yeah, right,
a big fat idiot who is dumb shit, Yeah, sucks
shit at his job. And then like there's obviously the
self edited Wikipedia entry where it's like urbane in his.

Speaker 2 (43:29):
Manner, right, yeah, he was, like I was handsome as shit.

Speaker 3 (43:32):
Picking up subtle things about how attractive he is.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
Right right, Yeah, his dick game, Like yeah, there's a
whole whole Wikipedia subcept suckset there. Yeah he was speaking
of dick game. He was fifty four and Eliza was
thirty seven when they left London on October twenty second,
eighteen thirty five, so there's a bit of an age
gap here. Now, as as is the norm for European parents,

(43:58):
they have no interest in parenting their and leave them
behind in Orkney to be watched over by a local
Presbyterian minister, which was the style at the times. Hey, kids,
we're going on a boat for like a year. We
may die or not. This minister's going to be your
dad and mom.

Speaker 3 (44:15):
Now hang out with a priest.

Speaker 2 (44:17):
Yeah, this guy's gotta be in charge. Good call parenting
in the eighteen hundreds. Most accounts will say that Eliza
was pregnant when the vessel departed, although again there's some
dispute on the matter. The sterling made it to Sydney
the following May. So it sets out in October and
it makes it to Sydney by May and offload supplies

(44:38):
it had brought from England, which you know, this is Australia.
So the supplies are rum wine, beer, pickles, mustard. You
know the necessities, right, all the things Australians need to survive.
Starting with rum wine and beer. It picks up other
goods and charts a course to Singapore. And the route

(44:58):
to Singapore with these goods that it picks up in
Sydney is going to take it past Moreton Bay. Unfortunately
for everyone aboard, this takes them near the Swain Reefs,
which is a treacherous piece of sea for competent helmsman
to navigate, and some of the evidence suggests Captain Fraser
and his men may not have been the very best

(45:19):
seaman England ever produced, which you could also say, no,
I'm not going to make that joke. So the ship
ran aground on the reef and the crew of nineteen
got into two lifeboats. Captain Fraser, his wife, his thirteen
year old nephew, and several other sailors, including a guy
named Robert darsh who we'll talk about later, got into
one leaking longboat, and everyone else got into a Pinnas,

(45:42):
which is a slightly nicer boat. Both boats traveled together
for a time and they split their supplies between them,
which included brandy and beer.

Speaker 3 (45:52):
But no water.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
So again they've got little beer. Now you don't want water,
you know what water in this boat.

Speaker 3 (45:57):
He just want some brandy and beer and some pickle
with mustard, if you right. Shit, we dropped that stuff
with the Aussies.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
Yeah, So they're just like drunk in the heat in
the tropics, which is going to slowly be killing them.
So everyone is slowly dying on these rescue boats. They
don't really know where they are. They do have guns though,
so they're they're drunk and disoriented, but heavily armed. The
nearest settlement to them is about three hundred and seventy

(46:24):
miles south of where the Fraser ran aground. But navigation
was difficult under these conditions. And again, no one particularly right, yeah, right, right,
No one's a master sailor here, right, We're not talking
about people who are great at what they're doing now.
In their defense, this is also difficult because Captain Fraser's

(46:44):
longboat is constantly taking on water, so they're baling it
out twenty four to seven while they're on it. Also
adding to the difficulty is that his wife goes into
labor on day three because it's pretty stressful having your
boat sink and then being on a longboat. So per
the most common accounting of the story, she delivers the

(47:04):
baby underwater because again the boat is constantly sinking and
the baby dies almost immediately, which geez, it's probably I
don't have trouble believing that if she was pregnant, because
babies don't do well in these conditions.

Speaker 3 (47:18):
Being born underwater during a shipwreck, yes, bad way to
have a baby. To people who have only consumed alcohol.

Speaker 2 (47:27):
Only source of galleries are beer and brandy. Yes, yeah,
I don't know what happened. How did the baby not
make it? If she did give birth and have the
baby die, it's kind of amazing she lived right like
this is it does point to her being physically pretty resilient.

