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

Summary

Behind the Bastards - Episode Summary: Part One: How Eliza Fraser Survived a Shipwreck and Sparked a Genocide

Release Date: June 10, 2025
Host/Author: Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
Podcast Description: Delving deeper than the superficial accounts of history's worst individuals, Behind the Bastards uncovers the bizarre and lesser-known truths about their lives. In this episode, the focus is on Eliza Fraser, a British woman whose shipwreck survival story became a catalyst for widespread genocide in Australia.

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1. Introduction to Eliza Fraser and the Great Sandy Island

The episode begins with the historical backdrop of Ghari (originally called the Great Sandy Island by Europeans), the world’s largest sand island located approximately 186 miles north of Brisbane, Australia. The island, inhabited by the Bachola tribe among others, boasts a history spanning over 50,000 years, with evidence pointing to semi-nomadic lifestyles reliant on mullet fishing and seasonal movements between the island and the mainland.

Notable Quote:
Jack O'Brien [09:50]: "Human beings have lived on what is today Ghari for more than 50,000 years."

2. European Contact and Misinterpretations

In 1770, Captain James Cook became the first Englishman to record contact with the island's inhabitants. Cook's initial interactions led to the island being named Indian Head, marking the beginning of European racialization and the subsequent justification for colonial violence against indigenous populations.

Notable Quote:
Jack O'Brien [41:09]: "Fiona Foley... describes this as part of a process that allowed the empire to facilitate, justify, and rationalize state-sponsored violence that tore land, resources, and sovereignty from indigenous people."

3. The Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle

Eliza Fraser, possibly born Elizabeth Slack in Wirksworth, Derbyshire, married Captain James Fraser and embarked on a voyage aboard the Stirling Castle in October 1835. The shipwreck occurred near the treacherous Swain Reefs, leaving Fraser, her husband, a 13-year-old nephew, and other crew members stranded on lifeboats without sufficient fresh water.

Notable Quote:
Miles Gray [52:10]: "So they're just like drunk in the heat in the tropics, which is going to slowly be killing them."

4. Survival Struggles and Conflicting Accounts

Fraser's accounts of survival are fraught with inconsistencies. Initially claiming to be pregnant, she later omits this detail, leading to debates among historians about the authenticity of her narrative. Her purported method of obtaining fresh water by wringing her skirt introduces skepticism, as surviving solely on seawater is biologically implausible.

Notable Quote:
Jack O'Brien [55:27]: "That didn't happen. You cannot survive on seawater."

5. Interaction with the Bachola People

Upon nearing Ghari, the stranded sailors anticipated hostility based on myths perpetuated by Fraser about the indigenous people's cannibalistic tendencies. Contrary to these fears, the Bachola extended humanitarian gestures by providing food and assistance. However, subsequent accounts twisted these interactions, portraying the Bachola as savage and abusive, largely influenced by Fraser’s embellished and falsified stories.

Notable Quote:
Jack O'Brien [62:59]: "Whoa, what does that have to do... Have like shoes that allow them to move quietly because that's useful when you're hunting or in war."

6. The Role of Daisy Mae Bates and Racial Bias

A critical examination of Daisy Mae Bates, an Irish self-taught anthropologist, reveals her significant role in propagating false narratives about Aboriginal cannibalism. Bates' accounts, often laden with racial bias and personal prejudices, served as primary sources for many of the negative stereotypes used to justify the genocide of indigenous populations.

Notable Quote:
Jack O'Brien [78:53]: "This is going to be a really fun part two without any horrifying information to learn."

7. Anthropological Insights and Cultural Misunderstandings

The episode delves into anthropological perspectives, highlighting how the Bachola interpreted the arrival of Europeans as spiritual entities or returning ancestors. These misunderstandings fueled tensions and misconceptions, further complicating the already strained interactions between the two groups.

Notable Quote:
Jack O'Brien [73:35]: "They interpret the first white people they saw as something like ghosts returned in corporeal form."

8. Conclusion and Foreshadowing Part Two

The episode concludes by acknowledging the complexity of cross-cultural interactions and the destructive impact of biased storytelling. It sets the stage for Part Two, which will explore the ensuing conflicts and the tragic consequences that followed Eliza Fraser's fabricated and exaggerated accounts.

Notable Quote:
Jack O'Brien [80:23]: "But that's all coming in part two, Jack."

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Key Takeaways:

• Eliza Fraser's Narrative: Fraser's accounts of the shipwreck and interactions with the Bachola are marred by inconsistencies and deliberate fabrications, serving specific agendas rather than representing factual history.

• Impact of Racial Bias: European anthropologists like Daisy Mae Bates played pivotal roles in distorting the realities of indigenous cultures, perpetuating myths that justified colonial atrocities.

• Cultural Misunderstandings: Misinterpretations between the Bachola and the stranded Europeans exemplify the broader challenges of cross-cultural communication and the dangers of preconceived biases.

• Legacy of Genocide: The episode underscores how distorted narratives can lead to massive human rights violations, highlighting the importance of critically examining historical sources.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Jack O'Brien [09:50]: "Human beings have lived on what is today Ghari for more than 50,000 years."

• Jack O'Brien [41:09]: "Fiona Foley... describes this as part of a process that allowed the empire to facilitate, justify, and rationalize state-sponsored violence that tore land, resources, and sovereignty from indigenous people."

• Miles Gray [52:10]: "So they're just like drunk in the heat in the tropics, which is going to slowly be killing them."

• Jack O'Brien [55:27]: "That didn't happen. You cannot survive on seawater."

• Jack O'Brien [62:59]: "Whoa, what does that have to do... Have like shoes that allow them to move quietly because that's useful when you're hunting or in war."

• Jack O'Brien [73:35]: "They interpret the first white people they saw as something like ghosts returned in corporeal form."

• Jack O'Brien [80:23]: "But that's all coming in part two, Jack."

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This detailed exploration of Eliza Fraser's shipwreck survival illuminates how individual narratives can influence and distort historical events, leading to tragic outcomes for entire communities. The episode serves as a cautionary tale about the power of storytelling and the enduring impact of racial and cultural biases.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

Call Zone Media.

