Part One: How Eliza Fraser Survived a Shipwreck and Sparked a Genocide
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Calls are media.

How do you keep opening the podcast? You know, I've already done the What's Cracking My Peppers. We've already reached the highest highs that a man can reach, not just in podcasting, but in life in general. So there's nowhere to go but just gibberish. Want to try...

Hello, and welcome to Behind the Bastards. I'm your host, Robert Evans. I don't think any podcast is ever open that way. Is that why we don't get awards? I prefer ha-ba-da-ba-ba-ba-da-ba-da. Yeah. That was pretty good. That was like Adam Sandler status.

Yeah, there you go. And he got to be in uncut gyms, you know? Maybe I'll get to be in uncut gyms. I could have a gambling problem, Sophie. I believe in me. I do believe that you could have a gambling problem, but we don't let you touch the money. No. Oh, man. I could put it all on black, Sophie. 21 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 pro brian ring a ding ding that's called a jackpot i thought and that is my catchphrase now that's nice i thought you were saying it back from

from the dead. From 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 21.

There's a game called Blackjack. I know they don't let you gamble, but... Yeah, he's not allowed to touch the money. Yeah. Yeah. You got Blackjack. It's a jackpot. My name really slots in nicely with a lot of casino lingo. Why have you not made a crypto coin? Oh, because it's evil.

Oh, right, right. I will tell you, that is not why. It's pure laziness and not willing to learn all the bullshit that goes along with it. I do feel like your co-host, Miles Gray, could really sell a meme coin. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah. Zytecoin? Come on. Oh, there it is. It's there. You did it. We did try and soft launch Zytecoin, and everybody thought it was a joke. Yeah. So...

I tried to launch BastardCoin. Oh, you didn't? I just wound up making the president a lot of money. Basically what we all do every day. Yeah, well, 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 subject this week. It's an Australian bastard. Our Aussie listeners have been begging for years. Years, literally. Why don't you ever talk about Australians? So many of us are terrible. It's always been 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. And kangaroos replacing whatever. Armadillos? I don't know. I don't know. I don't think anything replaces kangaroos. Nope.

Anyway, we're talking about a lady named Eliza Frazier this week. That's our bastard. Wow. 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 cascading and playing a role in a lot of genocidal bullshit. Yeah.

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 going to have a good time, Jack. You ready to hear about some genocide? We're the worst, mate.

No, that was not good. By the end, I will get one good syllable of an Australian accent. It's okay because Eliza comes from this era. She's British, right? Okay. She's a major figure in Australian history, but the Aussies hadn't really figured out that accent yet, right? They were still just British people on a different place.

Right? And Irish people and Scottish 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. Yeah. A bunch of rich guys sat around in a room. Yeah. In Shakespearean time, the British accent sounded like the Baltimore accent. Like it was just kind of like... Yeah. Everyone sounded like a character in The Wire. Can you do that again, please? Yeah.

Is that correct? Yeah, that sounds about right. Yo, Yin's going down to see Shakespeare at the Globe. That's exactly how Shakespeare sounded, yes. That's how much of you are right. To be or not to be. Yes, thankfully Denzel's version of Macbeth really delivered on that. But then they were like, we should sound fancy.

And that's where we got our seat for 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.

Jack, I've missed you, buddy. My accent works so good. You've missed me and my accent work. That's also part of the thing is like we could be shitty to everyone who doesn't talk right because they didn't go to Eaton or wherever. Yeah, exactly. Which is why you have like received pronunciation. If you know British people, they can always tell you, oh, yeah, that guy's rich just by like hearing him.

I know. Very posh, isn't he? Whereas in America, everyone just sounds like a Californian now. Yeah, that's right. We did it, Joe. All up speak. Oh. This is an iHeart podcast. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. But there were some dark truths behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie.

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The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, the unexpected, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. On Medal of Honor: Stories of Courage, you'll hear about these heroes.

and what their stories tell us about the nature of bravery. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the podcast Betrayal. Police Lieutenant Joel Kern used his badge to fool everyone, most of all, his wife Caroline. He texted, I've ruined our lives. You're going to want to divorce me.

How far would he go to cover up what he'd done? The fact that you lied is absolutely horrific. And quite frankly, I question how many other women are out there that may bring forward allegations in the future. Listen to Betrayal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Let's talk about Eliza Frazier and this series of genocides. It's great stuff.

Now, this is also kind of a story about how conflicting versions of events can sort of spread through popular media. Because one of the things that 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, like, literally, like, it's almost like its own cinematic universe of lying about this lady being shipwrecked that starts out in the mid-1800s. It's very fun. But every version of events starts the same way, which is that Eliza Fraser set sail on a boat called the Stirling Castle in 1836. Yeah.