Speaker 3 (47:42):
Unbelievable.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Yeah, now this is not part of the story. Part
of why people doubt whether or not Cheerly was pregnant
is that when she first gets rescued, she does not
talk about having a baby. She doesn't talk about this
in the first or second version of events that she dictated.
Later writers would only say that she she avoided this
until her story had gone eighteen hundred's viral quote, probably

(48:05):
through modesty. In other words, she didn't what it was
kind of shameful to talk about, so she didn't initially,
But she also does when she starts raising a bunch
of money, So there's some bid. Did she just make
this up to kind of get sympathy, because she definitely
does some of that, right, we really don't know. Two
days later processing this in several other traumas, Captain Fraser

(48:27):
was finally forced to put his failing boat ashore to
find water. Eliza would later claim that she figured out
how to get fresh water by lowering her skirt into
a crack and ringing enough water out of it to
fill their containers. She does lie about almost every part
of this story, and I don't assume this is true,
just because, like, well, this pretty obvious way to get water.

(48:47):
And I'm going to guess other people on these boats
had more experience foraging for water than her, So I
don't know if she had to teach all of them this.
But they didn't have dresses on though, right, and they
didn't have dresses at any rate. They fill up their water,
they finally have water, and they continue their journey until
they run out of water again. Eliza claims that she

(49:08):
was able to survive on seawater, but all of the
men got sick when they tried. And this is definitely
a lie because you simply can't survive on seawater.

Speaker 3 (49:16):
Yeah, right, that's a superpower. That's like her being like
and then I just that just flew to the island.

Speaker 2 (49:22):
Yeah, I levitated above the leaky boat. Yeah, you cannot
survive on seawater. It's generally three or four percent sodium.
Obviously drinking some like if you've ever gone swimming is fine,
but your kidneys need fresh water to process out all
of the sodium, and if you do not have fresh water,
you will get sick. Don't try to live off of seawater.

(49:43):
They're sort of traveling around the islands off that coast,
you know, periodically stopping when they need more water, trying
to find food, and eventually they wind up off the
coast of what was then called Indian Head, right based
on what Captain Cook had called it. The indigenous people
are still calling it Ghari. But Captain Fraser doesn't want
to get on the big island because number one, he

(50:04):
thinks it's a chunk of the Australian mainland. But number two,
he's been told everyone here is a cannibal, so he's
like scared of they can see people, and he doesn't
want to get close to people because he thinks they'll
eat him. One day, though, the pinnace, which is the
second boat with them, goes out to find water, while
the longboat kind of waits by the shore and it
never comes back. The people on it do eventually find

(50:26):
their way back to civilization. I don't know if they
just abandoned Eliza and her husband. Maybe because they found
them annoying.

Speaker 3 (50:32):
They're so annoying.

Speaker 2 (50:33):
Yeah, yeah, there is some evidence.

Speaker 3 (50:35):
History changed based on like how annoying someone is. Yeah,
the survivors were like, yeah, she sucked for a different
podcast looking into the day Lincoln was assassinated, and like
the only reason that ulysses As Grant wasn't there was
because ulysses As Grant's wife found Mary Todd Lincoln annoying. Yeah,

(50:58):
completely changed the course of history.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
You know, folks, you have to follow your instincts. If
you think someone's annoying, you're definitely gonna die if you
go out to a party with them.

Speaker 1 (51:08):
Never underestimate having that one annoying friend that you keep
around just to avoid assassinations.

Speaker 3 (51:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:14):
Yeah, that's the whole reason the guy you created Family
Guys survived nine to eleven. If I'm remembering correctly, had
bad vibes about a flight turned out to be a
bad flight to be Yeah, I don't remember if that's
exactly what happened, but he definitely was supposed to be
on one of those flights.

Speaker 3 (51:28):
They're like, he keeps doing the quagmire voice.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
Yeah, you're one.

Speaker 3 (51:34):
Stop saying giggity giggity man.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
No, they would let anybody on flights back then, as
as evidenced by nine to eleven happenings.

Speaker 3 (51:43):
Right, what a time.

Speaker 1 (51:45):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (51:50):
So anyway, they get abandoned off the coast of Gari,
and you know, they spend about a week kind of
sailing around the coast because again they're scared of the cannibals,
and they managed to like live off of limpets that
they tear off of rocks before eventually getting desperate enough
that like, fuck it, let's try our luck. We're going
to die either way. It's kind of I said earlier.