[Jack O'Brien]

It's behind the Bastards, a podcast that I have increasingly gotten bad at opening. You would think normally when you do something thousands of times, you get better at it, but sometimes you just get worse at it because how do you keep opening the podcast? You know, I've already done the. What's crackin 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. There's nowhere to go but want to try Gibberish.

[Robert Evans]

Want to try. Hello and welcome to behind the Bastards. I'm your host.

[Jack O'Brien]

I don't think that Robert Evans. I don't think any podcast is ever open that way. Is that. Is that why we don't get awards?

[Miles Gray]

I prefer haba da ba ba ba da ba da. Yeah, that was pretty good.

[Robert Evans]

That was like Adam Sandler status.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, there you go. And he got to be in Uncut Gems. You know, maybe I'll get to be in Uncut Gems. I could be. I could have a gambling problem. Sophie, I believe in me.

[Robert Evans]

I do believe that you could have a gambling problem. But we don't let you touch the money.

[Jack O'Brien]

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 Swish. Jack the Pro. Brian.

[Miles Gray]

Ring a ding ding. That's called a jackpot.

[Robert Evans]

I thought you.

[Miles Gray]

And that is my catchphrase. Now.

[Jack O'Brien]

That's nice.

[Sophie]

Back from the dead.

[Miles Gray]

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.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, he's not allowed to touch the money.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, yeah. You got blackjack. It's a jackpot. My name really slides slots in nicely with a lot of casino lingo.

[Robert Evans]

Why have you not made a crypto? Oh, because it's evil.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, right, right, right. I will tell you, that is not why. It's a pure laziness and not willing to learn all the that goes along with it.

[Robert Evans]

I do feel like your co host, Miles Gray, could really sell a meme Coin.

[Miles Gray]

Oh, hell yeah. Yeah, like Z coin.

[Robert Evans]

Come on. Oh, there it is. It's there. You did it.

[Miles Gray]

We've. We did Try and soft launch Zycoin. And everybody thought it was a joke.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. So I tried to launch Bastard Coin. Just wound up making the president a lot of money.

[Miles Gray]

Basically what we all do every day.

[Jack O'Brien]

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, 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. Anyway, we're talking about a lady named Eliza Fraser this week. That's our bastard. 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. So she's the bastard this week. And also the colonial state of Australia is a bastard. But it's a fascinating story about a place that I knew nothing about before I started reading about this. So we're gonna have a good time. Jack, you ready to hear about some genocides?

[Miles Gray]

We are the worst, mate. No, that was not. By the end, I will get one good syllable of an Australian accent.

[Jack O'Brien]

Well, it's okay, because Eliza comes from this era. She's British, right? Like, she's a major figure in Australian history, but, like, the Aussies hadn't really figured out that accent yet. Right. They were still just British people on a different place. Right. They're still workshopping Scottish people.

[Miles Gray]

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.

[Jack O'Brien]

Like, Yeah. A bunch of rich guys sat around in a room.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. In Shakespearean time, the British accent sounded like the Baltimore accent. Like, it was just kind of like.

[Jack O'Brien]

And then everyone sounded like a character in the Wire.

[Robert Evans]

Can you do that again, please?

[Miles Gray]

That's correct.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Jin's going down to see Shakespeare at the Globe.

[Jack O'Brien]

That's exactly how Shakespeare sounded. Yes.

[Miles Gray]

That's how much of you. Right. To be or not to be.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yes. Thankfully, Denzel's version of Macbeth really, really delivered on that.

[Miles Gray]

But then they were like, we should sound fancy. And that's where we got received 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.

[Robert Evans]

Jack, I've missed you, buddy.

[Miles Gray]

My accent work so good. You've missed me and my accent work.

[Jack O'Brien]

That's also part of the thing is, like, we could be shitty to everyone who doesn't talk. Right? Cause they didn't go to Eton or wherever. 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.

[Miles Gray]

I know. Very posh, isn't he?

[Jack O'Brien]

Whereas in America, everyone just sounds like a Californian now.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, that's right.

[Jack O'Brien]

We did it, Joe.

[Miles Gray]

All up Speak.

[Jack O'Brien]

This is an I Heart podcast.

[Bowen Yang]

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas.

[Miles Gray]

And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the host of Las Culturistas.

[Bowen Yang]

It's Pride Month, and you know what that means.

[Miles Gray]

Friendship Parties.

[Jack O'Brien]

Dancing. Correct.

[Bowen Yang]

And do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is?

[Miles Gray]

But when we talked about this, I'm not a thing.

[Bowen Yang]

Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos.

[Miles Gray]

Okay, Chic. And honestly, the only other correct answer.

[Bowen Yang]

Casamigos. Margarita during Pride. Now that's a sleigh.

[Miles Gray]

Ah, Casamigos. Anything is a sleigh.

[Bowen Yang]

Because anything goes with my Casamigos.

[Miles Gray]

Anything goes with my Casamigos. Bo, you're a poet.

[Bowen Yang]

Please drink responsibly. Imported by Casamigos Spirits Company, White Plains, New York. Casamigos Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume.

[Jack O'Brien]

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[Bowen Yang]

Speaking of tanning, I was sunning my.

[Jack O'Brien]

Nether regions because I read that you're supposed to, like, get sun not only in your mouth, but also in your other orifices. Wait, are you talking about you put your hole into the sun? I did. That's crazy. Downward dog mooning the sun. I was gonna say. Is it cheeks open? It's cheeks open all the way wide. Is it cheeks open? Uh huh. Who's holding them? Enough of that nonsense.

[Miles Gray]

Now.

[Jack O'Brien]

Listen to High key on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 a. 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. Her husband is the captain, and according to most versions of the story, although not all of them, she is preggers, which I don't think I've ever said on the show.

[Robert Evans]

I hated it.

[Jack O'Brien]

I really did. Should we not be silly? Okay, I'm getting mixed reactions.

[Miles Gray]

The goosebumps that I have on my arms right now are because it felt so good and natural.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Preggers. So preggers. McGregor's.