Uh, her husband is the captain and according to most versions of the story, although not all of them, she is preggers, uh, which I don't think I've ever said on the show. I hated it. I really love it. Should we not be? Okay. I'm getting mixed reactions. The goosebumps that I have on my arms right now are, uh, because it felt so good and natural. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Preggers. So preggers McGregor's McGregor's off only her last name had been McGregor. That would really have worked. Yeah.

I'm sure one of the people on the ship was named McGregor. There's got – anytime there's a British ship at sea, there's a McGregor somewhere on that motherfucker. So in May of 1836, several months after setting sail, the Stirling Castle runs aground not all that far from an island that –

At that point, Europeans called it the Great Sandy Island. It's going to be called Fraser Island. Uh-oh. 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 a pretty sizable island.

It's about 186 miles north of Brisbane. And today it's called Gari. It is spelled K apostrophe G-A-R-I. And if you go to like Wikipedia, it'll say it's pronounced Guri or Guri, 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 Gari.

So that's how I'm going to try to say it because I'm pretty sure they're righter 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.

Is it sandy island? Like just what is there? All 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. It's common, but not for them to be this big, right?

There's a bunch of sandy islands, but the Great Sandy Island is the biggest. One thing you gotta give the first name Europeans give it is that it's at least accurate, where they're like, wow, this is a fucking huge sandy island. This son of a bitch is big. It's like Jack-o'-Mountain Island, but more sand. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, like even sandier. Yeah. An even sandier island. You could call it the sandiest island. The sandiest of islands. Anakin Skywalker would hate this fucking island. As a colonizer, that I guess makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Got it. So people have been living on Gari for a very, very long time.

And at 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 60s and 70s with a grain of salt here. But 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 chunk of the mainland that they kind of moved to.

between because they were like a lot of the peoples who lived on Gari lived on Gari 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 what kind of food was available in what season. Not uncommon around the world. Most peoples who were like quote unquote hunter-gatherers or whatnot were more like semi-nomadic, right? Where they would have places that they would like settle down and 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 better than not doing it at all. The peoples who lived on 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. That's called foreshadowing, by the way. A sizable amount of their records. Like we have their records of their very first European contact, which has been passed down for like several hundred years through songs.

Human beings have lived on what is today Gari for more than 50,000 years. There's no real way to get much more precise than that. And human civilization on the island, in fact, predates it being an island because until about 6,000 years ago, it was still directly connected to the Australian mainland. Rising sea levels put an end to that and the fertile climate and bounty of aquatic protein enabled it to support a meaningful permanent population of like several thousand people.

Uh, most casual histories of Gari tend to emphasize the isolation, uh, 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. Uh, one of them, the Bochola, which is usually spelled B-U-T-C-H-A-L-L-A, but there's like three different spellings that are all correct because it's like an anglicization, right? Um,

So the Bacola 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 the mainland and the island. And then there's the Dulingbara, who occupied much 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 Bacola right.

So to some extent, Gari, like occupation of Gari 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 3,000 people 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 RVs, but otherwise, that's more or less accurate. In many ways, eastern...

like East Coast retirees are living the most similar lives to indigenous peoples of long ago. Right, right. Traveling to Florida. Yeah, going between the Jersey Shore and Florida. I mean, there are some ways in which that's right, right? The idea that people would just live one place all the time is new. It is. And it's also like not great.

That book, The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrove, 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 town. Like that was always the thing that people were just able to do. And then like entire communities were just like move. If things got shitty. Yeah. It seems like it sucks here. Let's go. Oh, this guy's calling himself King time to bounce. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, Oh, if only we could still do that by an RV become free, everyone. That's the message of, of, of this podcast live on the road, you know? Um,

there's no downsides. Everyone I know who lives in an RV is happy. Uh, it never goes badly. RVs are well-made. They don't break immediately. Okay. Okay.

I can't tell you the amount of times Robert has suggested we get a podcast RV. I think we should get a fleet of RVs. I don't hate that idea. We should probably talk about that. I could be a podcast Commodore. Thank you, Jack. 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's so mad at me for entertaining this. So mad at you. For being like, oh, I love...

I love this idea. We can cook lizards over open fires like Mad Max. I think it's a good idea. Okay. It's just a thing that I can't get my wife to agree to. And so I'm like, oh, we should expense it. I mean, people, a lot of people are really hesitant to let their children live in a roaming RV. Yeah.

Oh, they don't get to come. Okay, excellent. No, they're very good. So most of the sources I have found identify the island's Garry's first contact with Europeans as coming with the arrival of the notorious Captain James Cook. That said, there's evidence of several centuries of irregular contact with Europeans prior to James Cook showing up.