(52:14):
They think they found the mainland. We don't one hundred
percent know if they know this is an island or not,
but most accounts will say they thought this was somewhere
on the mainland that was just isolated from European civilization.
They are met very quickly by five locals with spears. Now,
contrary to all these myths that Captain Fraser had believed
that these people were cannibals, these folks, these Butchola people

(52:36):
see strange white people come aground and they show up
with food. Right, They're like, you guys look like shit.
You are obviously dying. We've watched you sailing, We've watched
you like boating around the coast, trying to eat liftoff
of limpets. You're clearly dying. I don't know why you
didn't come for help earlier. Here's some food, right, This
is very obviously a humanitarian gesture. But even in modern

(53:00):
casual accounts like this write up I found in Great
British Life, which is the one that wants to take
credit for her coming from Derbyshire, this humanitarian gesture is
often described as like gross and savage. Quote the Machola
people approached them with decomposing kangaroo meat. When a sailor
ate some they took some of his clothing and like
what man number one? They don't have refrigerators right, like

(53:23):
this is this happens in like the winter, so it's
not a great seat. They don't have a lot of food,
like this kind of going off like kangaroo meat is
the best they can do, and it's better than you
were able to do for yourselves, like this is a
this is a nice thing.

Speaker 3 (53:38):
They approached them with fruit that had brown spots on y.

Speaker 2 (53:42):
Yeah, fuck, and like they give him food and they're like, hey,
can I try on your clothes? Like, I haven't seen
anything like that. It's weird. It's a pretty normal thing
to do. You're meeting some very culture. Can I try
that hat? I've never worn a hat?

Speaker 3 (53:54):
What is that? Yeah, to this day, athletes exchange jerseys, right,
you know, it's a thing that's done, and it's not
a sign of war. It's a sign of like, hey,
this is silly.

Speaker 2 (54:05):
When I met you, you gave me some rancid kangaroo meat,
although for a different reason that we don't need to
get into.

Speaker 3 (54:10):
And then we exchanged shirts.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
We did exchange shirts. Yes, that was more to Yeah,
it was a weird hallucinogen. Yeah, the rant of kangaroo meat. Yeah,
if you get making in the high meat, you trip
off of it. Yeah, that's right. Look it up, folks.
So not long after this, eight of the remaining men
who had gotten like landed with Captain Fraser and Eliza

(54:33):
either try to leave or like walk off to try
to find a town to get rescued for everyone else,
or they just dessert. We don't really know. Crewman Harry
Yolden is the source of the claim that like we deserted,
and he blames Eliza for making them desert right quote,
she was a terrible liar and the most profane, artful,
wicked woman that ever lived, and this does comport with

(54:54):
some of her later behavior. Although other crewmen alleged that
Yolden was the problem and he stole a bunch of
water that like, way more water than he was supposed
to be drinking, both of these could be true. Maybe
they both sucked right. He Also, Yolden also called Eliza
a she captain, which is him insulting both her and
her husband.

Speaker 3 (55:13):
Yeah, he sounds like the worst it's possible for everyone
to such stirring shit in the middle of the life
and death thing, just like shit stirring on a new level,
being like, oh well, I guess we should listen to
our captain our wife. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (55:28):
At the same time, I do think that you should
now address me as she captain, as she captain, because
it's kind of grown on me in the last thirty seconds.

Speaker 2 (55:36):
I don't feel like you need to gender captain. Like
it's not an inherently masculine or feminine work.

Speaker 1 (55:42):
I don't know, there's kind of a flow to it. She.

Speaker 2 (55:45):
It's like calling somebod a she person. You don't really
need to do that. That just kind of sounds fucked up. Yeah,
So Eliza alleged that Yolden at one point threatened to
throw the captain overboard while they were still on the boat.
I don't know, uh, And also, depending on how competent
Captain Fraser was, this may have been an understandable move.
I can see a version of the story. We're throwing

(56:06):
him overboard might have been the best thing for everyone
at any rate. After they are rescued by the bachola,
the group splits up and Darj Yolden and four other
men head for where they think is Moreton Bay. But
Moreton Bay is on the mainland, so again they don't
really know where they are. Eliza her husband good navigators.

Speaker 3 (56:24):
We're gonna head over to Sydney.

Speaker 2 (56:27):
It's like east, and I think East is left, so yeah,
we'll just try that.

Speaker 3 (56:32):
They've been at sea, like offshore, sailing around the island
for the past like few weeks, and now I think.

Speaker 2 (56:39):
I say they're bad at this.

Speaker 3 (56:40):
I'm sure it's hard, Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (56:43):
I haven't tried to navigate this way without access to
a backup land. Eliza, her husband, and four other men
go south with the bachola. Right now, most of them
have guns, but they become separated at some point, or
several of them become separated at some point. It's a
little bit unclear exactly what happens. All of these stories

(57:05):
are kind of different, but Eliza and her husband wind
up living with the batola for several months, and the
first thing that she reports the Patrolla show them how
to do is dig a hole in the sand so
that it fills with water and then add leaves from
a local shrub to improve the taste. Right, So again,
they're like trying to teach them how to survive. They
are attempting to do a humanitarian things, right those monthster like, oh,

(57:28):
you guys are always you're dipping your filthy clothing into
water to like, no, this is how you get nice
clean water.

