Interview with Sylvia Lerch, author of Grasp the Nettle

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Go back in time before electricity, running water, or any
way to communicate with the outside world. Now do it
in nineteen twenties Australia. Our guest today comes to us
from that opposite side of the world. We're up early
and she's up late, so we're going to have a
lot of fun talking about her latest novel, Grasp the Nettle.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
Let's give a.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
Mighty ccw Welcome to historian, octogenarian and author Sylvia lerch Yay.
Welcome to our show, Sylvia, and I wave to you
from clar across the planet here. Thank you so much
for taking the time to meet with us today. Usually
the first thing we do for guests is to let

(00:42):
them tell our audience where to find them on the internet.
But you are not on the internet, so we will
make sure that all of the links directly to your
book and how they can find you will be on
our website, counterculturewise dot com. And if you do decide
to hop onto TikTok, let us know and we'll make
sure that everybody knows where to find you. Let's start

(01:06):
right out of the gate and talk about the title
of your book and Grasp the Nettle. Now I grew
up in Washington State, where we have stingy nettles a plenty,
and the title spoke to me because of that. But
not everybody is familiar with those, So why don't you
let us know why you titled the book that and

(01:26):
why specifically nettles.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
It's an old fashioned term that fits with the era
of the story in the nineteen twenties. Nettles particularly grow
where people have what we call chucks, that's domestic hens.
They seem to grow very willingly around hen houses. But

(01:49):
who these days has that yard ends. So the cover
was designed to be instantly legible and to relate to
the fact that it's an Australian story. So it's got
gum leaves.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yeah, I was going to ask about that, that's not
actually a netle, but it's definitely when Aussie plant.

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Yes, And why uh grasp the netle?

Speaker 1 (02:21):
If I'm understanding it is basically, let's take charge of things.
Let's just it's going to sting but let's just do it.
Is that kind of the overall meaning of that Title's.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
Be brave enough to face your circumstances and so forth,
be brave enough to just have the courage to make
the best of your circumstances. Well, actually, if you do
grasp the netle, it doesn't sting you. It stings you
if you rub up against it.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
And lately, yes, exactly, Yes, yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:54):
That's appropriate because so much of the nineteen twenties, well
it's remembered for its gay abandon and so forth, that
it must have actually been a very difficult time of
life for a lot of people, for a number of reasons,
like the failure to recognize gender diversity for one thing.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
Yeah, that was something I've found very interesting in this
book is you don't come out and just overtly say anything.
And I found myself writing little sticky notes and question
marks and highlighting things.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
I'm like, wait, is that is he? Is she?

Speaker 1 (03:37):
And so I have so many questions that we'll probably
do that offline because I want.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Readers to read this and enjoy how it unfolds.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
The book is written through journal entries of basically a
pioneer woman who is married off to a guy in
the would you call that the outback?

Speaker 3 (04:00):
It is a very remote district. I still live in
that district. Really, yes, I live in a really small town.
But the nearest town south appears three hundred kilometers. The
nearest one is six hundred kilometers and it is a

(04:23):
remote area. And of course in that beer there were
no phones, no internet, none of the things we take
for granted, no GPS, no electricity, and it would have
been ten times more remote than it is today. Yeah,
those things hadn't been invented.

Speaker 1 (04:46):
She barely even had a stove or a roof. I
mean she started our heroine in the book at dirt
floor kind of a put together stove that was really smoky,
and literally had to do everything from scratch. How much
of you is in that character?

Speaker 3 (05:06):
A lot. I enjoy basically living, if you like, I
lived on a yacht with no engine and no refrigeration,
and you really learn to pare down your possessions when
you live on a sailing boat. And I have had

(05:28):
lots of first hand experience of cooking and an open
fire on hunting trips and so forth. And Elsie, my protagonist,
she doesn't have a stove. She has an open half
with a chain hanging down there and s hooks on
the chain so you can put what you're cooking close
to the fire or further away from the fire, so

(05:50):
there is some else of control in it, and she's
too far out of town to walk into town. She
has no horse to ride a car, of course, and
her husband works in a job that takes him away
for weeks at a time, so she's left to her
own devices. And she is educated enough to be keeping

(06:12):
a journal. That means she was taught to read and
write and so forth, which is a very prestigious thing
really in those days, because so many people could read
or write. And so the only book she has to
read is King James version copy of the Bible, and

(06:32):
she reads it, but she makes unconventional interpretations of the text.

