Australia's Wild Northern Territory with David McMahon

Aussie outback guide David McMahon spends his life surrounded by crocodiles, snakes and any number of creatures that can kill you in Australia's Northern Territory. Is it as dangerous as it sounds? Should you be afraid to visit? Hear from a guy who lives among the wildest area of the wildest country. David started as a chef in South Australia, but today he guides guests into the remote places he loves in Arnhem Land, Kakadu National Park and more. With host Tim Sweeney, David discusses the significance of the local Indigenous culture, the diversity of languages in "The Territory", and the challenges of living alongside dangerous wildlife in his role as a lead guide for Venture North Safaris. His passion for spending life in "The Bush" and his experiences in the wild provide listeners with a vivid picture of life in this extraordinary part of the world, and the host chimes with a few of his own yarns from a visit to Darwin and the Top End of Australia. 


Chapters

00:00 Introduction to a Unique Lifestyle
10:12 The Wildness of Northern Australia
14:09 Living with Nature's Dangers
17:05 The Abundance of Food in the Bush
20:13 The Impact of Nature on Tourists
22:39 Conclusion: A Life of Adventure and Learning
29:21 Exploring Diverse Travel Experiences
30:21 Cahills Crossing: A Crocodile Hotspot
32:52 Understanding Crocodile Behavior and Risks
35:19 The Unique Ecosystem of Northern Australia
37:46 Close Calls: David's Wild Encounters
41:22 Favorite Animals and Fascination with Snakes
45:48 Future Aspirations and Adventures
48:03 Travel Recommendations for Northern Australia

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Transcript

Tim Sweeney (00:05)
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the long distance lounge. My name is Tim Sweeney and on this episode we're going out there to the outback specifically we're going to the Northern territory or as they call it the territory in Australia and we're going to talk to a guy named David McMahon who man this guy has some stories and he knows how to tell a story.

Tim Sweeney (00:28)
David works for a company called venture North safaris, which specializes in high end tours. take people all across the top end and the Northern territory of Australia, including way out into Arnhem land, which is a place well beyond where I actually visited.

Tim Sweeney (00:45)
These are wild places. His life involves, you know, encounters with crocodiles, snakes, you name it. And we're going to get into all of that with him. And yes, he can tell a story. I went to the Northern territory, the territory myself, I wrote about it in my book. That book is called Yank Down Under a drink and a look around Australia.

You can find it on Amazon. Yep. Had to get that plug in there. ⁓ my trip to Darwin and the Northern territory was really something else. It's a very, very unique place. This is like the last frontier, a bit ⁓ of Australia. Darwin is a frontier town and that is how you access these places that you probably saw in crocodile Dundee. And David kind of lives that life in a way. And we joke about that in the podcast, but.

It's a very special place. think you're going to love David's stories. And so I won't keep yammering on here and I'll let you hear from him. Let's get into it. This is David McMahon coming to you from the Northern territory of Australia.

Timothy Sweeney (01:49)
welcome David. Thank you so much for joining me. I have been waiting to talk to you. I'm really excited about this, because I think you're living, I guess, a life and existence, job, let's say, career, I suppose, few people do. lot of people would think it's eccentric, and to people in other parts of the world, they can't even.

put their minds around this. So first, where are you calling in from today and can you just give us title, what you do for a living?

David (02:15)
Absolutely, pleasure to be here. So I'm a tour guide in Arnhem Land. I'm in Darwin at the moment, the capital of the Northern Territory. And that's where I'm sort of based. But most of my time is out in the most remote pockets of Northern Australia, really, really wild places where we take small guests, pick them up in Darwin and get them right out in the bush. We have a lot of access through really remote Aboriginal country when it permits to be there. And we work closely with traditional owners to take small groups of interest

interesting guests into this wild part of northern Australia.

Timothy Sweeney (02:49)
Yeah. So tour guide is kind of putting

it, ⁓ that when people think of tour guide, you know, you could be at the Disney world or something, but this is really remote places you go to. mean, I guess we can start with the Northern territory in or territory has you say down there, I guess the territory, ⁓ is, is a massive, massive place. Right. And there's only what several hundred thousand people that live on in this overall in the territory. It's.