Speaker 3 (57:35):
Patiently teaching them how to not die. She's like, oh
my god, they're trying to kill me.

Speaker 2 (57:41):
Yeah. Now, Eliza admits that they did this, but she
also claims they demanded clothing from the men and beat
one of them when he refused. And here's how John Wright,
the author of that Derbyshire Life article, describes what happened next.
They're dwindling numbers made the Aborigines. Again, that's not Aboriginal
people preferred terb but this is how he writes it

(58:02):
bolder in the exchange of clothing continued until they were naked.
The men were led away, leaving Eliza naked apart from
some trailing sea grape plant she tied around her waist.
Aboriginal women took her to their camp, prodded her and
pulled her hair. They gave her a baby to breastfeed
as its mother was sick, and painted her body with
charcoal and lizard grease to make her skin darker. Now
this is largely wrong. It's based on a mix of

(58:24):
three different accounts left by Frasier and several subsequent books,
one of which is fiction based on her story. Some
of these details are true, but are missing important details.
For example, the story about them painting her with charcoal
and grease is likely true, but they didn't do it
to make her skin darker. There's substantial documentation that the
Bochola used charcoal to treat wounds, rubbing it into like

(58:48):
an injury as a sav or ungwin perhaps mixed with herbs, right,
and this can actually be effective. You don't have better
methods right available, Like this is a thing that the
Beachola and other people do. So this account and other
accounts are like, oh, they did it because they wanted
to make her skin darker like theirs. It's like, no,
she was probably covered in cuts because she'd been shipwrecked

(59:09):
and at sea for months and they were trying to
treat her injuries.

Speaker 3 (59:12):
Blackface was actually their idea. It's not something that we
do on our Yeah, they actually came up with the now, yeah,
because they thought it was cool. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:21):
It looks to me like they were again trying to
teach her how to have clean water and deal with
her injuries so she doesn't die. And also, the story
about being forced to nurse is not in either of
Eliza's original accounts, and she in fact does not bring
this up at all until she gets back to London,
which is like the third version of the story she gives,
which is also when she adds the part of the

(59:42):
story that she gave birth on a lifeboat. So again,
maybe she was just embarrassed to talk about it earlier,
or maybe she knew that this. She was raising money
off of the story at this point, so maybe she
just knew that like, oh, adding in that they made
me breastfeed one of their babies. That's going to really
like be freaky to all of these like white British
people that like, I was made to do this. I'll

(01:00:04):
just throw that into the story too. She would also
later claim to have been given the job of maggot
picking right, otherwise picking like maggots out of injuries, and
maybe she was that's the thing you need, you're going
to have people do, and they have her work, not
like in a mean way, but because you don't survive
as a group of people living this way unless everyone

(01:00:24):
does stuff right. In general, she alleges beasteal treatment from
the Butchola, who, by her accounts, forced her and the
other survivors into hard labor and beat them when they
failed to work at a sufficient pace. Now it's important
that we take a second here to look at how
the Bachola would have seen these white people at this
point in time. They have had very little contact with Europeans,

(01:00:46):
and their traditional concept of the world was a lot
smaller than it would become. Since part of their funerary
ritual involved skinning the dead, which left them looking white.
They interpreted the first white people they saw as something
like ghosts returned to corporeal form. Right, these are the
ghosts of our dead who have come back to us.

Speaker 3 (01:01:05):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:01:05):
That's at least, you know, an anthropological account that I found,
and it was common. Some of the evidence for this
is that it was really common in this period for
stranded whites who like wound up on the island to
get adopted into different bands on Gari after one member
of a tribe or another would be like, oh, I
think this is the returned spirit of like my husband
or my kid, right, And so that was kind of

(01:01:26):
like the way that they rationalized what they were doing
and sort of you know, what was going on under
the hood here. Another thing that's happening in this period
is that, you know, you've got cities like Sydney, which
are European cities and thus have European prisons, and sometimes
convicts will escape these prisons on mainland settlements and they'll flee,
and some of them will wind up on these islands

(01:01:47):
and they will be taken in by the Bachula and
other tribes. And again the same kind of justification is
used when someone arrives a nineteen seventy seven paper in
the Journal of Occupational Papers in Anthropology noted quote. The
most likely to have reached the island first was James Davis,
who ran in March eighteen twenty nine and subsequently joined
the Bachula on the Mary River. Although initially known to