[Jack O'Brien]

McGregor's. Oh, if only her last name had been McGregor, that would really have worked.

[Miles Gray]

I'm sure one of the people on the ship was named MacGregor.

[Jack O'Brien]

God, anytime there's a British ship at sea, there's a MacGregor 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 and. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. They name it after this lady who lies about 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, G A R I. And if you go to, like, Wikipedia, it'll say it's pronounced Gurri or Gurry, 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 gonna 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 gonna try to call it Ghari. Cause that's what it sounded like in the video that I saw.

[Miles Gray]

Is it Sandy Island? Like just what we all say is. Yeah, all sand. Is that uncommon? I guess, is my question. Like, I've been to islands that have sand on them, but like, I. I did not realize that they were.

[Jack O'Brien]

It's common, but not for them to be this big. Right. Like there's a bunch of sandy islands, but the Great Sandy island is the biggest. One thing you 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.

[Robert Evans]

Jack, imagine an island, but like more sand.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, like even sandier.

[Jack O'Brien]

Right? Even an even sandier island. The sand, you could call it the sandiest island, the sandiest of island. Anakin Skywalker would hate this fucking island as a colonizer. That, I guess makes sense.

[Miles Gray]

Got it.

[Jack O'Brien]

So people have been living on Ghari 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 between because they were like a lot of the peoples who lived on Ghari lived on Ghari, 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, and they call foreshadowing, by the way, like, a sizable amount of their records. Like, we have their records of their very first European contact, which has been passed down for several hundred years through songs. Human beings have lived on what is today Ghari 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. Most casual histories of Ghari tend to emphasize the isolation that the people there had from other groups of people. This does not seem to be entirely accurate. By the time Europeans arrived there, there were three broad tribal groups on the island. One of them, the Bachola, 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. So the Bachola lived on the mainland across from the great Sandy Strait and in the central part of the island. Right. So they would kind of go between diff, like the mainland and the island. And then there's the Dulungbarra, who occupied much of the south, and the Ngulungbara in the north. And I was not able to find pronunciations for those latter two. So I'm doing my best on those, I'm pretty sure I've got Bachola. Right. To some extent. Ghari, like, occupation of Ghari 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, in many ways Eastern.

[Miles Gray]

Like, east coast retirees are living the most similar lives to indigenous peoples of long ago.

[Jack O'Brien]

Right. Florida and that.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. Going between the Jersey Shore and Florida.

[Jack O'Brien]

I do. There are some ways in which that's right. Right. The idea that people would just live one place all the time is new.

[Miles Gray]

It is. And it's also, like, not great. That book, the dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrove, like, they talk about how one of the key freedoms that they used to have that we don't really have as much anymore and don't really value is just the ability to be like, well, this sucked, and, like, leave town. Like, that was always the thing that people were just able to do. And then, like, entire communities would just, like, move if things got shitty.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. Seems like it sucks here. Let's go. This guy's calling himself king. Time to bounce. Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jack O'Brien]

Oh, if only we could still do that. Buy an rv, become free, everyone. That's the message of this podcast, live on the road. You know, there's no downsides. Everyone I know who lives in an RV is happy.

[Miles Gray]

That's right. It always goes well.

[Jack O'Brien]

It never goes badly. RVs are well made. They don't break immediately. Okay.

[Robert Evans]

I can't tell you the amount of times Robert has suggested we get a podcast RV.

[Jack O'Brien]

I think we should get a suite of RVs.

[Miles Gray]

I love that idea. We should probably podcast.

[Jack O'Brien]

I could be a podcast commodore. Thank you, Jack. Yes.

[Miles Gray]

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 being like, oh, I love this idea.

[Jack O'Brien]

We can cook lizards over open fires like Mad Max. I think it's a good idea. Okay.

[Miles Gray]

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.

[Jack O'Brien]

I mean, people. A lot of people are really hesitant to let their children live in a roaming RV parade.

[Miles Gray]

They don't get to come.

[Jack O'Brien]

Okay, excellent. No Then 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, yeah, 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 at. There's some debate on this, but there's some evidence that here as well as in other places, when people's loved ones died, there was a degree of funerary cannibalism practiced. Right. And another thing that 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. 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.

[Miles Gray]

Not entirely wrong, not entirely inaccurate.

[Jack O'Brien]

Kind of a helpful coincidence there in some ways. 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 Gyrbao, the bachala 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 believe that everyone went to the same place and that apart from their homeland and the lands of other tribes, they knew there was no other place. So again, this 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 Ghari, but for like, all of the different aboriginal peoples in Australia, will be used by Europeans as justifications for some pretty hideous acts of genocide, 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 engage 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, like, human civilization on Earth. If you go back far enough, it.

[Miles Gray]

Kind of seems like a somewhat sophisticated idea. The idea of, like, you are turned into energy. Like, it's not necessarily like dust to dust, as the whites like to say. You actually turned into energy and, you.

[Jack O'Brien]

Know, you remain a part of us.

[Miles Gray]

That a plant grows out of that gets eaten. And.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

You know, I will say also, as somebody who grew up in a strict Catholic household, there's a lot of cannibalism is not. Not uncommon in the Western world. Like, they live for people who don't know Catholicism. Like, they believe that they're, you know, they're doing the sacrament up on the altar, they ring a little bell, and at that point the bread and wine literally turns into Jesus is like body and blood.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Like, that's what they think is happening. Yeah, I've tasted it. Actually. I don't want to write 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 judging other people.

[Jack O'Brien]

So weird, right? The way they do. It's bad, though, is it just like.

[Miles Gray]

A small piece of, like, a loved one?

[Jack O'Brien]

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 of 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. Like, we are talking about people who are living with wildly different margins than we can conceive of. And the purpose here is not cruelty or some dark ritual, which is, again, what it often got spun out to, that they're doing this for some sort of magic purpose. This is survival. Right. There's simply not enough food. 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.

[Miles Gray]

And almost like a mercy killing in some cases. Right. Like they're going to starve to death.