David (03:05)
territory,

Timothy Sweeney (03:16)
I forget there's all kinds of stats, right? It's like six times bigger than the UK, twice the size of Texas.

David (03:18)
It's twice the size of Yeah, twice the

size of Texas and we've got just over 200,000 people. So most of those are in Darwin. About 120 something thousand, yeah.

Timothy Sweeney (03:24)
Wow. most, yep, okay. So Darwin's kind,

really, okay. So Darwin's kind of the, I say, for a tourist, for a visitor, kind of the jumping off point to see the rest or other parts of the territory. Like there's a proper city there or town city, if you will, which has some, yeah, a lot of cool history actually too, which I didn't realize until I went there. And when you fly in to Darwin, I was coming from Melbourne,

David (03:44)
Yeah, it's a lovely small city.

Timothy Sweeney (03:55)
It's red, dry, and then a lot of wetlands. So the contrast was quite fascinating from above. can you kind of set the stage for what is up there in the top end as they call it?

David (04:07)
So yeah, the top end.

The Northern Territory is split into the top end and the desert country. And Central Australia in the desert, you've got Uluru, Alice Springs is the capital of the desert and it's really dry, surrounded by all these really, really dry deserts. But as you head north, go in thousands of kilometres further north, you're well and truly up in the tropics. So Darwin gets that wet season, dry season tropics, enormous amounts of rain in the wet and that creates these endless floodplains and wetlands and really spectacular stuff.

Timothy Sweeney (04:38)
It's quite a contrast, isn't it, from the dry center, if you will. And then when you get to the top end, it's like, right, this winter, what is winter in the north and summer for you guys is serious wet season. I mean, the changes in the season are drastic, right?

David (04:43)
Yeah.

mean, yes, Southern Australia, talk about summer, autumn, winter and spring like everywhere. Northern Australia, we don't have any of that. We have the wet season and the dry season. And for Aboriginal people, it's even more sophisticated. Larrakia people, the Aboriginal mob in Darwin, they have seven different seasons. So they break it up even further. But there's certainly no winter, that's for sure. And it's never cold.

Timothy Sweeney (05:10)
Wow. Okay.

Yeah, it's

always toasty. ⁓ I guess let's, let's start with your background too, because how do you get into this? ⁓ if, if I look at your social media, your Instagram, it's incredible. The stuff you're showing and you're really authentic. It's, it's, you know, a ton about what you do. It's clear. How did you, I guess, gain all the knowledge? What's the background to do this? Did you always want to do this and where did you even grow up?

David (05:41)
Well it's a bizarre background to get into this sort of lifestyle. I grew up in the South of Australia in Adelaide, place called the Floreo Peninsula, if anyone knows of Kangaroo Island, it's a really well known tourist island in the South, not far from there. every spare second I ever had growing up I was in the bush, but my path led me down the idea of chefing. I jumped in after school and did an apprenticeship, worked in super flash fine dining restaurants in the South, a world away from what I'm doing now.

Timothy Sweeney (06:08)
Okay? Yeah.

David (06:11)
Back

then every spare second I had I'd be in the bush but my day job was in kitchens doing this really hectic pace lifestyle and I took a break from that after finishing that apprenticeship. Bought a four-wheel drive, head up the guts right up the centre of Australia, 3,000 kilometres from the south to the north and drove into a place called Arnhem Land which is a hundred thousand square kilometres of aboriginal owned land and my auntie was a nurse. She's nursing in this really tiny remote

Timothy Sweeney (06:18)
Really?

Yep.

David (06:41)
Aboriginal

community, 800 people in the back of beyond and my uncle's running a boat for a tourism company. So I spent a bit of time in the community, got to know locals, got to learn a bit of Binning Goonwok Binning language and then spent a bit of time in this tourist camp and realised hang on, this is a job, you can do this as a job, know, rather than spending all your spare time in the bush, this could be me permanently. And I'd grown up as a budding naturalist, know, always, every time I walked past something I wanted to know what it is, why it was there.

Timothy Sweeney (06:47)
see.

Right.

David (07:11)
I had this reasonable base level of knowledge and had that organisation skills from Sheffing. They hired me on the spot. That was 16 years ago. I spent the next 16 years in a one-off apprenticeship. There's no other way to describe it. Living and working with Aboriginal people, downloading this vast 65,000 years of knowledge. There's no better people to learn the bush from. So I've been extremely fortunate. Privilege of a lifetime.