(01:02:09):
coastal Aborigines as Dunnbot, meaning small one, among the Bachula,
he became Thorimbi, the reincarnated son of a tribal elder
killed in battle some years before. Again to tales of
Davis's exploits are sparse, for he was a particularly taciturn
individual who remained tight jawed about much of his fourteen years.
Experiences as a wild white man. David Bracewells for Bossi

(01:02:30):
earned him the name want or Talker, but it was
not until his fourth abstention from Warreton Bay after July
eighteen thirty nine that he actually mentions having passed over
to Fraser's Island, called Gari by the natives, right he
spells at Karina. I don't understand why, but it's pronounced Kai,
where he remained for nearly a year. His impression was
that its inhabitants were very numerous, he thinks thousands, and

(01:02:50):
at their great fights he has seen them, covering the
beach for four miles in extent. Finally, John Failey, called Gizburi,
after a long trek from Armadol to the Mary River
via the Bunyel festivals in the Black All Ranges, moved
with the Aboriginal people of White Bay for almost twelve years,
helping them to plan raids against early White settlers, before
being retaken by Lieutenant Bly and his Native mounted police

(01:03:11):
in December eighteen fifty four. Fayhee, it seems, became the
most totally incorporated of all the fugitives into Aboriginal lifestyles,
passing through the Bora ceremony and bearing upon his body
the Musgara scars and the Eppelate Bora marks on the
white shoulder. After enduring the brutal privations of convict life,
each of these escapees testified to the comparatively kindly treatment
they received from the Aboriginal people. In John Fahy's case,

(01:03:33):
his Black kinsmen fought bitterly with the Native troopers to
prevent his recapture. Upon his return to Sydney, However, officialdom
casually awarded Fayhee a year's imprisonment on the roads and
chains and forgot him. This is like fascinating story of
like these people who have been tossed out by their
own culture and like you have no value, but like
being chained to a gang, working on the roads or

(01:03:56):
locked in a cage, and they're adopted as members of
the family by some of these groups. I find that
particularly the case of Fah where he's like helping them
raid at like white settlers, and they're like fighting, you know,
tooth and nail to the death to stop him from
being recaptured. They like, you know, ritually scar his body.
They take it's it's I wish we knew more about

(01:04:16):
that guy. It's an amazing story.

Speaker 3 (01:04:18):
Yeah, all of these interpretations where it's like and they
thought we were ghosts and were like it's like but
then all of the stories when people when they're living
side by side, it's always people love to like go
join the tribe and like are accepted in.

Speaker 2 (01:04:37):
It seems to be a mix. Like some of these
people do go back and forth. A couple of these
guys go back several times, will like try to make
it in Europe and then head back to the tribe.
Like some of them have like families that they will
periodically leave and then come back to So it is
like a it's like a complicated, for sure exchange here,

(01:04:57):
but certainly like like especially the case of Fahy, this
guy who is like, oh you know what these people rip,
I'm going to help him kill like these colonizers, right,
sounds like and then yeah, dies abandoned in a chain
gang by the British authorities. Yeah. Real bummer, real bummer.

(01:05:17):
But yeah, Like fascinating stuff and the fact that it's
one of those things. One of the things I find
interesting that we'll talk about more in part two is
this belief that like these people with white skin are
like returning spirits, isn't going to last. Right, This is
a belief that exists primarily when they have not had
a lot of contact with Europeans. They don't keep believing

(01:05:38):
that forever, right, Like, it becomes very clear as they
have more and more Oh no, no, no, these are
these people are something else, and they're kind of a
problem for us, right, Like, this is something that changes
because this is not a static culture. Right, They're capable,
like any culture, of adapting to times because they're people, right, Like,
this isn't just like this is the thing they believed.

(01:05:59):
It's like, no, this was like a belief that existed
at a period of time and changed after contact with
the world.

Speaker 3 (01:06:05):
Right on first pass. They were like, they look different.
There must be a reason for this.

Speaker 2 (01:06:09):
Oh no, there's yeah, kind of like our dead people.
Maybe they're like, you know, this is something that happens.