This would have begun with Portuguese sailors around 1500. 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 1500. It's a little hard to say. There's also like clay pipes that were made by the Dutch that would have come from the 1600s.

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 were trading with other different like groups of aboriginal peoples who were themselves trading with these other Europeans, right? We don't really know that.

As one of my sources, an article by the Fraser Island Defenders Association notes, this could simply be evidence of trade between Gari and people with other parts of Australia. Over the generations, 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 in sort of anthropological studies. I don't think this is something that is like known to a T. 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. Right.

And another thing that was done that we know that was done was that like when people's loved ones died, they would be like 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, right? 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. Not entirely inaccurate. Kind of a helpful coincidence there. In some ways. Yeah. Yeah. As a paper from the Anthropological Museum of Queensland edited by Dr. Peter Lauer describes after this ritual was finished, quote, certain sacred portions of the deceased had been ceremoniously consumed by relatives. Carefully executed funeral rites would ensure that the spirit, like a cold wind, left the body before it was interred.

According to Aboriginal informant Gairbao, the Bacala believed that on the following day the spirit returned. Then the relatives would accompany it to a certain rock at Bari Iba, which bore the impress of the foot of Beral, 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 followed him to the sky country.

Two men specially posted, one at either side of the rock, would watch for the spirit's 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 believed 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. Um...

So again, this is like 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 Gari, but for like all of the different Aboriginal peoples in Australia, will be used by Europeans as justifications for some pretty hideous accusations.

of genocide, which has led to understandable pushback by modern day descendants of these people to assert that like this is not an accurate characterization of their ancestors. And usually what the Europeans are accusing them of doing is like hunting and eating white people, right? Right. Like as like a predatory act.

And this is like basically all of these accounts are lies. And we'll talk a little bit about how a lot of these lies 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.

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 and used as soil to grow things, right? There are services people use that for today, and there's something kind of powerful here, both in a refusal to totally let go of a dead loved one and a desire to keep a piece of them alive with you in some way.

Funerary cannibalism was a common practice in England about 15,000 years ago, and evidence of similar practices has been found in Ireland, in Germany, in the UK, in Russia, Belgium, Portugal, basically everywhere, right? You can find evidence of this in almost every human civilization on Earth if you go back far.

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, uh, the whites like to say, you actually could be turned into energy and, you know, you remain a part of us that a plant grows out of that gets eaten. And, you know, um,

I will say also as somebody who grew up in a strict Catholic household, um, there's spiritual sacramental cannibalism is, uh, not, not uncommon in the Western world. Like they lit 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 little bell. And at that point, the bread and wine literally, uh,

into Jesus's body.

blood yeah like that's what they think is happening yeah I've tasted it it's not actually I mean I don't want to spoil anything for anybody but it's yeah yeah so I don't know like like having fantasies of cannibalism that are supposed to be literal cannibalism at the center of your spiritual beliefs but then judging other people's yeah right the way they do it's bad though

Is it just like a small piece of like a loved one? That's what it sounds like based on the reading that I've done.

And I mean, it varies from place to place, right? Again, this is something that we found evidence of in every continent, right? So like, you know, different groups of people probably had different attitudes as 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 that are one of like the pretexts for the genocide that's going to come.

Right. Which is why talking about this at all, there's a lot of like 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 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.

Right.

Everyone who has ever lived has relatives, if you go far back enough, who had to make choices like this because it's hard to live as a fucking, like, yeah. And almost like a mercy killing in some cases, right? Right. Like they're going to starve to death. I don't know if we're going to live. This baby certainly can't, right? And so, 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

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 to do that as a hobby. 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. Right.

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 in this period, recorded a case on the Gascoigne River in Western Australia where an Aboriginal girl was 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. Bleakle, 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 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? Like we don't actually know why he said this. It's going to look so good in our movies. Yeah. Yeah. We got to put this in some art, some newspaper articles, right? Right. Yeah. And it's the same thing with like these claims about the killing and eating of white settlers 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 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. Right.

Those animals are so fucked up. I can't believe you did that. Yeah. That's like, that's the explanation behind the dial a tough pass, whatever that one is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. They're like, Oh, monster must've eaten them. Their tongues were missing. Yeah. Eyes were missing. It's like, yeah, those are the soft animals eat when you're just hungry. Cause it's snowy. Yeah. Uh,

And when I looked into this paper more, because like I found a bunch of cases where it's like, OK, here's a lurid story and he says 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 Mae Bates.

Bates was an Irish woman and, again, a self-taught anthropologist who expressed a misfit. The best kind. The best kind. And she's kind of wandering around in like the 1800s. Oh, sorry, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. 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.