[Jack O'Brien]

I don't know if we're going to live. This baby certainly can't. Right. And so you. You know, but what you have is you have these people who are calling themselves anthropologists, these Europeans traveling, you know, through the continent and who find evidence of this. And they're not really anthropologists. They're usually just like people 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, of course. And so this thing that's like, well, yeah, sometimes people who are starving have to make hard choices gets turned into something else. Right, right. I found an article on Aboriginal cannibalism in Queensland on the University of Queensland's website, written by E. G. Heap in 1967. So this would have been published at close to the peak of days of racist anthropology on this matter. And even in this article, the author repeatedly points out how incredibly thin the actual evidence is for many of the cannibalistic practices that were claimed to be universal. Quote. Thomas, who's one of the anthropologists in this period, recorded a case on the Gascoigne river in Western Australia where an Aboriginal girl was eaten and killed and eaten by a native who decoyed her away. She was very plump. The object of killing her was to acquire this desirable quality. 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 ritual purpose. There's no evidence that this happened. Right. Like, we don't actually know why. He said, in our movies, yeah, yeah, we gotta 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 people eating parts of defeated enemies 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.

[Miles Gray]

Those animals are so fucked up. I can't believe they did that. Yeah, that's like the explanation behind the Dyalatov Pass, whatever that one is.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, Dyatlov Pass. Right. The monster must have eaten them.

[Miles Gray]

Their tongues were missing, their eyes were missing. It's like, yeah, those are the soft animals eat when you're just.

[Jack O'Brien]

And they're hungry because it's snowy. And when I looked into this paper more because like I found a bunch of cases where it's like, okay, 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 mystic, the best kind. And she's kind of wandering around in like the 1800s. Sorry, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. And she's this mix of this kind of like paternalistic sympathy towards aboriginal people. Sure, right. But also a lot of bigotry. And she becomes maybe the primary source during this period of claims about cannibalism and.

[Miles Gray]

Sounds reliable.

[Jack O'Brien]

Sounds reliable. It's one of those things. And this is often 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 with the notable exception of cannibalism. Basically you can't listen to anything she says when she brings up cannibalism, Right. Like 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. So I'm not primed to like her. She seems to have grown up as a 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 lying about her background, pretending to have come from a different place than she did and be a different person that she is. And she's got. She's obsessed with cannibalism kind of later in life. 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.

[Miles Gray]

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?

[Jack O'Brien]

No, no, she's just a very modern figure.

[Miles Gray]

She could have been in the administration from dementia.

[Jack O'Brien]

Jesus, he would have made her the fucking ambassador to Australia.

[Miles Gray]

Believes that she's qualified to do a job that she is in no way qualified to do.

[Jack O'Brien]

Honestly, 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, like claiming that that is a thing that's happening. 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?

[Miles Gray]

Ooh, dog.

[Jack O'Brien]

Cat. Oh, you were close. You're close, Jack. Fucking cat bones. She's lying about a cat bones being a cannibalized baby. Speaking of eating cats. Don't do that. Listen to these ads.

[Miles Gray]

I thought the Advertiser was.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, HelloFresh has a new product line. This is an advertisement from BetterHelp. Men often feel an immense amount of stigma around the very concept of seeking help with their mental health. And it can be a real struggle to keep everything together while bottling up the way you feel inside. And that can lead to depression, burnout, and a lot of other unhealthy habits. It's okay to struggle. Real strength comes from opening up about what you're carrying and doing something about it so you can be at your best for yourself and everyone you care about. And if you're considering Therap, you might give a look to BetterHelp with over 35,000 therapists worldwide, BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy provider, having served over 5 million people globally. And it works with an App store rating of 4.9 out of 5 based on 1.7 million client reviews. It's convenient too. You can join a session with the click of a button, helping you fit therapy into your busy life. Plus, you can switch therapists anytime. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp, our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com behind that's betterhelp.com behind I'm sure you know that identity theft is a growing problem, and it's not just your grandma who's at risk. It can happen to anyone, even the rich and famous. Victims of identity theft include famous actors, politicians, talk show hosts and one very famous golfer. None of us are safe. Fortunately, there's LifeLock. LifeLock monitors millions of data points a second for threats to your identity. If your identity is stolen, a LifeLock US based restoration specialist will help solve identity theft issues on your behalf, guaranteed or your money back. Plus, all LifeLock plans are backed by the million dollar protection package, meaning LifeLock will reimburse you up to the limits of your plan. If you lose money due to identity theft, you can't control how diligent others are with your personal information, but with Lifelock, you can help protect it. Act now and save up to 40% your first year. Call 1-800-LIFELOCK and use promo code BTB or go to lifelock.com BTB for 40% off. Terms apply. American Public University is where service members like you can access high quality, affordable education built for your lifestyle. With online programs that fit around deployments, training and unpredictable schedules, APU makes it possible to earn your degree no matter where duty takes you. Their preferred military rate keeps the tuition at just $250 per credit hour for undergraduate and master's tuition and with 24. 7 Mental health support plus career coaching and other services, APU is committed to your success during and after your service. Learn more at APU Apus. Edu Military that's APU Apus Edu Military.

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[Jack O'Brien]

We're back. And our lawyers have sent 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 you know, are there allegations that they serve cat meat?

[Miles Gray]

Certainly are now, Robert.

[Jack O'Brien]

Absolutely. Now there are for sure, your cats. But we can't prove it.

[Robert Evans]

Your cats just sent me a text message and they're uncomfortable with this conversation.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, well, they do look delicious.

[Robert Evans]

Oh my God, Leave Saddam and Saddam Hussein's best friend alone.

[Jack O'Brien]

Well, they've gotten fat lately. You know, they have a good diet. I'm just saying, you know, salivary, I.

[Robert Evans]

Think they look great. And you're mean.

[Jack O'Brien]

That's right, I am.

[Miles Gray]

And when Sophie says they look great, she means they look like big cartoon ham legs.

[Robert Evans]

Not what I said.

[Jack O'Brien]

That's what they look to me. I didn't have breakfast today, so I'm just. I'm just looking at everything that way. So.

[Miles Gray]

By the way, it's three in the afternoon, everybody. Just so you know what kind of hours Robert keeps.