Timothy Sweeney (07:40)
are you working for different guide groups along the way and like who you're working for now? Are you

Are you moving around? How's that all work for to build that career?

David (07:47)
Yeah, well I was pretty fortunate. The tourism company my uncle was working for is a mob called Venture North Safaris and 16 years on now I'm still their head guide. Just an extraordinary small business that takes really small groups, so maximum six people and their cultural nature-based tours with acts unparalleled access into the most remote parts of northern Australia. So it was a huge change for me to try to learn that bush and you know growing up always being passionate and interested in things like crocodiles and snakes.

Timothy Sweeney (08:02)
Okay.

David (08:17)
but there's no crocodiles in the south all of a sudden I'm surrounded by crocodiles and it's it's pretty much a sink or swim sort of thing you you are yeah you learn quick

Timothy Sweeney (08:27)
Yeah, I want to get

into all that stuff. the, the thing that I experienced there, I did a tour. went to Darwin. did Litchfield, another park nearby. I wrote about that in my book, which was a funny day because it was me and a bunch of retirees. ⁓ I was worried people were gonna, we're gonna drop dead cause it was toasty. We did some swimming and some of the, ⁓ swimming poles, I guess you'd say it was a spectacular experience. the next day,

I went out to Kakadu, which was a smaller group tour. lot of younger people. mentioned to you before we, before we started recording here that the guide really took us beyond where most people had a four wheel drive vehicle, which is cool. You did the yellow water billabong. So you cruise, you see the crocodiles and then some hiking. How do you get access? Cause you're going well beyond that. Like Arnhem land, you need permits, et cetera. So I guess we should first explain from Darwin. You have.

various national parks you can access within a a couple of hours. Kakadu is a huge place. A lot of tour groups go there, but there's still Aboriginal communities living out there and it's a different way of living. Arnhem Land is beyond that even, right? Can you kind of set the landscape for us of what, when, when you look at a map, what do you, how far afield are we talking?

David (09:44)
Yeah so Darwin sits in the right in the centre of Australia but way up north and when you head out to the east of there a couple of hours drive you get into Kakadu National Park and a national park like Kakadu it's kind of hard to put into words how big but I know Yellowstone National Park is 9000 square kilometres Kakadu National Park is just over 20 000 square kilometres so it's big on another scale it's an enormous

Timothy Sweeney (10:09)
Okay, here.

David (10:13)
in itself extremely remote

as you mentioned Aboriginal people still living in the park it's all Aboriginal land but if you go further again so another couple of hours drive you cross this wild river called the East Alligator River funny story there's no alligators in the East Alligator but that's another yarn and that's the western border of Kakadu and Arnhem Land and when you get out into Arnhem Land it's like it's like going back in time Aboriginal people have been able to maintain that cultural knowledge and that connection with

Timothy Sweeney (10:26)
Right. Yep.

David (10:44)
country so you've got these scattered communities, Aboriginal communities and then outside of that you've got Aboriginal people living on what's called homelands these really small like maybe two or three little houses in the bush all the Aboriginal languages of Arnhem Land they're all still spoken and we're talking a huge diversity of language it's a wild place really really wild

Timothy Sweeney (11:08)
What I really found fascinating was the way people talk, even in all of the Northern territory about things being like just down the road. I was in a, I was in a pub in, Darwin as you do, I think, ⁓ frequently there. Yeah, exactly. It was, it was at the time. I was probably too thirsty again there. and some, remember someone saying, right, just to start up a conversation with someone and

David (11:21)
Thirsty place?

Timothy Sweeney (11:33)
The guy was like, yeah, I'm from just down the road in Alice Springs. And then I was like, just down the road looking on the map. It's like a day or two, right? I mean, it's not just down the road. But people talk like everything's nearby.

David (11:43)
Yeah.

Distance is relative. mean, yeah, when you're living in these places where it's just a normal day to drive two or three hours at speed to get to a spot for whatever reason, yeah, distance becomes a different thing. And what's down the road to us is two days drive to someone else, going, well, it's a long road. And it is literally one road,

Timothy Sweeney (12:03)
Yeah. Right. Can, can. Yeah.