Sounds reliable. Sounds reliable. It's one of those things, and this is awful what's frustrating, you can't discard everything she says because she is one of the only sources of ethnographic research we have on 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 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 there's some stuff she has to say about like languages and stuff that's useful. But 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 Bates, this lady, this cannibalism-obsessed lady, is a monarchist and an anti-union activist as well. Oh, hell yeah. So I'm not primed to like her. She seems to have grown up obsessed. An anti-union activist.

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 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 with cannibalism.

Jesus. She could literally be the president right now. Monarchist, racist, like fucking making things up about her background. Like, was she a time traveler? No, no. She's just a very modern figure. She could have been in the administration. Brain dissolving from dementia. Jesus. He would have made her the fucking ambassador to Australia. Yeah.

Believes that she's qualified to do a job that she is in no way qualified to do. Honestly, iconic. Ahead of her time. I talked to you a little bit earlier about how some of these peoples during times of starvation would practice infanticide, right? Which is, again, a thing you see all over the world. Bates is the person who spins that into claiming that they're doing infant cannibalism, right? And she is the primary source in this period, claiming that that is a thing that's happening. Right.

She writes dozens of articles in newspapers about this practice. And in 1920, 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? Ooh, dog? Cat! Ah, you were close. You were close, Jack. Fucking cat bones. She's lying about a cat bones being a cannibalized baby.

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You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who did make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself.

And I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did.

what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back, and our lawyers have sent us an email. I am not allowed to accuse HelloFresh of serving cat meat.

You know until the court case finishes one way or the other we can't prove that they ate cat meat certainly can't prove it and

And, you know, are there allegations that they serve cat meat? There certainly are now, Robert. Absolutely. Now there are, for sure. But we can't prove it. Your cats just sent me a text message and they're uncomfortable with this conversation. Yeah, well, they do look delicious. Oh my God, leave Saddam and Saddam Hussein's best friend alone. Well, they've gotten fat lately, you know? They have a good diet, I'm just saying. Salivating. I think they look great in your mean clothes.

That's right. I am. And when Sophie says they look great, she means they look like big cartoon ham legs. That's not what I said. That's what they look to me. I didn't have breakfast today, so I'm just looking at everything that way. Wow.

By the way, it's three in the afternoon, everybody. Just so you know what kind of hours Robert keeps. The audience knows. They're aware by this point. For an example of the kind of shit Bates 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 Kimberley to Eucla and through all the unoccupied country east of it, and there were many grisly rites attached thereto. Human meat had always been their favorite food, and there were killing vendettas from time immemorial. In order that the killing should be safe, murderer's 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 in running shoes, their feet leaving no track.

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. But she's just like... And that must be because they are trying to eat people. 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 a thing that was normal, right? Like whether it was practiced in some groups or not, again, 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 is very racist.

They like cannibalism so much they like try and marry it. They want to marry cannibalism. It's their best friend. She would have married cannibalism. Yes. Yes. She's a cannibalism influencer. Yeah. Yeah. Like what Joe Rogan is to fucking ayahuasca. This Bates lady is to cannibalism. Allegations of cannibalism.

So frustrating that he is the psychedelics person. I know. I know. I've done way more fucking DMT than him. You're so much better at psychedelics than him. You need to take it back. This is our psychedelics guy, not fucking Joe Rogan. Jesus Christ. Did you see his special? Forget being the Joe Rogan of the left. Robert's the psychedelics of the left. The psychedelics guy. Yeah, it's you. That's right. I could take steroids. I believe in me.

Yeah. Did you see his standup special or better yet? Did you see the elephant graveyard analysis of his standup special? No, I haven't. I will send that link to you. I assume it's a literal elephant graveyard you're talking about. I'm not going to look into that more. I think that's the name of the channel, but they just like go through, they're like, we're really excited about Joe Rogan standup special. And then just like go joke for joke. And they're like, Oh,

Oh, no. Oh, Joe, what is happening? Things have gone downhill since... What was he? He wasn't on the man show, was he? No.

Fear Factor. He might have. No, Fear Factor. That was Adam Carolla. Yeah, yeah. He was on that show with Andy Dick. Frankly, too much time on Joe Rogan. Continue with the script, please. Anyway, speaking of Andy Dick. Never enough. 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 Gari. Ooh.

Uh, in 1770, he first sighted the island and reported spotting several people on the shore. He 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 to, okay, we're just being racist now. Great. Yeah.

He and a colleague debated whether or not – because, again, there's notes taken on board the ship, and the notes are that James Cook is debating with a colleague 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. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

Made out of the same stuff. Yeah, yeah. Wow, the same kind of hair as we. Same dang hair. Do you remember this article that we did at Cracked about like the great explorers and all the just insane lies that they told? Well, because 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. Yeah.