[Robert Evans]

The audience knows.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, they're aware by this point.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah.

[Jack O'Brien]

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 there too. Human meat had had always been their favorite food. And there were killing vendettas from time immemorial in order that the killing should be safe. Murderer 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.

[Miles Gray]

With, like, she's just describing things that they have, like tools that they have and being like, yeah, I'm sure they.

[Jack O'Brien]

Have, like shoes that allow them to move quiet because that's useful when you're hunting or in war.

[Miles Gray]

She's just like, that must be because they are trying to eat people.

[Jack O'Brien]

And like, again, you can find actual debate between 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 certainly not like a favorite 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. Because she's gone crazy and is very racist.

[Miles Gray]

They like cannibalism so much. They like try and marry it. They want to marry cannibalism. It's their best friend.

[Jack O'Brien]

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.

[Miles Gray]

So frustrating that he is the psychedelics person.

[Jack O'Brien]

I know, I know. I've done way more fucking DMT than him.

[Miles Gray]

I'm so much better at psychedelics.

[Jack O'Brien]

Thank you.

[Miles Gray]

You need to take it back.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, this is.

[Miles Gray]

This is our psychedelics guy. Not fucking Joe Rogan. Christ. Did you see this special?

[Robert Evans]

Forget being the Joe Rogan of the left.

[Jack O'Brien]

Robert's the psychedelics of the left, the psychedelics guy.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jack O'Brien]

I could take steroids. I believe in me. Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Did you see his stand up special? Or better yet, did you see the elephant graveyard analysis of his stand up special?

[Jack O'Brien]

No, I have.

[Miles Gray]

I. I will send that link to you.

[Jack O'Brien]

I assume it's a literal elephant graveyard you're talking about. I'm not gonna look into that more.

[Miles Gray]

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's stand up special. And they just like go joke for joke and they're like, oh, no. Oh, Joe. What is. What is happening?

[Jack O'Brien]

Things have gone downhill since. What was he. He wasn't on the man show, was he?

[Robert Evans]

Fear Factor.

[Miles Gray]

He might. No. Fear Factor.

[Jack O'Brien]

That was Adam Carolla. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was on that show with Andy Dick.

[Robert Evans]

Frankly, too much time on Joe Rogan. Continue with the script, please.

[Jack O'Brien]

Anyway, speaking of Andy Dick, the Andy Dick of old timey European colonizers was Captain James Cook, who was the first Englishman to enter the recorded history of the people of garri. 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. He and a colleague debated whether or not. Cause again, there's like, notes taken on board the ship and the notes are that James Cook is debating with, like, a colleague whether or not the skin color of these people meant they were a new race of humans. Humans. He was kind of tripped up by their hair, which he was surprised to see was, quote, very much like ours. Wow. Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Made out of the same stuff.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, yeah, wow. The same kind of hair as we.

[Miles Gray]

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? Like.

[Jack O'Brien]

Well, because you. You have to be out of your mind. And if you're not out of your mind when you start becoming an explorer, the months you spend dying at sea are going to make you lose your mind.

[Miles Gray]

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.

[Jack O'Brien]

The anthropophagi, I think, is the name of those that, like, Sir Walter Rachel. Raleigh. Right.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah.

[Jack O'Brien]

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.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, it was. These are just like, the world's best liars. Like, I mean, not even good liars, I guess.

[Jack O'Brien]

The lies I would have told.

[Miles Gray]

Successful.

[Jack O'Brien]

Imagine because, like, you wind up in, like, the center of, like, a European capital, effectively in the center of their entire media ecosystem. And you're like, so, have any of you guys been to China? All right, I'm gonna just say some shit.

[Miles Gray]

Nope.

[Jack O'Brien]

I can make you guys believe anything.

[Miles Gray]

Good news for me. They worshiped me as a God.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. So The Bachola 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 Bachola artist and scholar writing for the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University. The Bacholip 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 Bachola as Takiworu. 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 Takiworu, 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 space, 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.

[Miles Gray]

And frequently they're like, and why do these guys smell like.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, wow. They smell like that boat. You can smell it from here.

[Miles Gray]

Like, all the European settlers just smelled. I mean, first of all, they're, like, rolling in off a boat.

[Jack O'Brien]

Like, they're shitting over the side of this thing, right?

[Miles Gray]

Just. 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 end edge.

[Jack O'Brien]

Every one of those sailors is like 80% Giardia by body weight. Like, they're just.

[Miles Gray]

Just stuck all river and, like. And swollen gums. That's the. What, 90% of their body weight comes from.

[Jack O'Brien]

Oh, man.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. I mean, that's like, even. You know, I remember the. That article that I was talking about, like, Marco Polo is one of them. His, like, whole claim to fame was going to China and, like, becoming a great, great ruler in China and, like, helping them fight a war. And you can go like, they were a way more advanced civilization, the most advanced civilization on the planet.

[Jack O'Brien]

They had a.

[Miles Gray]

They had a printing press at this point, like, well ahead of Europe. 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, you know, sailed around the bend and then just, like, came back five years later and was like, like China. Ever heard of it? Great.

[Jack O'Brien]

Nope. Okay, I'm just gonna say, shit, no. This is why I'm an Ibn Battuta Stan and not a Marco Polo Stan.

[Miles Gray]

There you go.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Cool.

[Miles Gray]

You always have been.

[Jack O'Brien]

Hook him up, kids. He's cool. So he probably also did some fucked up shit, man. I'm not gonna lie. So Fiona here, who's this Bachola scholar and artist who I just quoted from, describes Cook's attempts to classify the denizens of Ghari in his decision to name the island Indian Head as, quote, the first of British racialization in Australia. And cites Jody Bird'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's that it doesn't start with the actual colonization or with even the legal code. It starts with this guy in 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. Yeah, right. That. That's the start of the process of racialization that ends that. Well, it leads to genocide. It doesn't end there, but that's a part of it. Right. So this was just the beginning of a long process of colonial violence. 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 Wirksworth, 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.

[Miles Gray]

Anyone famous? You know, we don't care why, let's just get someone famous scraping the bottom.

[Jack O'Brien]

Of the barrel in Derbyshire. Derbyshire.