Yeah. That, that's the road you took to change your life, I guess. Right.

straight up the guts, as you say. ⁓ when, I guess, ⁓ it'd be nice to explain to people who haven't visited Australia or, know, just watch movies and, ⁓ I don't want to name the movie that everybody watched in America that, that,

David (12:12)
Yeah, just do it highway, right up north.

Timothy Sweeney (12:28)
You know what I'm talking about. And Ozzy's will get mad at me if I mention his name, the fictional character. Right? It's okay if you say it. They did.

David (12:35)
Hey, Crocodile Dundee, that's 30 years and we're still milking it, it's fantastic. I mean, really, that

has done wonders for the Northern Territory. Every Australian loves Paul Hogan, so yeah, you can't go wrong with Crocodile Dundee. It's a classic film.

Timothy Sweeney (12:43)
Right? It's true.

Right. Do

you get like, you know, not comparisons, but people aren't watching this or they're listening, you got the beard, the cap, right? If they visit your Instagram, you live a bit that life. I don't want to patronize what you do because that's fiction. You're doing the real thing, taking people out there, but people must give you a little bit of gruff for that sort of lifestyle, do they?

David (13:10)
Yeah, well I suppose. mean, yeah, you watch that film. You've got this guy taking a journalist out and I think, you know, I do that all the time. That really is my life. And just as well with the crocodiles and you know, those experiences that are fictionalised in that movie and made fun of or whatever, it's a very funny film. I think, I could make a movie pretty similar about things that have actually happened to me. So, not far from the truth. It's a wild place.

Timothy Sweeney (13:18)
Right.

Right, real life, real life stuff. Yeah.

So in Kakadu where I went where I was, and even when I went to the swimming holes in Litchfield, this is blows people's mind who've never been there, but they said, yeah, it's safe to swim. Now the, the whole swimming hole has been cleared of crocodiles. Everything's everything's fine.

David (13:38)
Yeah.

Timothy Sweeney (13:54)
how does that all work? Because from, from times of year, you can't go near swimming holes. You definitely don't swim at the beaches in Darwin in the Northern territory. Like

This is a different world in Northern Territory from even from other parts of Australia.

David (14:07)
Yeah, it's a wild place.

By the 1970s we'd almost shut crocodiles out, we protected them, now there's more crocodiles than people. And that's the way we want it. We live in a wild place where nature rules. So they've got their natural diversity, their natural numbers in the bush. The places we can swim in the wet season, everything floods. So crocodiles can get anywhere, it's just off limits. Crocodiles can be in any bit of water. It has happened in the past that people have found crocodiles in their backyard swimming pool. That's not a normal story, but it happens. And then once the water drops, those crocodiles are

Timothy Sweeney (14:36)
Right.

David (14:39)
trapped in these water holes. Most of them we just leave alone. That's where they live. But there's a few designated swimming holes where we say, okay, this is set aside for people. And the crocodile management teams, they get in there, they put these huge traps in. Usually they bait with pig heads. We've got a huge feral pig problem. So the rangers go out, bang off a few pigs. They bait with the pig's head. it takes over 30 nights consecutive of scanning the water for those red eyes, the traps out. You've got big floating boys.

Timothy Sweeney (14:58)
Okay.

David (15:09)
as well we say boys but booey or whatever you call them those floating and that's stuff with fish oil crocodiles have to chomp them they can't help themselves and it's these consecutive nights to make sure if there are any crocs in they're caught and removed and then you need to go back to that 30 something consecutive nights of no crocodiles so they don't mess around you know by the time they say yep this is safe to swim it sounds like it's a pretty wild you know you're juggling with danger but they've never got it wrong so they're good at what they do

Timothy Sweeney (15:13)
Yep.

Yeah, well you want to

get that right because they don't mess around, crocodiles don't mess around for sure. They don't discriminate.

David (15:40)
Outside of that,

we can't go in any bit of water. mean, that's for crocodiles. We live with them. They're easy live with. They live in the water, we live on land. It's dead easy.

Timothy Sweeney (15:51)
But so you, happens just to be clear at the end of the, so the wet season would last the, your summer months. And then, so this happens toward the end of the wet season as the water's receding or less rainfall and such is happening.