Yeah, they would be like, I saw the person, like one of them was, I think they said they had like eyes where their shoulders were and like mouths in the middle of their, between their nipples. Yes, the Anthropophagi, I think, is the name of those. Yeah, Sir Walter Raleigh. Yes. Yeah.

I still think they're real somewhere, but they just live... I saw one down the street from me in rural Oklahoma as a kid. Yeah. Yeah. They just live here. Yeah. These are just like the world's best liars. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, not even good lies, I guess. Oh, the lies I would have told. Imagine, because you wind up in the center of 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 going to just say some shit. Nope. Great. I can make you guys believe anything. Good news for me, they worshiped me as a god. Yeah, yeah.

So the Bochula 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 getting down history. We have their record of seeing him, right? So he's writing – he's got people on his boat writing about seeing these people.

And we have them singing about seeing his ship. Per an article by Fiona Foley, a Bochola artist and scholar writing for the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University, the Bochola 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 20th of that year. The song takes place on a volcanic headland of Gari, known in Bochola as Takiwuru. 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 Takiwuru, and they saw many men walking around on it. They asked each other, Who are these strangers, 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 case, which is fairly rare when you're talking about story, like things like this, like first contact between, you know, an indigenous group and Europeans that you have like both sides of like the very first conversation about seeing each other, which I find really interesting. Yeah.

And frequently they're like, and why do these guys smell like shit? Yeah, well, they smell like that boat. You can smell it from here. They smell fucking terrible. Like all the European settlers just smelled. I mean, first of all, they're like rolling it off a boat. Like they're shitting over the side of this thing, right? Yeah. At first they're shitting over the side of it, Robert. By the end, they're just like, I really am so hungry. I can't even get up to the edge.

every one of those sailors is like 80% Giardia by body weight. Like they're just, just, just all liver and like, and swollen gums. That's what 90% of their body weight comes from. Oh man. Yeah. I mean, that's like even, um,

You know, I remember that article that I was talking about, like Marco Polo is one of them. His whole claim to fame was going to China and becoming a great ruler in China and helping them fight a war. And

you can go like, they were a way more advanced civilization, the most advanced civilization on the planet. They had a, they had a printing press at this point, like well, well ahead of here. And so you can like go back and look at their written record and like, it's just crickets as far as Marco Polo goes. But we, you know, we just trust whatever the random guy who, uh,

you know, sailed around the bend and then just like came back five years later and was like, uh, China ever heard of it? Great. Yeah. Nope. Okay. I'm just going to say shit. No, this is why I'm an Ibn Battuta Stan and not a Marco Polo Stan. There you go. Um, yeah. Cool. You always have been. Look him up kids. He's cool.

So he probably also did some fucked up shit, man. I'm not going to lie. So Fiona here, who's this Batchola 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.

and cites Jody Byrd's book, The Transit of 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 land 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 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 thing

Yeah. Right? That that's the start of the process of racialization. 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. And a major chapter in that history brings us back to the person who is the subject of these episodes, Eliza Frazier, right? And 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 1st of June in 1798, although that is debated. One writer in the 1930s described her 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 as like a native daughter of the town. So I don't know. Maybe they have a little bit of an agenda. Anyone famous, you know, we don't care why. Let's just get someone famous. We're scraping the bottom of the barrel in Derbyshire. Derbyshire?

Let's go to the genocide insiders. We don't have anybody. 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, you know, you're not super poor generally if that's happening in England at this period of time. Most men thought that that was scientifically and physically impossible at the time. It's starting to change by the time she... But 1798 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 Fraser,

Maybe not. Again, kind of some conflicting reports there. But she marries this sea captain whose boat, the Stirling Castle, depending on, again, who you read, was either a crumbling 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 in demand by ship owners who had managed to over-insure their vessels. In other words, this guy's so incompetent, you hire him to run your ship. To crash, to drunk drive your car. Right, right. If your insurance is good, he's going to drunk drive your boat into oblivion. Yeah. So,

That's one claim about him. I've also heard him described as urbane in his manners and in attitudes and features what is deemed a handsome man. So either he was a drunk old boar who will crash your ship or he was like a handsome, you know, polite and competent sea captain. You'll hear both stories. He's been dead a long time. I simply don't know.

Love how mean the conflicting thing, like the big fat idiot who 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 manner. Right. Yeah. He was like, I was handsome as shit. Picking up subtle things about how attractive he is. Right. Right. Yeah. It has dick game. Like, yeah, there's a whole Wikipedia subset there. Yeah. Yeah.

He was, speaking of dick game, he was 54 and Eliza was 37 when they left London on October 22nd, 1835. So there's a bit of an age gap here.