[Miles Gray]

Let's go to the genocide inciters. We don't have anybody. Let's go.

[Jack O'Brien]

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's 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.

[Miles Gray]

Most men thought that that was scientifically and physically impossible at that time.

[Jack O'Brien]

It's starting to change by the time she. But 1798 is still pretty dark days for that. She may have had a husb. 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 boar, much in demand by ship owners who had managed to overinsure their vessels. In other words, this guy's so incompetent you, you hire him to run your.

[Miles Gray]

Ship, to drunk drive your car.

[Jack O'Brien]

Right, right. If your insurance is good, yeah. He's gonna drunk drive your boat into oblivion. 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, polite and competent sea captain. You'll hear both stories. He's been dead a long time. I simply don't know.

[Miles Gray]

Love, how mean the conflicting thing. Like the big fat idiot who dumb shit.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Sucks shit at his job. And then like there's obviously the self edited Wikipedia entry where it's like urbane in his manner.

[Jack O'Brien]

Right? Yeah, he's like, I was handsome as shit.

[Miles Gray]

Picking up subtle things about like how attractive he is.

[Jack O'Brien]

Right, Right. Yeah, his dick game. Like, yeah, there's a whole Wikipedia suck set there. Yeah, yeah, he was. Speaking of dick game, he was 54 and Eliza was 37 when they left London on October 22, 1835. So there's a bit of an age gap here.

[Miles Gray]

Slight, small.

[Jack O'Brien]

Now, as is the norm for European parents, they have no interest in parenting their children and leave them behind in Orkney to be watched over by a local Presbyterian minister, which was the style at the times. Hey kids, we're going on a boat for like a year. We may die or not. This minister is going to be your dad and mom now.

[Miles Gray]

Hang out with a priest.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, this guy's gotta be in charge. Good call, parenting in the 1800s. Most accounts will say that Eliza was pregnant when the vessel departed, although again, there's some dispute on the matter. The Stirling 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, 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 Moreton Bay. Unfortunately for everyone aboard, this takes them near the Swain reefs, which is 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 gonna make that joke. So the ship ran aground on the reef and the crew of 19 got into two lifeboats. Captain Fraser, 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 el got into a pinnace, which is a slightly nicer boat. Both boats traveled together for a time and they split their supplies between them, which included brandy and beer, but no water. So again, they've got different beer. No, you don't want water. You don't want water in this boat.

[Miles Gray]

You just want some brandy and beer and some pickles with mustard if you. Ah shit, we dropped that stuff with the Aussies.

[Jack O'Brien]

So they're just like drunk in the heat in the tropics, which is going to slowly be killing them. So everyone is slowly dying on these rescue boats. They don't really know where they are. They do have guns though, so they're drunk and disoriented, but heavily armed. The nearest settlement to them was about 370 miles south of where the Fraser ran aground. But navigation was difficult under these conditions. And again, no one 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 Fraser's longboat is constantly taking on water. So they're bailing it out 247 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 long boat. 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.

[Miles Gray]

Being born underwater during a shipwreck.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yes. Bad way to have a baby.

[Miles Gray]

To people who have only consumed alcohol.

[Jack O'Brien]

Whose only source of calories are beer and brandy. Yes.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah. I don't know what happened. How did the baby not make.

[Jack O'Brien]

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 incredible. Pretty resilient.

[Miles Gray]

Unbelievable.

[Jack O'Brien]

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 the. Until her story had gone 1800s viral quote, probably through modesty. In other words, she didn't. 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. Did she just make this up to kind of get sympathy? Cause she definitely does some of that. Right. We really don't know. Two days later, processing this and several other traumas, Captain Fraser was finally forced to put his failing boat ashore to find wash. 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 the 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.

[Miles Gray]

Maybe they didn't have dresses on, though, right?

[Jack O'Brien]

They didn't have dresses. At any rate, they fill up their water, they finally have water, and they continue their journey until they run out of water again. Eliza claims that she 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.

[Miles Gray]

That's a superpower. That's like her being like. And then I just.

[Jack O'Brien]

That just didn't happen.

[Miles Gray]

Flew to the island.

[Jack O'Brien]

I levitated above the leaky boat. Yeah. You cannot survive on seawater. It's generally 3 to 4% 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 Indianhave Head. Right. Based on what Captain Cook had called it. The indigenous people are still calling it Ghari, but Captain Fraser doesn't want to get on the Big island because, number one, he thinks it's a chunk of the Australian mainland. But number two, he's been told everyone here is a cannibal. So he's, like, scared of. They can see people, and he doesn't want to get close to people because he thinks they'll eat him. One day, though, the Pinnace, which is the second boat with them, goes out to find water while the longboat kind of waits by the shore, and it never comes back. The people on it do eventually find their way back to civilization. I don't know if they just abandoned Eliza and her husband maybe because they found them annoying.

[Miles Gray]

They're so annoying.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. Yeah. There is some evidence history changed based.

[Miles Gray]

On, like, how annoying someone is.

[Jack O'Brien]

Other survivors were like, yeah, she sucked.

[Miles Gray]

We're going 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. Granted, Grant's wife found Mary Todd Lincoln annoying.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Completely changed the course of history.

[Jack O'Brien]

You know, 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.

[Robert Evans]

With them, never underestimate having that one annoying friend that you keep around just to avoid assassinations.

[Miles Gray]

That's right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[Jack O'Brien]

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.

[Miles Gray]

They're like, he keeps doing that quagmire voice.

[Jack O'Brien]

You're not allowed on this one.

[Miles Gray]

Stop saying giggity giggity man. Just get the fuck out of there.

[Jack O'Brien]

No, they would let anybody on flights back then, as evidenced by 911 happening right?

[Miles Gray]

What a time.

[Robert Evans]

Wow.

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[Jack O'Brien]

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[Jack O'Brien]

So anyway, they get abandoned off the coast of Ghari 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 they're like, fuck it, let's try our luck. We're going to die either way. It's kind of, 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 bachola 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 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, the Bachola people approached them with decomposing kangaroo meat. When a sailor ate some, they took some of his clothes and, like, what? Man, number one, they don't have refrigerators. Right. This happens in the winter, so it's not a great sea. They don't have a lot of food. Like, this kind of going off. Kangaroo meat is the best they can do, and it's better than you were able to do for yourselves. Like, this is a nice thing.