Speaker 1 (06:38):
Actually, there are a couple of things conclusions that she
came to that rocked my world. And I there's one
in particular that I actually discussed with my husband last night,
and I marked it and highlighted it because it's so
profound and yet makes so much sense. I'm going to

(07:01):
go ahead and read, if that's okay. So she is
at the very beginning. She names her diary Poppy, and
so i'd to it. She says, dear Poppy, and she
treats her diary as if she's writing letters to a person.
And so you get a lot of insight because She's very,
very honest and detailed. Whereas her husband that she doesn't

(07:25):
even meet until she gets sent out there to be
with him, he just is not He doesn't the very
I mean, you really have to glean and dial down
to get anything from his journal entries. It's mostly just
business stuff, but once in a blue moon you'll get
a little insight into Yeah. So I want to read

(07:47):
this part here because, ah, this really hit me. At
the end of chapter three in Genesis. This is her
writing to her diary after Adam and Eve have been disobedient.
It says God clothed them with skins. It must mean
that additional punishment for Adam and Eve was for God
to clothe them in skin and bone, flesh and blood,
reduced to the status of mere animals, subject to gravity, disease,

(08:10):
and decay, and no longer able to hover in the
image of God.

Speaker 2 (08:16):
I love that interpretation is so vulous.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
It makes sense, doesn't it. It makes sense, and certainly
I'm very happy to be able to express that in
a form that claims to the fiction. It makes sense
to me that I can say that and disguised as fiction.
But earlier, she's reading Genesis, and she reads in the

(08:44):
early chapters of Genesis that God made the waters and
the Holy Spirit hovers over the water like a dove,
and she says, if I am made in the image
of God, I must be able to hover. And then
she reads on and works out, oh, Adam and Aid
must have been reduced to me animals, what a punishment?

(09:08):
And how to be no longer able to harbor.

Speaker 1 (09:13):
I think it's such a wonderful and poignant conclusion that
she came to, because I've read the Bible many many
times and that thought never.

Speaker 2 (09:21):
Occurred to me. But it makes so much sense.

Speaker 1 (09:24):
That actually makes a lot more sense. So I love that,
like you said, through fiction you were able to convey that.
I think that's fantastic. And there's a lot more insights
in there. You very very lightly touch on the natives,
the aboriginals, and then very very lightly touched on Islam,

(09:47):
and you forget that there was a presence.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
Way back then of.

Speaker 1 (09:54):
Even You've mentioned campbels and things like that, and I
think people have no idea, so you get a little
bit of a historical knowledge as well.

Speaker 2 (10:03):
Talked a little bit about.

Speaker 1 (10:04):
The incredible loneliness that she must have felt, and towards
the end, it's almost as if she starts going a
little bit mad. I mean, she starts talking to the
leather flap on her window that was made from a
shoe tongue and gives it a name and everything, and
then of course she is she doesn't even question or

(10:28):
rail against the fact that she's just basically seen as
a breeder and that her her entire reason to exist
is to give him children.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
And then you, it's.

Speaker 1 (10:41):
Your book is so gentle, and yet it touches on
such hard, difficult things where he talks about if it's
only a girl, balance, if she has a baby and
it's only a girl, like it's just a throwaway thing.

Speaker 2 (10:57):
It's just I don't know how.

Speaker 1 (10:59):
You find it that way, where you're reading it and
you're like ah, and yet at the same time it's
just you just gently ease into it.

Speaker 2 (11:06):
I was really impressive. I'm sorry. I don't mean to
be blowing smoke out of your two two ear, but
I really did enjoy this book. Sometimes I get I
get gushy. I do apologize.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
She fanned girls, I do, I fan girl that's what
we call Why why did you choose that specific time period?
I mean, you talked to a little bit about it
being you know, gay and happy, and people think about
the Roaring twenties in the US. Things were drastically different
in Australia, and so you are basically that girl in

(11:39):
modern day. What made you pinpoint that specific decade.

Speaker 3 (11:45):
Well, that was brought alive to me by my parents'
first hand experience of it. My father was born in
nineteen hundred and two and my mother in nineteen hundred
and six, so they experienced that ear at firsthand, and
they lived through very difficult times, the First World War,
the Second World War, the Great Concision, and they just

(12:08):
made history come alive. For instance, in that era must
have been nineteen twenty my grandfather, my mother's father, bought
the second automobile you would say, a Murdika ever sold
in Tasmania. And he'd worked and lived with horses all
his life, so he didn't really know what he was buying.

(12:30):
And my mother said, he learned to drive this thing.
He would start it in the first year and move
up to second year and all the way up to
third year. That she said if the engine was laboring,
because they were going up a hill and there are
lots of hills in Tasmania. Instead of changing down to

(12:51):
second gear, he would let go the steering wheel and
raise his arms high in the air and urge the horses, eye,
get up.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
Oh my goodness. So he didn't quite understand down shifting here.
He was invoking the horses.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
It's hilarious.

Speaker 3 (13:11):
It just makes alive. And they had lots of stories
like that. So the book really tries to encourage the
reader to use their imagination too. It's short and intense,
it's controversially nonconformist, but it has other curiosities that The

(13:36):
formatting is important, the two diaries in different front to
make it easier to read. But a lot of the
historical information is accurate. The two protagonists are very different people.