David (16:03)
Yeah, the wet season sort of starts around October and then

by December we get our first monsoons where we get big, big rain, you five days of just blanket rain. And by around April, that's done. The wet season's done and then we won't see rain again until October again that next year. So the wet season, there's water everywhere. The dry season, everything shrinks up and the crocodiles then all get pushed into smaller and smaller bits of water. So by the time the tourists get up into the north, there are hundreds of crocodiles in each of these.

Timothy Sweeney (16:28)
Right.

David (16:33)
little

billabongs and bodies of water. There are crocodiles everywhere. So they've got to see it to believe it.

Timothy Sweeney (16:39)
Yeah. And when you say

wet season, I mean, you see the posts if you do, if you drive someplace in the dry season, you cross a little road or, you know, a back country road or something where there might be a trickle in the dry season. You see these posts that say, you know, two meters, three meters, and the water rises like crazy during the wet season, right? We're talking meters of difference in depth of water, even in the wet areas, but.

David (17:05)
Yeah, there's a river I

cross all the time to get into Arnhem Land, the East Alligator River. And in the dry season you can cross it pretty easy. There is big tidal movement on that river, even we have massive tides. But on low tide, you cross it no worries. And so many cars get washed off doing silly things, but I always get comments, people saying, why don't you build a bridge? And you have to explain to them in the wet season, the water is seven metres higher. And it's not just high in that river, it floods for a hundred kilometres. Like you can't...

Timothy Sweeney (17:32)
meters.

Right,

David (17:35)
a 100km bridge for couple of hundred people to

use, it's just completely impossible. You kind of have to see it to believe it, how much rain falls out of the sky in that short period.

Timothy Sweeney (17:46)
Right. And that changes

everything changes the landscape, but it's also responsible for like in Kakadu. told you I did the yellow water cruise, which is pretty normal thing. People do on a tour. They, you, you pull up, you, when I pulled up, they said straight into the, I think I was there in November, December. it was a bit wet. ⁓ but they said straight onto the, the walking path where they have like chain link fences on the side. So I guess to keep you from getting eaten. but they said,

We had some rain last night. was a, there was a 14 foot crocodile in the parking lot here where we're going to park the bus. just be, you know, aware. mean, they're clear. Obviously they can make any mistakes, but you get on the, and you go for this beautiful cruise, up and down the billabong, the bird life, everything it's the colors are spectacular. And I guess that's because of all the rain and everything you get. mean, it's the, it's the perfect place for all these things to grow. It started to rain slightly sprinkle.

and the guide said, it's perfect. There's gonna be crocodiles come to the surface. They come out when it's raining. They were everywhere. mean, everywhere. There's whatever the stat is, one every 10 or whatever meters in the water in that area, correct?

David (19:00)
Yeah, yeah, so I mean.

That's the crazy thing is you went there in the wet season so there's water everywhere you could do that cruise and see one or two crocs and you go not many crocs but as you say that bit of rain when it's hot and and you get that rain all the crocs take the opportunity to get out of the water and they love love to spend a bit of time on land if they can and you all of a sudden there are just hundreds of crocodiles we think where were they all hiding and that's the that's the frightening thing is that these ancient massive predators more than capable of eating people are completely

invisible in knee deep water.

Timothy Sweeney (19:34)
Yeah.

The guy said, ⁓ you know, they do the safety spiel. That's there's the, this is where the life preserver is. If something happens to the boat, et cetera. And this is two minutes later telling us that there's a croc every 10 meters. And I remembered just kind of under my breath saying, so what's the use of the life preserver? And he said, yeah, I may just, you know, if you go in the water, throw the life preserver in one direction and swim like hell on the other and get out of there. I said, that's what I thought. The safety spiel was just a.

A spiel, let's say.

David (20:04)
Yeah,

government regulation, it's a, no, you, you imagine sitting there. mean, Crovodil is seeing full colour. So you've got this bright yellow, a bright orange slowing you down as you're trying to cumbersly get through the, no, throw it one way, swim as fast as you can, get out of there. Don't mess around.

Timothy Sweeney (20:13)
Okay, didn't know that.