[Miles Gray]

They approached them with fruit that had brown spots on them. It's like, what the fuck?

[Jack O'Brien]

And, like, they give them food, and they're like, hey, can I try on your clothes? Like, 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.

[Miles Gray]

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.

[Jack O'Brien]

When I met you, you gave me some rancid kangaroo meat, although for a different reason that we don't need to get into.

[Miles Gray]

And then we exchanged shirts.

[Jack O'Brien]

We did exchange shirts. Yes.

[Miles Gray]

That was more to. Yeah, it was a weird hallucination. The rancid kangaroo meat.

[Jack O'Brien]

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 landed with Captain Frazier and Eliza either try to leave or walk off to try to find a town to get rescued for everyone else. Or they just desert. We don't really know. Crewman Harjolden is the source of the claim that we deserted. And he blames a lot Liza for making them dessert, 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.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, he sounds like the worst.

[Jack O'Brien]

It's possible for everyone to suck here.

[Miles Gray]

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.

[Jack O'Brien]

Our she wife. Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

At the same time, I do think that you should now address me as she captain.

[Jack O'Brien]

As she captain, sure. Of course.

[Robert Evans]

Because it's kind of grown on me in the last 30 seconds.

[Jack O'Brien]

I don't feel like you need to gender captain. Like it's not an inherently masculine or feminine word.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know. There's kind of a floater it she caps.

[Jack O'Brien]

It's like calling someone a she person. You don't really need to do that. It 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 Fraser 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 point. Rate, after they are rescued by the Bachola, the group splits up and Darj ylden and four other men head for where they think is Morton Bay. But Moreton Bay is on the mainland. So again, they don't really know where they are. Eliza, her husband, good navigators.

[Miles Gray]

They're crazy. We're gonna head over to Sydney real quick.

[Jack O'Brien]

It's like, east, and I think east is left. So, yeah, we'll just try that.

[Miles Gray]

They've been at sea, like, offshore, sailing around the island for the past, like, few weeks, and now they're like.

[Jack O'Brien]

I think I say they're bad at this. I'm sure it's hard.

[Miles Gray]

Yeah, for sure.

[Jack O'Brien]

I haven't tried to navigate this way without access to a backup plan. Eliza, her husband, and four other men go south with the Bachola. Right now, most of them have guns, but they become separated at some point, or several of them become separated at some point. It's a little bit unclear exactly what happens. All of these stories are kind of different, but Eliza and her husband wind up living with the Bachola for several. And the first thing that she reports, the patroller 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 just dipping your filthy clothing into water. Like, no, this is how you get nice, clean water.

[Miles Gray]

Patiently teaching them how to not die. And she's like, oh, my God. They're trying to kill me.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. Now, Eliza admits that they did this, but she also claims they demanded clothing from the men and beat one of them when he refused. And here's how. John Wright, the author of that Derbyshire Life article, describes what happened next. Their dwindling numbers made the Aborigines. Again, that's not Aboriginal people is the preferred term, but this is how he writes it. Boulder. And the exchange of clothing continued until they were not 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 Fraser 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 if you don't have better methods. Right. Available. Like, this is a thing that. That the Bachola and other people do. So this account and other accounts are like, oh, they did it because they wanted to make her skin darker like theirs. It's like, no, she was probably covered in cuts. Cause she'd been shipwrecked and at sea for months and they were trying to treat her injuries.

[Miles Gray]

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.

[Jack O'Brien]

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.

[Miles Gray]

Yes.

[Jack O'Brien]

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 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 gonna really be freaky to all of these white British people that 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 maggots out of injuries. And maybe she was. That's the thing you're gonna 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? In general, she alleges bestial treatment from the bachola, who, by her accounts, forced her and the other survivors into hard labor and beat them when they failed to work at a sufficient pace. Now, it's important that we take a second here to look at how the bachola would have seen these white people at this point in time. They have had very little contact with europeans, and their traditional concept of the world was a lot smaller than it would become Come. 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, like, wound up on the island. To get a dark adopted into different bands on ghari, after one member of a tribe or another would be like, oh, I think this is the return spirit of, like, 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, you know, what was going on under the hood here. Another thing that's happening in this period is that, you know, you've got cities like sydney, which are european cities and thus have european prisons. And sometimes convicts will escape these prisons on mainland settlements and they'll flee, and some of them will wind up on these islands, and they will be taken in by the bachelor chola 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 bachola on the mary river. Although initially known to coastal aborigines as dunanbot, meaning small one, among the bachola, he became thorimbi, the Reincarnated son of a tribal elder killed in battle some years before. Again, details of Davis's 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 Ghari by the natives, right? He spells it Carina. I don't understand why, but it's pronounced Carri, 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 Armadal to the Mary river via the Bunyil 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 Lt. Bligh and his Native Mounted Police in December 1854. Fahey, it seems, became the most totally incorporated of all the fugitives into aboriginal lifestyle, lifestyles passing through the Bora ceremony and bearing upon his body the musgrah 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. In John Fahey's case, his black kinsmen fought bitterly with the native troopers to prevent his recapture. Upon his return to Sydney, however, officialdom casually awarded Fahey a year's imprisonment on the roads and chains and forgotten got him. So there's this fascinating story of these people who have been tossed out by their own culture and you have no value but being chained to a gang, working on the roads or locked in a cage. And they're adopted as members of the family by some of these groups. I find that particularly the case of Fahey where he's helping them raid white settlers and they like fighting 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.

[Miles Gray]

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 they're living side by side, it's always, people love to like Go join the tribe and like, are accepted in.