(13:57):
She's the energetic, young, romantic young woman and he's a
very staid businessman trying to please his father. And that
information such as the fact that his brother, who never
came home from the First World War, had taken with

(14:20):
him to war, the book that so many Australian soldiers
took with them. That's C. J. Dennis's book Sentiment, The
Sentimental Bloke, which is full of boody rivaled ballads and
songs written in the vernacular, and it includes that wonderful
chorus that people say should have been turned into the

(14:42):
Australian national anthem. I don't know it, but I can
recite Please Do, Please Do, and it comes time and
time again in this ballad. But it's get a bloody
move on, have some flaming sense on the flipping art
of sefter bloody fence so much that book to war

(15:10):
with them instead of carrying a copy of the Bible.
Of course, so that kind of detail is genuine. So
are all the stats about law production and fleece and
so forth, and so it's historically accurate, but it also

(15:32):
is meant to make people understand the era better. I
think it's very important people know that so much of
the wealth in this country came from the sheep's back.
It's important to know that one pound in weight of
grease fleets paid a white man's wages for a month,

(15:57):
and each sheep carries pounds pounds of wool, and the
flocks of sheep are counted in thousands. It's just staggering
the value of the wol clip.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
And that's basically every journal entry is either talking about
having to repair things or head of sheep, and through
that you kind of get little tidbits here and there.
I mean, his first journal entry is well, not as
very first, but one of the first journal entries is,
you know, got married, Better tell the father.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
I mean, that's it.

Speaker 1 (16:32):
That's all you get out of him. Yeah, And no
answer from his father. And then later, I mean, we're
almost halfway through the book and I come across this
line and I went, uh, I was not expecting that
no answer from father ever, regarding how come it is
acceptable for two women to live together and just be

(16:53):
called old maids, but it is not acceptable for two
men to share their lives together. And I actually put
a flag there with a big question mark, is like,
uh am I missing something here, and it's never and
then it's never mentioned again. It's never brought up again.
It's just.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
Nothing. And then like, wow, Okay.

Speaker 3 (17:15):
It's for the reader to feather out. He's trying to
do what his father wants. His father wants grandsons to
carry on the family name. His brother has lost his
life in the war. But if you read on and
come to the end and return back to the beginning, yes, yes,

(17:39):
it begins to tie itself all together, except of course,
did you identify the missing clue in the police report,
the original police report about the deceased mail that's been found.

Speaker 1 (17:57):
Yes, and I had some questions about that, but I
don't want to give away too much. But my first
question was about the initials or am I off?

Speaker 3 (18:09):
No, you're exactly right, but you're giving I'm.

Speaker 2 (18:13):
Sorry, I'm giving it away too much now. But yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
I got to the very end and it was like
one of those m night shamal on movies where we're like,
hold on, wait, okay, hold on, and then you have
to go all the way back to the beginning and say.

Speaker 2 (18:23):
Okay, yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
And I do encourage our listeners, our followers to give
it a read and then all those questions you had
along the way go back and read it again and
things will start to click into place.

Speaker 4 (18:39):
You'll be like, oh, yeah, So I'm not going to
say much more other than it's not.

Speaker 2 (18:50):
A happy ending. There's no happiness to be found in
this book.

Speaker 1 (18:55):
It's a very, like I said, very well written, beautiful book,
yet very difficult because all your emotions get tangled up
and you don't get you know, the Disney Princess ending.

Speaker 2 (19:10):
You get a very.

Speaker 1 (19:12):
Realistic ending, and it's and it's tough. It's tough, and
then then you finish it. You close the last page,
and you do this for a minute, and then.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
You go back and you read it again. Command.

Speaker 3 (19:28):
So I told you it's a very good book for
book clubs because it's an intense and full of curiosities,
and it's not just as straightforward Lived Happily Ever after
fairy Tale. It's far closer to the realities of the time.
Sickness must have been a huge part of life in

(19:51):
those days, and it's too easy to forget all that, and.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
That we would succumb to things like measles or flu or.
I mean, those were deadly things back then. We don't
even think about that now.

Speaker 3 (20:08):
Her eesels, mumps, chicken pop skooping cops. I remember asking
my mother what happened in your day if a child
was born with a recognizable handicap, such as dumb syndrome
or something, and without hesitation, she just said, they were
mercifully carried away by God. And I said, well, what

(20:29):
on earth do you mean by that? And she said,
there were no immunizations in those days. When a child
that was obviously not going to have a very rewarding
kind of a life. When that child became inevitably sick
with measles, mumps, chicken, pop scooping, cop dipped there as

(20:50):
garlet theater, any of those terrible sicknesses. No one actually
nursed that infant back to help. They just put them
aside to be mercifully carried away by God. Oh it's
a very different life.

Speaker 1 (21:05):
Different mindset. Yeah so they wow, Yeah that was nineteen twenties. Yeah,
that is a harsh reality, very harsh reality. Now, besides
the historical element, and I'm just going to be honest,

(21:27):
you let us know.

Speaker 2 (21:27):
You're an octogenarian. You are not a spring chicken. You
are not a.