Speaker 3 (01:06:15):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:06:17):
Yeah, it's not like when you think about like the
what they had in access to information wise, it's not
an a logical conclusion to come to initially. So and
again it's important here at this point, as we kind
of close this episode out, that I make two acknowledgments.
The first is that even though the vast bulk of
the evidence suggests that the people who took in Eliza

(01:06:37):
and her husband and shipmates were trying to be kind
and welcome them in essentially as members of the family,
this still would have been disorienting and terrifying for Eliza
and her shipmates, and not just because they're racist, because like,
you don't know these people language, you don't understand entirely
what they're trying to do. It is a scary situation,
even if you're not a bigot. It's like scary because

(01:06:58):
you can't communicate direct with these folks, and some of
them are going to get angry at you, right, like
because you're not good at hunting and gathering, and you're
kind of dragging the rest of the group down and
taking away resources of them, right.

Speaker 3 (01:07:12):
And you're like another mouth to feed. You're like that baby.
They're like, God, can I he just fucking bashes ahead
in with a rock, right could? I? Like, it's what
are we doing here? Right?

Speaker 2 (01:07:21):
And like, like many cultures, like there is like corporal
punishment if you're not pulling your weight, maybe you get smacked, right,
you get yelled at, or you get smacked, right, Because
that's just like a thing that's not in common with people,
and these folks are not They're like children, right like
you have to they can't. They're not learning how to
do anything fast enough, and they require a lot of

(01:07:42):
food to keep alive.

Speaker 3 (01:07:44):
So many wacky misunderstandings and understandings, and also just these
people this is the starving time of the year, so
you have to also keep in mind when members of
the Bachola are doing stuff like smacking them for not
being good at gathering food, they're starving actively because it's
the starving season, Right, you go hungry at points in

(01:08:04):
the year regularly because it's just kind of hard to
live this way. They gave me a spanking on my
little bottom, these savages.

Speaker 2 (01:08:13):
Right, And when we talk about like, yeah, maybe they'd
get smacked, you know, smacked around or hit or something
for not doing a job correctly, that is the same
in the culture they came from. The most common phrase
to describe how the British Navy is held together in
this period is rum sodomy and the lash otherwise keeping
them drunk, letting them fuck each other and whipping them

(01:08:34):
until they're bloody when they don't perform at the expected level, right,
Like Captain Fraser would have whipped people on his ship.
So the fact that they are also being subject to
probably some corporal punishment when they fuck up is not
like alien to them, right, Their own culture does this.

Speaker 3 (01:08:52):
He's like, but not me, Yeah, Captain Fraser.

Speaker 2 (01:08:55):
Sometimes people you know, smack each other. It's not uncommon.
This is not bachola thick. So the worst that we
might say then about the beatola is they expected these
guests or ghosts or whatever however they saw them to
pull their own weight, and they weren't afraid to, like,
you know, chastise them if they put the group in danger.
Much of Eliza and the European world's horror at her

(01:09:18):
treatment is going to come from the fact that the
Beatola they didn't It's not that they treated her as
a slave or as a captive, but they treated her
like an equal, and for the rest of her life,
Eliza Fraser is never going to forgive them for this,
and neither are the Europeans. Jesus, that's all coming in
part two, Jack.

Speaker 3 (01:09:36):
That sounds like it's going to be a really fun
part two without any horrifying information to learn.

Speaker 2 (01:09:42):
Yeah, no, it's all good. From here. They start a
dance troop smooth yea, they dance it out, they open
a B and B together. Yeah, it's great. It's all
gonna be good. All right, Jack, You anything to plug.

Speaker 3 (01:09:58):
I do, Robert, thank you so much for asking. I
co host a show called The Daily Zeitgeist with Miles Gray,
also a guest on this show in the past. We're
on there every like every weekday. I believe that can't
be right. That's too many, too many damn shows. Yeah,

(01:10:20):
Monday through Friday we drop at least an episode, so
you can find me there, and I'm on Twitter at
Jack Underscore O Brian and on blue Sky at jack
Obi the number one because I didn't get on Blue
Sky fast enough.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
Right right, Well, either get on Blue Sky or don't. Honestly,
I think we've all had enough social media at this point.
Maybe light your computer on fire.

Speaker 3 (01:10:44):
That's an interesting idea.

Speaker 2 (01:10:45):
Burn your own house down with all of your electronics
in it, except whatever electronics you use to listen to
this podcast. Don't stop listening to this podcast. Accept this advice.

Speaker 3 (01:10:57):
Obviously, burn down your neighborhood.

Speaker 2 (01:11:00):
Yeah, okay, let's end on that note.

Speaker 1 (01:11:06):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the
Bastards is now available on YouTube, new episodes every Wednesday
and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot com slash

(01:11:27):
at Behind the Bastards.