Slight. Small.

this minister is going to be your dad and mom. Hang out with a priest. Yeah. This, this guy's got to be in charge. Good call. Uh, parenting in the 1800s. Most accounts will say that Eliza was pregnant when the vessel departed. Uh, although again, there's some dispute on the matter. Uh,

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 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 to Singapore with these goods that it picks up in Sydney is going to take it past Morriton Bay. Unfortunately for everyone aboard, this takes them near the Swain Reefs, which is a treacherous piece of sea for competent helmsmen to navigate. And some of the evidence suggests Captain Fraser and his men may not have been the very best seamen England ever produced.

Which you could also say, nope, I'm not going to make that joke. So the ship ran aground on the reef and the crew of 19 got into two lifeboats. Captain Frazier, his wife, his 13-year-old nephew, and several other sailors, including a guy named Robert Darge, who we'll talk about later, got into one leaking longboat. And everyone else got into a pinnace, which is a slightly nicer boat.

Both boats traveled together for a time. Um, and they split their supplies between them, which included brandy and beer, but no water. So again, they've got liquor and beer. No, you don't want water. You don't want water in this boat. You just want some brandy and beer and some pickles with mustard. If you, ah, shit, we dropped that stuff with the Aussies. Yeah. So they're just like drunk in the heat in the tropics. Uh, uh,

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 drunk and disoriented, but heavily armed.

The nearest settlement to them was about 370 miles south of where the Frasier ran aground. But navigation was difficult under these conditions. And again, no one here... The drunkenness, 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 Frasier's longboat is constantly taking on water. So they're bailing it out 24-7 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 baby underwater because, again, the boat is constantly sinking and the baby dies almost immediately, which it's probably I don't have trouble believing that if she was pregnant because babies don't do well in these conditions. Right.

Being born underwater during a shipwreck? Yes, bad way to have a baby. To people who have only consumed alcohol for the rest of three months? Whose only source of calories 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. Unbelievable. Yeah, now...

This is not part of the story. Part of why people doubt whether or not Shirley 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 avoided this until her story had gone 1800s viral, quote, probably 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 debate that she just make this up to kind of get sympathy because she definitely does some of that. Right. We really don't know. Um,

Two days later, processing this and several other traumas, Captain Frazier 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 wringing 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. 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 maybe didn't have dresses on though. Right. They didn't have dresses. Uh,

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 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. Yeah. Right. That's a superpower. That's like her being like, and then I just flew to the island. Yeah. I levitated above the leaky boat. Yeah.

Yeah, you cannot survive on seawater. It's generally three to 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.

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 Gari. Right.

But Captain Frazier doesn't want to get on the big island because number one, he 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 Pennis, 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 their way back to civilization. I don't know if they just abandoned Eliza and her husband, maybe because they found them annoying. They're so annoying. Yeah. Yeah. There is some evidence of that. History changed based on like how annoying someone is. Yeah. Other survivors were like, yeah, she sucked. We're doing for a different podcast. We're looking into the day Lincoln was assassinated and like-

The only reason that Ulysses S. Grant wasn't there was because Ulysses S. Grant's wife found Mary Todd Lincoln annoying. Yeah. It completely changed the course of history. Folks, you have to follow your instincts. If you think someone's annoying, you're definitely going to die if you go out to a party with them. Never underestimate having that one annoying friend that you keep around just to avoid assassinations. Mm-hmm.

That's right. That's the whole reason the guy who created Family Guy survived 9-11, if I'm remembering correctly. Had bad vibes about a flight. Turned out to be a bad flight to be on. I don't remember if that's exactly what happened, but he definitely was supposed to be on one of those flights. He keeps doing the quagmire voice. You're not allowed on this one. Stop saying giggity, giggity, man. Just get the fuck out of here. No, they would let anybody on flights back then. As...

as evidenced by 9-11 happening, right? What a time. Wow. Camp Shane, one of America's longest-running weight loss camps for kids, promised extraordinary results. Campers who began the summer in heavy bodies were often unrecognizable when they left. In a society obsessed with being thin, it seemed like a miracle solution. But behind Camp Shane's facade of happy, transformed children was a dark underworld of sinister secrets.

Kids were being pushed to their physical and emotional limits as the family that owned Shane turned a blind eye. Nothing about that camp was right. It was really actually like a horror movie. In this eight-episode series, we're unpacking and investigating stories of mistreatment and reexamining the culture of fatphobia that enabled a flawed system to continue for so long.

You can listen to all episodes of Camp Shame one week early and totally ad-free on iHeart True Crime Plus. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts and subscribe today.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States. Recipients have done the improbable, showing immense bravery and sacrifice in the name of something much bigger than themselves. This medal is for the men who went down that day. It's for the families of those who didn't make it. I'm J.R. Martinez. I'm a U.S. Army veteran myself.