Speaker 1 (21:31):
Young, you know, college student who is getting modern ideas
in your head. Where did these what we would consider
to be modern ideas of gender equality or orientation or
some of these other ideas.

Speaker 2 (21:50):
Where did those come from? With you?

Speaker 1 (21:53):
I mean, you've traveled the world. We'll talk a little
bit more about that, But where did that come from
from a woman who isn't from these times and isn't.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
Where did you even get these ideas?

Speaker 3 (22:07):
Life experience teaches you a lot. And I have children
of my own and grandchildren and now I have great grandchildren,
and the gender diversity has always been there. It's just
not been accepted until now. It's not been properly identified

(22:29):
or accepted. Although some of it now might be described
as being taken over the top, I don't know that.
I think gender diversity has always been there, it just
wasn't accepted. It was swept under the carpet or denied,
and I think that must have made life very hard

(22:52):
for people like tom My character Tom. And so once
again I'm trying to make the reader be imaginative about
what's in the book. Use your imagination. What would it
be like? How hard would it have been to be
socially unaccepted because of who you are?

Speaker 1 (23:18):
Yeah, and the only insight you get into that is
that one passage. You don't hammer it like so many
modern writers do. You didn't make it the entire book
about that. We were talking about gender equality, and I
had mentioned briefly that I actually found the line wife
safely delivered a baby. Don't think I'll bother notifying father

(23:41):
as it's only a girl, no guarantee it's even mine exactly.
That poor woman is out in the middle of nowhere,
who's does he think it.

Speaker 3 (23:51):
Is his good friend who broke in the marriage.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
All right, I'm not going to say any more because
I want people to come to their own conclusions.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
I just love that I got to pick your brain offline.

Speaker 1 (24:05):
I feel like I have I want to read the
book again with the knowledge that I got from you.

Speaker 2 (24:09):
So nanny nanny booboo to everybody who reads this book.

Speaker 1 (24:12):
And doesn't get to talk to the author firsthand, because
there's a lot going on in this book. I want
to talk about you though, while we have you, and
we'll come back to the book.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
The book is, like I said, I've been gushing about it,
but you, Oh my goodness, what a life you've had.
So you do have previous books.

Speaker 1 (24:30):
The one I was looking at is out of print,
so I do want to ask about that for a
couple of reasons. The title of it is Barefoot Roving
the Traveling Kitchen.

Speaker 2 (24:40):
My first question.

Speaker 1 (24:41):
I'm a barefooter. I like, don't even own shoes. I
go barefoot everywhere I go. I've always We live in Texas,
which is the Australia of the United States.

Speaker 2 (24:51):
Meeting everything's out to kill you.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
We have fire ants and rattlesnakes, and black widows, and.

Speaker 2 (24:56):
We live and we live out in the country.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
Yeah, all of those things are in our yard right now,
so we're like way out in the middle of nowhere.
Do people I mean, I've heard that in town that
being barefoot is like an ozzy thing that nobody bats
an eye. Were here in the States, everybody's like freaked
out about it all the time time. We call them
the shoe police. So tell me about this barefoot Rovine
traveling Kitchen. Is Is it a novel or a cookbook?

Speaker 2 (25:21):
What is it?

Speaker 1 (25:21):
Because I wasn't even a little I found it, but
it was out of Prince that didn't give me any
information about it.

Speaker 3 (25:26):
It's a lifestyle sort of a book. I spent some
time living on a sailing boat, a Warrem catamaran, which
is to say, the most basic catmaran you could ever
go aboard. And because we were on the cat we
have the most deck space. So when you stop an

(25:49):
anchor somewhere every afternoon, people in other cruising yachts that
they all congregate together for an evening tipple at sunset.
But everyone used to come to our boat because we
had the most deck space. This is not talking marinas
and so forth. I'm talking open waters. Australia has a

(26:15):
vast coastline. If you're a mariner, you'd be very well.
You'd feel at home here because it's an island, it's
got lots, and so it's a wonderful place to be
on a cruising yacht.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
And so.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
People would come aboard, and of course they bring their
own grog. But then time goes on and people are hungry.
So I would cook something and feed everybody, maybe a
dozen people, and people would look down below on a
cat and say, how did you do that? You haven't

(26:57):
even got a fridge down there.

Speaker 1 (26:59):
Yeah, I was going to ask you. You don't have electricity,
so what are you cooking? And are you building fires
on the deck of your boat?

Speaker 3 (27:06):
Some of them do on Warren's, but we didn't. I
had a pressure carrow stove and a pressure cooker. That's
that's the key. So then people started asking me, how
did you do that? Will give me the recipe kind
of thing. So I started writing down recipes and information

(27:28):
about what to stow on a sailing boat to go
to remote places. I mean, you're in Texas, so you
understand there are vast tracks of coastline here where there
is nobody, nobody. There's no internet connection, there's no phone coverage,

(27:50):
there's no even radio except HF radio. You can't dial
up some takeaway food.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yes, where we're at, we don't have phone, we don't
have internet. If it weren't for Elon Musk, we wouldn't
have even the capability to reach the outside world. Can't
get garbage service, you know, a lot, a lot of
our electricity is on a co op. So it's like
we're not quite as pioneer woman as you were. But yeah,
it's a different world. It's a very different world that

(28:18):
people take so many things for granted.