So what, what

is the life like there? mean, we're, we're saying it's clearly dangerous, but people live in this area. These are people that are been on the land for tens of thousands of years, as you said,

But how are people living kind of in harmony with the land, with those, say, threats around? Because there's snakes, there's whatever, whatever else, you know? What's, what's...

David (20:42)
Yeah, I mean Australia

is home to the top, most of the top ten, most venomous snakes in the world. The North is full of crocodiles, you go out into the ocean, you've got box jellyfish that can kill you. There are all of these things that can absolutely kill you, but it becomes this perception. Everything sounds really dangerous when you're living out in the bush there. know, the crocodiles live in the water, so you avoid the water. Snakes, I mean I've worked with snakes all around the world, I've worked with venomous snakes all over, and every time you see a snake, if you're scared, you'll have this fear

But if you just stop and watch a snake, he'll look at you and just go the other way, you know? So it's very unlikely. We have maybe one or two snake fatalities a year in the whole of Australia. We have about one crocodile fatality a year in the whole of Australia. So you go to somewhere like India, for example, they have 40,000 people a year die of snakebite alone. have far more crocodile, 40,000, yeah, that's recorded. I mean, in the US, there's

Timothy Sweeney (21:22)
Is that it? Well.

40,000?

my gosh.

David (21:42)
There's

bear attacks, there's way more animals killing people than in Australia, but we've got this perception because we have all these animals that can kill you. When you get out in the bush, the reality is it's not quite as dangerous as you think, which is good. Otherwise, maybe you couldn't live there, but it's just knowing the bush and knowing, you know, if the crocodiles are in the water there, let's stay away from the water. And, there's a death adder. Let's not step on the death adder. Like it's a few simple words.

Timothy Sweeney (22:10)
That one got me.

David (22:12)
You

Timothy Sweeney (22:12)
The death adder got me, not got me obviously, but we did this extended walk, which was fortunate to have the small group. I think it was an eight K walk and I can't remember the name. think I told you previously, but you had said it's, it's yeah, not everyone gets to go to this place. And there were some puddles and stuff because it had rained, but they said, you know, they're crocodiles in the area, but they're freshies, freshwater crocodiles, which is smaller.

Totally different beast than a saltwater crocodile for people who don't understand. but, I remember the, the guide saying, you know, just be careful in this area because death adders, the snakes, this sort of dry leaves, they just can sit there right in this kind of setting. So just be careful. And then he starts telling stories about a guy who got fit and then stayed still through the night and didn't let the poison in his, get in his.

throughout his body and then walked out the next day. And I said, well, what would happen if someone gets bit? And he said, I'll run to the truck and get the sat phone and call for help, which was, five K away. I remember thinking like, what the hell is the sat phone doing in the truck? Yeah.

David (23:13)
You

That is pretty wild.

mean, yeah, always take a sat phone or some sort of this. I mean, you are so far away from mobile coverage, you're so far away from help. It's the only chance you've got is get on the sat phone. We're lucky in Australia. We've got this phenomenal flying doctors that will come out in a helicopter, hover down over somewhere, drop a couple of people out and pick you up. Yeah, we can be a long way from help, but still not as far as you would be without this great healthcare system and everything that someone comes helps you out.

Timothy Sweeney (23:33)
okay.

Someone having to run.

So tell me a bit about your day to day in the, in the job, cause you do a lot, ⁓ really cool kind of selfie stuff on your Instagram where you're telling people explaining, like even eating things out there, yeah, you can find this, you can cook this, you're cooking things on, the, on the beach. it seems exotic to people, but this is, I guess it's just a quiet, you said 16 years acquired knowledge of

This is something you can find out here and Eden, you learn that from the local people. How have you acquired all that knowledge?

David (24:18)
Yeah, I mean places like Arnhem Land, you're going back in time to what the world was like before we populated to the point where there's not as much fish anymore, there's not as much whatever. So it's just an abundance of food, there's so much food around. And spending that 16 years really closely, mostly with the old people, with the old women in particular for plant food, the women hold this phenomenal botanical knowledge, ethnobotany stuff of what plants you can and can't eat and how you prepare certain things.