And I'm honored to tell you the stories of these heroes on the new season of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage from Pushkin Industries and iHeart Podcast. From Robert Blake, the first black sailor to be awarded the medal, to Daniel Daly, one of only 19 people to have received the Medal of Honor twice. These are stories about people who have distinguished themselves by acts of valor going above and beyond the call of duty. You'll hear about what they did.

What it meant and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice. Listen to Medal of Honor on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation.

To most people, I'm the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. VoiceOver is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's more than personal. It's political, it's societal, and at times, it's far from what I originally intended it to be.

These days, I'm interested in expanding what it means to be voiceover to make it customizable for anyone who feels the need to explore their relationship to relationships.

I'm talking to a lot of people who will help us think about how we love each other. It's a very, very normal experience to have times where a relationship is prioritizing other parts of that relationship that aren't being naked together. How we love our family. I've spent a lifetime trying to get my mother to love me, but the price is too high. And how we love ourselves. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. No.

Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. DNA test proves he is not the father. Now I'm taking the inheritance. Wait a minute, John. Who's not the father? Well, Sam, luckily it's your Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. Now I find out he's trying to give it to his irresponsible son instead.

but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. So what are they going to do to get those millions back? That's so unfair. Well, the author writes that her husband found out the truth from a DNA test they were gifted two years ago. Scandalous. But the kids kept their mom's secret that whole time. Oh my God. And the real kicker, the author wants to reveal this terrible secret, even if that means destroying her husband's family in the process. So do they get the millions of dollars back or does she keep the family's terrible secrets?

Well, to hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 manage 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. Um...

I said earlier they think they found the mainland. We don't 100% 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 Frazier had believed that these people were cannibals, these folks, these Bochola people, 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, live off 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 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, And, like...

Man, number one, they don't have refrigerators, right? Like this is, this happens in like the winter. So it's not a great season. 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. They approached them with fruit that had brown spots on it. It's like, what the fuck? And like, they give them food and they're like, Hey, can I try on your clothes? Like, I don't know.

I haven't seen anything like that. It's weird, right? It's a pretty normal thing to do. You're meeting someone from a new culture. Can I try that hat? I've never worn a hat. What is that? Yeah. To this day, athletes exchange jerseys after, 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. When I met you, you gave me some rancid kangaroo meat, although for a different reason that we don't need to get into. And then we exchanged shirts. We did exchange shirts, yes. That was more to, yeah, it was a weird hallucinogen, the rancid kangaroo meat. Yeah, if you make it into 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 Frazier and Eliza either try to leave or like walk off to try to find a town to get rescued for everyone else. Or they just desert. We don't really know. Crewman Harry Olden 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 some of her later behavior, although other crewmen allege that Yolden was the problem and he stole a bunch of water, 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 was him insulting both her and her husband. No.

Yeah, he sounds like the worst. It's possible for everyone to suck here. Just stirring shit in the middle of a life and death thing, just like shit stirring on a new level, being like, oh, well, I guess we should listen to our captain, your wife. At the same time, I do think that you should now address me as she captain. As she captain? Sure, of course. Because it's kind of grown on me in the last 30 seconds. I don't feel like you need to gender captain. Like, it's not an inherently masculine or feminine word.

I don't know. There's kind of a flow to it. She, Captain. It's like calling someone a she person. You don't really need to do that. No, you do not. 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. And also depending on how competent Captain Frazier was, this may have been an understandable move. I can see a version of the story where throwing 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 Darge, Yolden and four other men head for where they think is Morriton Bay. But Morriton Bay is on the mainland. So, again, they don't really know where they are. Eliza, her husband. Good navigators. They're great. We're going to head over to Sydney real quick. It's like east. And I think east is left. So, yeah, we'll just try that.

They've been at sea, like offshore sailing around the island for the past, like few weeks. And now they're like, I think I say they're bad at this. I'm sure it's hard. Yeah, for sure. I haven't, I haven't tried to navigate this way without access to a backup plan. Uh,

Eliza, her husband, and four other men go south with the Bacola, 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 are kind of different, but...

But Eliza and her husband wind up living with the patchouli for several months. And the first thing that she reports the patchouli 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 monsters. They're like, oh, you guys are always, you're dipping your filthy clothing into water? Like, no, this is how you get nice clean water. Patiently teaching them how to not die. Right. She's like, oh my God, they're trying to kill me. 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. Yeah.

And here's how John Wright, the author of that Derbyshire Life article, describes what happened next.

Their dwindling numbers made the Aborigines, again, that's not, Aboriginal people is the preferred term, but this is how he writes it, bolder and 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 three different accounts left by Frazier 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 Bachola used charcoal to treat wounds, rubbing it into like an injury as a salve or unguent, 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 Bachola and other people do, right?