[Jack O'Brien]

It seems to be a mix. Like, some of these people do go back and forth. A couple of these guys go back several times, will like try to make in Europe and then head back to the tribe. Like some of them have like families that they will periodically leave and then come back to. So it is like a, it's like a complicated for sure exchange here. But certainly like especially this case of Fahey, this guy who is like, oh, you know what? These people rip, I'm going to help them kill these colonizers. Right. Sounds like. And then, yeah, dies, abandoned in a chain gang by the British authorities. Real bummer. Real bummer. But yeah, 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 these people with white skin are returning spirits isn't going to last. 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?

[Miles Gray]

Yeah.

[Jack O'Brien]

Like, 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.

[Miles Gray]

On first pass, they were like, they look different. There must be a reason for that. Oh, no, they're just assholes.

[Jack O'Brien]

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 what they had access to, information wise, it's not an illogical conclusion to come to initially.

[Miles Gray]

Right.

[Jack O'Brien]

So. And again, it's important here at this point, as we kind of close this episode out, that I make two acknowledgments. The first is that even though the vast bulk of the evidence suggests that the people who took in a Eliza and her husband and shipmates were trying to be kind and welcome them in essentially as members of the family, this still would have been disorienting and terrifying for Eliza and her shipmates. And not just because they're racist, because, like, you don't know these people'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? 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?

[Miles Gray]

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?

[Jack O'Brien]

Right?

[Miles Gray]

Could I? Like, it's what. What are we doing here?

[Jack O'Brien]

Right? And like. Like many cultures, like, there is, like, corporal punishment. If you're not pulling your weight, maybe you get smacked, right? You get yelled at or you get smacked, right? Because that's just like, a thing that's not 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.

[Miles Gray]

So many wacky misunderstandings, right?

[Jack O'Brien]

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 bachola are doing stuff like smacking them for not being good at gathering food, they're starving actively because it's the starving season, right? You go hungry at points in the year regularly because it's just kind of hard to live this way.

[Miles Gray]

They gave me a spanking on my little bottom, these savages, right?

[Jack O'Brien]

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 rather 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.

[Miles Gray]

He's like, but not me.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, Captain Fraser, sometimes people smack each other. It's not uncommon. This is not a bachola thing. So the worst that we might say then about the bachola is they expected these guests or ghosts or however they saw them to pull their own weight, and they weren't afraid to 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 Bachola. It's not that they treated her 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.

[Miles Gray]

Jesus.

[Jack O'Brien]

But that's all coming in part two, Jack.

[Miles Gray]

That sounds like it's going to be a really fun part two without any horrifying information to learn.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah. Nope. It's all good from here. They start a dance troupe.

[Miles Gray]

Smooth sailing.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah.

[Miles Gray]

They dance it out.

[Jack O'Brien]

They open a BNB together. Yeah, it's great. It's all going to be good. All right, Jack, you got anything to plug?

[Miles Gray]

I do, Robert. Thank you so much for asking. I co host a show called the Daily Zeitgeist with Miles Gray, also a guest on this show in the past. We're on there every, like, every weekday, I believe. That can't be right. That's too many. Too many damn shows. Yeah. Monday through Friday, we drop at least an episode, so you can find me there. And I'm on Twitter at jackobrian and on bluesky@jackobie. The number one, because I didn't get on Blue sky fast enough.

[Jack O'Brien]

Right, Right. Well, either get on Blue sky or don't. Honestly, I think we've all had enough social media at this point. Maybe light your computer on fire. That's not fun.

[Robert Evans]

You're gonna idea.

[Miles Gray]

That's an interesting idea.

[Jack O'Brien]

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.

[Robert Evans]

Never take advice from Robert.

[Jack O'Brien]

Except this.

[Miles Gray]

This advice obviously burn down your neighborhood.

[Jack O'Brien]

Yeah, okay, let's end on that note.

[Robert Evans]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is Now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards.

[Bowen Yang]

This is Bowen Yang from Las Culturistas.

[Miles Gray]

And I'm Matt Rogers, and we're the hosts of Las Culturistas.

[Bowen Yang]

It's Pride Month, and you know what that means.

[Miles Gray]

Friendship parties.

[Jack O'Brien]

Dancing. Corre.

[Bowen Yang]

Do you know what the perfect thing to bring to any Pride event is?

[Miles Gray]

But when we talked about this, I'm not a thing.

[Bowen Yang]

Oh, not you. I meant Casamigos Okay, Chic and honestly.

[Miles Gray]

The only other correct answer.

[Bowen Yang]

Casamigos Margarita during Pride. Now that's a sleigh.

[Miles Gray]

Ah, Casamigos.

[Bowen Yang]

Anything is a sleigh because anything goes with my Casamigos.

[Miles Gray]

Anything goes with my Casamigos. Bo, you're a poet.

[Bowen Yang]

Please drink responsibly. Imported by Casamigos Spirits Company, White Plains, New York. Casamigos Tequila 40% alcohol by volume Balancing.

[Jack O'Brien]

Work, family and education isn't easy, but American Public University makes it possible with online courses, courses, monthly start dates, and flexible schedules. APU is designed for busy professionals who need education that fits their lives. And Affordability matters, too. APU offers the Opportunity Grant, giving students 10% off undergraduate and master's level tuition, helping you reach your goals without breaking the bank. Plus, they provide career services and 24. 7 mental health support at no extra cost. Visit Apu Apus Edu to learn. Learn more. That's Apu Apus Edu.

[Robert Evans]

This podcast is supported by BetterHelp, offering licensed therapists you can connect with via video phone or chat. Here's BetterHelp head of clinical operations Hes Hu Jo discussing who can benefit from therapy.

[Jack O'Brien]

I think a lot of people think that you're supposed to be going to therapy once you're like having panic attacks every day. But before you get to that point, I think once you start even noticing that you feel a little bit off and you can't maintain this harmony that you once had in relationships, that could be a sign that maybe you want to go talk to somebody. There's always a benefit in talking to someone because we can all benefit from improved insight about ourselves and who we are and how we behave with other people. So if you're human, that's like a good indicator that you could benefit from talking to someone. Somebody.

[Robert Evans]

Find out if therapy is right for you. Visit betterhelp.com today. That's betterhelp.com you know what's great about.

[Jana Kramer]

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[Jack O'Brien]

This is an iHeart podcast.