Speaker 3 (28:20):
Yes, and I do have some copies of the book left.
I would love to send you one.

Speaker 1 (28:28):
I loved one, I have loved one. That would be awesome,
please please, it's.

Speaker 3 (28:35):
If you give me your mailing address, I'll mail you
a copy.

Speaker 2 (28:39):
I absolutely will. We'll definitely do that.

Speaker 3 (28:41):
Okay, that's wonderful.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
Yeah, oh, thank you. So I'll pay shipping whatever. I
know how hard it is to ship things.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
Do all stroll here because my brother lives there, so.

Speaker 2 (28:51):
That yeah, Oh, I would love that, Thank you so much.
I appreciate that I do. Yeah, I was pretty I
always I'm so selfish.

Speaker 1 (28:58):
Whenever we have an author on I always ask for
a copy, a hard copy of the book because I
have this fantasy of having a library that's nothing but
original titles with with author signatures in them. So I
know you sent this directly because it would have been
you know, pretty difficult to get a copy and then
mail it and all that, because it is hard shipping

(29:19):
things from Australia to this day.

Speaker 2 (29:21):
So please please please autograph it for me. They would
make it a treasure. Yeah, like I said, I'm really
selfish some people. Some people stock celebrities for autographs. She
and it's funny because yeah, I've offored I have five
books as well, and people.

Speaker 1 (29:43):
It's just there's something special about owning a book of
a person you've actually met.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
You know, everybody can.

Speaker 1 (29:49):
Buy a Stephen Gang or whatever. That when you've actually
met the person, you know, the human being and the
insights that you've given me offline.

Speaker 2 (29:59):
Makes the book so much better.

Speaker 1 (30:01):
So I highly encourage people to whenever you get a chance,
if there's a signing or anything like that, meet the
author if you can, because it does really change your experience.

Speaker 2 (30:11):
With the book.

Speaker 1 (30:13):
All right if you even living out in the in
the middle of nowhere growing up on I love how
you call it a yacht, but I mean we think
of yachts, and we were thinking of these, you know, giant,
beautiful ships with all the luxuries and not so much.

Speaker 2 (30:31):
In your case. You have a pilot's license. You do everything,
So tell us about that.

Speaker 1 (30:41):
Why, especially probably at a time that women weren't expected
or possibly even allowed. What what brought you to get
a pilot's license.

Speaker 3 (30:55):
Well, it's a long story, and I weren't take up
too much of the time, but I will say that
I learned to fly before GPS was invented. So we
had to navigate. So we had a paper chart folded

(31:16):
on our lab, and we had a compass with a
hole in the middle and a piece of string. You
put the compass on the paper chart and you laid
off your course, and that was your true course that
you needed, your magnetic course, And so you had to

(31:38):
think in the number of degrees of variation and so
forth to get the course you need to steer to
get to where you wanted. All these things much much
harder to day, but I loved it. All The navigation
was hard that I enjoyed it, and the meteorology. I
loved all these different components of obtaining this license. But

(32:03):
I still have the license. But if I wanted to
fly now, I don't think i'd passed the medical test
toil an aircraft. It don't allow octogenarians to do that.
But I'm very happy I did the training, and it's
a wonderful way to get around, to just cover the distances.

(32:26):
It's wonderful. I loved it.

Speaker 2 (32:29):
Yeah, that's fascinating.

Speaker 1 (32:31):
I'm thinking of all the knowledge you would have to
have besides the you know, we're talking about your main
character and grasp the netal you know, well read educated,
and yet they're you know, she's just thrown out in
the middle of nowhere where none of that comes in
in handy. But you not only do you have the

(32:51):
writing and the reading and all that, but the math.

Speaker 2 (32:55):
The I have no directional sense.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
I have the GPS my way to the bathroom, so
I can't even imagine knowing which way every time we
get in the car and we're going somewhere and the
GPS starts out with head north. I'm like, lady, if
I knew which way north was, you'd be out of
a job.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
I can't even imagine being.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
Up in the air with a piece of paper and
a pin and you know all the thing and you're
doing the math in your head.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
I mean you must.

Speaker 1 (33:22):
You must have just the most amazing brain to be
able to have all those things in there at once,
and I bet you can still do it.

Speaker 2 (33:28):
To this day. I think, how long did this book
take you to write? Sylvia?

Speaker 3 (33:38):
It was sort of in my head for a long
time because the interpretations of the religious text are something
I've been thinking about for a long time, especially the
bit about who moved the stone to open a term that's.