So this account and other accounts 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 and at sea for months and they were trying to treat her injuries. Blackface was actually their idea. It's not something that we do on our. Yeah, they actually came up with the idea because they thought it was cool. Yeah, 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 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. So I'll 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 does stuff, right? Right.

In general, she alleges bestial treatment from the Bocciola, 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 Bocciola would have seen these white people. At this point in time, they have had very little contact with Europeans, 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 in corporeal form, right? These are the ghosts of our dead who have come back to us, right? 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 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 return spirit of my husband or my kid, right? And so that was kind of like the way that they rationalized what they were doing and sort of 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 and they will be taken in by the Bacola and other tribes. And again, the same kind of justification is used when someone arrives. A 1977 paper in the Journal of Occupational Papers in Anthropology noted, quote,

The convict most likely to have reached the island first was James Davis, who ran in March 1829 and subsequently joined the Bochola on the Mary River. Although initially known to coastal Aborigines as Dunnabot, meaning small one, among the Bochola he became Thurimbi, the reincarnated son of a tribal elder, killed in battle some years before. Again, details of Davis' exploits are sparse, for he was a particularly taciturn individual who remained tight-jawed about much of his 14 years' experiences as a wild white man.

David Bracewell's verbosity earned him the name Want or Talker, but it was not until his fourth abstention from Moreton Bay after July 1839 that he actually mentions having passed over to Fraser's Island, called Garry by the natives, right? He spells it Carina. I don't understand why, but it's pronounced Car-ay.

where he remained for nearly a year. His impression was that its inhabitants were very numerous, he thinks thousands, and at their great fights he has seen them covering the beach for four miles in extent. Finally, John Faley, called Gizburi, after a long trek from Armidol to the Mary River via the Bunyal festivals in the Blackall Ranges, moved with the Aboriginal people of Wide Bay for almost 12 years, helping them to plan raids against early white settlers before being retaken by Lieutenant Bly and his native mounted police in December 1854."

Fahey, 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 epaulet 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, and

Jeez. So there's this, 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 locked in a cage. Yeah.

And they're adopted as members of the family by some of these groups. I find that particularly the case of Fahey, 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. I wish we knew more about that guy. It's an amazing story. Yeah. Yeah.

All of these interpretations where it's like, and they thought we were ghosts and we're 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. 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. We'll like try to make it in Europe and then head back to the tribe. Like some of them have like families there.

that they will periodically leave and then come back to. So it is like a, it's like a complicated. For sure. Exchange here. But certainly like, like especially this case of Fahey, this guy who was 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. Bummer. Real bummer.

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 to

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 that forever, right? Like it becomes very clear as they have more and more, oh, no, no, no. 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? Yeah.

This isn't just like, this is the thing they believed. It's like, no, this was like a belief that existed at a period of time and changed after contact with the world, right? Right. On first pass, they were like, they look different. There must be a reason for that. Oh, no, they're just assholes. Kind of like our dead people. Maybe they're like, you know, this is something that happens. I don't know. Yeah, it's not like when you think about like what they had access to information wise, it's not an illogical conclusion to come to initially. Right.

Right.

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's 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 you can't communicate directly with these folks.

And some of them are going to get angry at you, right? Yeah. 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? And you're like another mouth to feed. You're like that baby. They're like, God, can I please just fucking bash his head in with a rock? Could I, like, it's, what are we doing here? Right. And 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 uncommon 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 food to keep alive.

So many wacky misunderstandings. Right. There's some misunderstandings. 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 Batchola 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 the year regularly because that's just kind of hard to live this way.

They gave me a spanking on my little bottom. These savages. 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 until they're bloody when they don't perform at the expected level. Right. Like Captain Frazier 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. He's like, but not me. Yeah. Captain Frazier. Sometimes people, you know, smack each other. It's not uncommon. This is not a patchouli thing.

So the worst that we might say then about the Bacchola 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 treatment is going to come from the fact that the Bacchola, 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 Frazier is never going to forgive them for this. And neither are the Europeans. Jesus. But that's all coming in part two, Jack. That sounds like it's going to be a really fun part two without any horrifying information to learn. Yeah. It's all good from here. They start a dance troupe. Smooth sailing. Yeah. They dance it out. They open a B&B together. Yeah. It's great. It's all going to be good.

All right. Jack, you got anything to plug? 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. Um, yeah, Monday through Friday, we, we drop at least an episode. So, uh, you can find me there and I'm on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien and on blue sky at Jack OB, the number one, because I didn't get on blue sky fast enough. Right. Right. Uh, well, you,

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. That's a good idea. That's an interesting idea. 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. Never take advice from Robert. Except this advice, obviously. Burn down your neighborhood. Yeah! Okay, let's end on that note.

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