Speaker 2 (33:59):
A little edge.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
Yeah, let readers come to their own conclusion on that one.

Speaker 3 (34:03):
Yeah, well, those kinds of things have been in my
head for a long time, and I don't know if
it was COVID or something. Time on your hands and
you start putting things down on paper, and I can't
do a lot of the things I used to do

(34:24):
because of my health problems and whatnot, So why not write?
English is such a rich and beautiful language. We're blessed
to have that as our primary language.

Speaker 2 (34:38):
Well, we borrow from everybody, so we get all the
extra words that other languages don't.

Speaker 3 (34:43):
Yes, that we get the shades of meaning that other
languages don't have, because diverse and so forth. It's absolutely wonderful.
We lived in the Central Pacific region in the sixties
and I learned to speak, read, and write kill of Us,
which is the language of the kill of Us people

(35:05):
you're with, the Nonest Islands they used to be called,
And that is an astonishingly interesting language because they have
only nine letters in their alphabet oh wow, really only
one tense. So it's essentially a spoken language. To understand

(35:25):
the meaning of what someone is saying, you have to
hear the emotion in their voice. So it's definitely not
a richly written language. It's beautiful and they express what
they want to say, but you really need to hear
what someone is telling you to understand it. And that

(35:47):
is the absolute other extreme of Well, I shouldn't say
that because I've never studied Chinese, for instance, but English
is such a rich language. It's just wonderful. And the Shakespeare,
of course was the master of the English language. Yes,

(36:07):
and Chaucer to one. Yes. The one of the Pilgrims
is the partner in the Canterbury Tails, and he describes
him very aptly, just in the words he uses the

(36:30):
part of somebody handling small sums of money. He was
a bit of a dodgy, sort of a blog a
bit like a naval purser, a bit questionable about what
happens to these small summers of money. And Chaucer describes
him as having red hair, red as the bristles of

(36:51):
a sow's ear. And straight away you bring to mind
the old saying you can't make a silk purse out
of a cell.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
Its just, yeah, there's always both Chaucer and Shakespeare. And
you you've got that same gleam in your eye where
you have this poetic language, but there's always just a
little kind of in the background. You have that same
gleam in your eye.

Speaker 3 (37:20):
I enjoy the language. I think that's where that comes from. Yeah,
there are wonderful words that I wish people used more often,
like opricity. What a wonderful word. And I'm xorious that
wonderful word, and that the history of that world is
so interesting to me. When the men were putting together

(37:43):
the Oxford English Dictionary, they asked all sorts of people, women,
in particular, these educated women who were twiddling their thumbs,
waiting to be married off. They would send in examples
of text that proved what a word actually meant, and

(38:03):
they sent in examples quotes from text that proved what
the word uxorious means. But the men putting the dictionary
together couldn't bring themselves to write it accurately. So if
you look up the word uxorius, the dictionary says inordinately
fond of his wife. How can any man be described

(38:29):
as inordinately fond of his wife?

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Inordinately?

Speaker 3 (38:35):
I love you? It doesn't make sense. But if you
go back and read the quotations from the text that
proves what the word really means, you find that it
means a marriage where the husband allows the wife to

(38:57):
wear the pants, to be the boss, and he's a man. Yeah,
none of that is.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
Often how our marriage is a little window into our
life here.

Speaker 1 (39:14):
Yeah, not by choice. I that that is something that
we run across often because we're both voracious readers, and
there are so many words that only really.

Speaker 2 (39:31):
Come to life in context.

Speaker 1 (39:33):
And then there are times where I'll say something and
it's a word that I understand and I've embraced, but
I've never actually heard I've only read it, and my
pronunciation of it is so abysmal that he's just like,
what are you trying to say?

Speaker 2 (39:53):
And then we'll laugh.

Speaker 1 (39:54):
And sometimes you feel like you're a dumb dumb but
then you realize, well, hold on a second. A lot
of peop people that are much smarter than I am
and probably never even come across this word, and even
if they know how to pronounce it, they might not
know what it means. And there's there's just a certain
you can tell who is a reader, because every now

(40:17):
and then they'll come out with a word that not
very many people use, but they just pronounce it totally wrong.
You're like, ah, you're a reader, you're a reader.

Speaker 3 (40:29):
We've had a famous prime minister here once who did
exactly that, and she she said, oh, that press report
is just hyper all.

Speaker 1 (40:45):
And the thing with the word hyperbole is it ain't
spelled the way it's said, and it ain't said the
way it's spelled.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
I think one of.

Speaker 3 (40:56):
Those Yeah, that makes.

Speaker 2 (41:01):
Sense that that's how it's spelled.

Speaker 3 (41:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (41:04):
People, people are so much fun, and I miss being
able to celebrate each other's differences and have fun with
that and poke fun at each other and we become
so uptight. Do you experience that at all? And in
your book as you were writing that, did you get
a little bit of joy from her just being so
free and able to talk about things like race and

(41:25):
you know, the the natives that she mentions, and you know,
Islam and I mean.

Speaker 2 (41:30):
All these like really big things that we're not.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
Allowed to talk about and she just you know, talks
about it. And did you find that free?

Speaker 2 (41:38):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (41:39):
Absolutely. It's her personal diary. It's it's not she's not
writing it for public consumption. It's her personal record. And
she says in the beginning that she's not going to
ever tell put down an untruth on the pages. That
diary should be like a best friend, someone whom you confide.

(42:02):
And yeah, she's able to say anything because diaries were
very personal, they were not shared. And it's interesting too
that she believes that when she finally gets the chance
to read Tom's diary, she's yes, she thinks that it

(42:22):
might contend lots of poetry and so forth, because he's
out there under the stars. The skies here are just fabulous,
so many stars and so forth, and she's expecting some
romantic kind of display of his true character, but we

(42:42):
the reader, No, she's not going to read that.

Speaker 1 (42:45):
So why is it that Tom doesn't engage at all?
I mean, even in his own diary that he knows
nobody's going to read. Why is that like the male
rule that his father expected of him.

Speaker 3 (43:06):
I think he's trying to do what his father wants.
He's trying to be the obedient son, even though it's
against his instincts, if you like. And I'm sure he
must have felt very sorry that his brother had lost
his life defending the empire in a foreign country, not

(43:27):
even defending Australian soil. Really, so many men left this
country to go to the First World War, they enlisted voluntarily,
and so many of them didn't come back. And I'm
sure any brother of any soldier who'd lost their life
like that would have felt an obligation to replace them,

(43:50):
if you like, or do their to do what the
father wanted. So he's not likely to engauge with her romantically,
and yet he is worried about her. He brings home

(44:11):
the goat in kid in case she doesn't survive childbirth.
You see, And that information came to me from my
father's great grandfather's journal, that he wrote in eighteen twenty,
traveling from Scotland to Cape Town and then to Australia.

(44:33):
That journal says, two or three days out of Leith
Roads in Scotland, our magine McLeod's goat dropped a kid
last night, and you ask yourself, why on earth would
anybody have a heavily pregnant goat in their goods and
chattels traveling from Scotland. And then a few days later

(44:57):
they're in very rough season the Bay of Biscay and
he says, oh, Major McLeod's wife gave birth to a
son last night, so they would have had the goat
in case she didn't survive, and to provide milk. And
that's that's primary historical documentation. To me. That's really interesting.

Speaker 2 (45:18):
Yeah, and there are a lot of little historical tidbits that.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
You have to stop and think about and then it just, yeah,
that makes complete sense the minute I thought about it. Yeah,
goat smoke, that would be the next best thing. And
then and then you start going off into this out, well,
what happens if she doesn't make it? I mean, would
he have to stay home and take care.

Speaker 2 (45:39):
Of the baby.

Speaker 1 (45:40):
And then if it's a girl, would he bother? And
so you have all these questions that of course aren't
addressed in the boat because the story moves in a
different direction.

Speaker 2 (45:48):
But I really appreciate how it.

Speaker 1 (45:50):
Makes you think that's exactly almost write your own narrative.
And I think that was very I don't want to
say calculated, but the way you wrote it, it's like
you specifically wanted people to do that as And that's
why it's so short. I don't want to say short,
but that's why it's so well.

Speaker 2 (46:10):
It is short. It's a small book.

Speaker 1 (46:11):
It's a little book that there's so much in here,
and yeah, so you yeah, you literally put it down
and go, okay, what about this?

Speaker 2 (46:23):
And what about that? And what about this?

Speaker 1 (46:25):
And then you try to guess what's going on.

Speaker 2 (46:27):
I thought when.

Speaker 1 (46:28):
I based on the information I got before I got
the book, I thought it was a who Done it?

Speaker 2 (46:33):
I thought it was a murder mystery. It's really real,
really not. It is not a murder mystery.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
It's it's something completely different altogether. And there's some tough
things in here, and then there's some fascinating things in here,
and then there's some things that you could get in
big trouble for saying today and I have a flag
here where you talk about are talking about Hakeem and

(47:01):
one of the Muslim traders. I'm not going to read
it because we probably get blasted right off the internet
for doing it. It's very very true, very very honest,
and something that we were able to talk about now
we're not. And she just boop puts it right there
in her diary, not on the internet. Tell us a
little bit about that, because that is today, and you

(47:21):
have children, and I'm assuming grandchildren. So the choice to
not be on Facebook and all the other places that
is a conscious choice nowadays.

Speaker 3 (47:34):
It is I'm not tech sevvy at all. I have
to rely on my daughter for this connection today. For instance,
I just I'm very happy to live my own little,
tiny life the way I do. And I live in
the tropics that I don't have air conditioning in the house,

(47:57):
that kind of thing, so I changed the house to
suit the climate instead of trying to change the climate
to suit the house. And I just don't have the
energy to be on Facebook and all these things. And
I really don't enjoy the way the language is being

(48:20):
reduced to the sort of lowest com denominator.

Speaker 2 (48:23):
Definite point.

Speaker 3 (48:25):
I definitely there, and all the scamming that goes on,
I don't want to be part of that or a
victim of that. It must be very easy to be
a victim of that. Harder and harder people don't accept
personal checks anymore. And yeah, so I'm stubbornly staying away

(48:52):
from a lot of the modern text stuff.

Speaker 1 (48:55):
But yeah, your bio said, you don't even have an
ATM card. No, you're you're you are fighting tooth and
nail and keep it up, Keep it up, Sylvia.

Speaker 2 (49:04):
Don't let them get you.

Speaker 3 (49:07):
Thank you. And I've never swiped a card. I don't
have a credit card.

Speaker 1 (49:15):
Yeah they are. They are trying to get us away
from cash. I think that would be a big mistake.
Especially all of this could go away. You get one
e m P when one magnetic pulse or the sun
decides to throw a flare or something, it could just
all go away in the blink of an eye.

Speaker 3 (49:33):
And then what Yes, that's the same with GPS. They
can turn that off at anything. It was developed as
a weapon of war, they can, and so that, and
then how are people going to navigate and so forth?
They've never learned Yeah, treasure that knowledge of navigation and

(49:55):
stuff that I'm.

Speaker 2 (49:58):
Just I guess all that.

Speaker 1 (50:00):
That is to say, Sylvia, that when the zombie apocalypse
hits and all the lights go out, you're going to
be the only survivor.

Speaker 2 (50:06):
You're going to be the one who knows what you're doing.

Speaker 3 (50:11):
But happily send you a copy of Barefoot Driving because
it has instructions on how to preserve fish, for instance,
and how to start a bread sauce start for sad bread.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
That is the one bread I have yet to try making. Yeah,
she's an excellent baker.

Speaker 1 (50:35):
Yeah, I've mastered a whole week pretzels of all things
that I've tried a lot of different things, and as
I was learning how to bake, I've become quite the
frontier wife out here.

Speaker 3 (50:48):
Yes, well, most people make sadough bread by feeding a
bread start. My book tells you how to start a starter,
not just be a starter that somebody else started. Lovely
treasured information, I think, because that kind of information falls

(51:12):
into the grave with old people. Anyway, I'll send you
a couple.

Speaker 1 (51:18):
Well, I'm very much looking forward to that. I will
definitely give the sour dough start a start.

Speaker 2 (51:25):
And hopefully we become penpals. I'll let you know how
it goes.

Speaker 3 (51:29):
It would be wonderful.

Speaker 2 (51:32):
Sylvia.

Speaker 1 (51:32):
You have been such a joy, And if you ever
write another book, let me know.

Speaker 2 (51:36):
We'll have you right back on.

Speaker 1 (51:38):
Is there anything you would like folks to know that
we haven't gone over? Is your chance to blast out
to the world anything that you'd like us to know
or anything that's coming on the horizon for you.

Speaker 3 (51:51):
Well, I think the information in the book is very
intense and very very It would make a good Netflix series.

Speaker 2 (52:05):
Yes, it would.

Speaker 3 (52:07):
Is interested in that the historical stuff is accurate and
the storyline is interesting enough. That's the comment I'd like
to make. I think it could receive a far wide audience.
It is available as an audio book, it is. It's

(52:27):
an e book and a hard copy. But I think
it would be a success as a series. What do
you call it? Netflix series?

Speaker 1 (52:39):
Netflix, Amazon, one of those.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (52:42):
So the book is Grasp the Nettle by Sylvia Lurch
And do you go on Amazon. We'll have the link
on our website and culturewise dot com also in the comments.
If you're watching this or if you're listening to this,
because we have both audio and video versions of our podcast.
So if you listen to this, head on over to
our website so you can see the lovely woman's face.

(53:04):
She's got, like I said, that gleam in her eye
that I think you'll enjoy.

Speaker 2 (53:08):
And go get the book. It's quite a.

Speaker 1 (53:12):
Read, and do sit down with a nice hot cup
of tea or coffee and snuggle in and take the
time to absorb it. And then when you're done reading it,
go back and read it again, because you're going to
find more than you bargain for in the book. Sylvia,
you've been such a joy. I will let you. I
know it's very late there, it's relatively early here, so

(53:35):
we will let you get on with your evening. Thank
you again so much, and I hope that you do
continue to write. You are gifted and I look forward
to reading what you write next.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
Thank you so much, Thank you very much. I really
appreciate the chance to talk to you and reach all
your followers. It's worth a lot to me.

Speaker 1 (54:01):
Says well, thank you so much. You have a lovely evening.
It was very nice meeting you.

Speaker 3 (54:06):
Thank you. Ander

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Interview with Sylvia Lerch, author of Grasp the Nettle

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Interview with Sylvia Lerch, author of Grasp the Nettle

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