Some plants are toxic and less prepared a certain way. There's just really unbelievable thousands of generations of accumulative knowledge. And then you've got all the proteins. you just go down to mangroves and you pull out these huge big mud muscles and you chop open a bit of rotten mangrove and grab these big mangrove worms and things that look real wild and people go, how could you eat that? It's like anything, it's an acquired taste. Who ate noisetuff in the first time? It really is food everywhere.

Timothy Sweeney (25:10)
Yeah, right.

David (25:18)
It's for me day to day getting out there, having the chefing background as well, being able to eat such wild food is just extraordinary. know, spear a mud crab, cook it on the fire, shut a dozen oysters off the rocks and then go in the bush and have a big juicy bush apple you think. This is the way we all use the loob. It's amazing to be able to tap into that knowledge.

Timothy Sweeney (25:22)
yeah, of course.

Yeah, nothing processed

and it's real, real stuff, real food right from the vine or the ground or anywhere. ⁓ what, what about the day to day of the job? If people come out and do a tour with you and what do they learn? Why do they, why do they go? I felt it's maybe sounds cheesy as a tourist to say, but when I left there, I was like, I'm really, really glad I did this. It was just, it blew my mind. The reef, seeing the reef, the great barrier reef.

had a similar effect. remember thinking the colors are just nothing I've ever seen before in my life. ⁓ and I, I'd say adventurous. I like to get outdoors, spend a lot of time in the outdoors. Northern territory was just a different beast altogether. And people say it can change you, guess, after you see it, have you seen that with, with visitors, the effect it has on them.

David (26:30)
and

Absolutely. And even for myself, I travel around the world, I've been to some of the wildest pockets of the world and I've really struggled to come across anywhere quite so wild as the Northern Territory. There's just endless expanses of wild bush with hardly a person and the abundance of Northern Australia. We're always having people come away saying, wow, we didn't know what we expected, but this is blown away what we expected. a day on tour, for example, get up in the morning,

across a river in a couple of inches of water but either side of the car has got 30 crocodiles and you go wow this is just driving down the track we pick up an Aboriginal guide they show us 30,000 year old rock art in a rock art site that also has 50 year old rock art you know you've got Aboriginal people that have this the longest continuation of cultural knowledge and art in the world and you've got these people sharing this knowledge in language and you turn around and you're in this phenomenal

Timothy Sweeney (27:08)
Hmm.

David (27:31)
an old rock art escarpment area with these endless floodplains. There really is just no way to work like this. It's breathtaking and it also has this spiritual feeling. I'm not a terribly spiritual person myself but you can feel it. Being surrounded by so much really wild nature, it just gets under your skin. That's just something about it.

Timothy Sweeney (27:54)
Yeah, and

not to mention the fact that you're away from everything else, right? You're, you're away from the hustle and bustle. Sorry.

David (27:59)
No distractions.

Yeah, yeah. No distractions. It's just just us and Bush.

And yeah, I mean, it's what keeps me coming back. I've worked for the same company now for coming up to 16 years, as I said, and I couldn't do that if it was the same tour every day. But every single week I'm seeing things I've never seen before. Around every bend is a new adventure, and there's really not many places you can get that. It's just an addictive lifestyle. And getting to share that with people from around the world, privilege of a lifetime, without a doubt.

Timothy Sweeney (28:31)
Yeah. The

interesting thing is, I guess when you think about it, there's a bit of something for everyone because I was not I don't know much about art and I'm terrible at it. Written words have always been my thing. So even, you know, I go to museum or something and you just try to, I try to go rep my head around how this was done. And this is, something that's 600 years old, let alone thousands and thousands of years old, you have, you have art, the wildness of the, you know,

the reptiles, everything that you can encounter, the climate, the flowers, the birds, whatever. There's kind of something for everybody in that part of the world if you just get yourself there. And there's a feeling too that you're far away from everything, like detached kind of from a lot of things in the real world in a way.

David (29:21)
Yeah, I mean you really are and as you said there is something for everyone because

You can do it on a small scale as a backpacker on a budget where you hop on a four-wheel-drive bus with a young tour guide and he'll take you right out in the bush and for next to no money you've had this real wild experience. On the other end of the scale you can do tours like with us where they're only small groups but it's a much more high-end product and we've set up this luxury, well sort of luxury lodge eight hours away from the nearest point of civilization. It's very much like African safari camps.

Timothy Sweeney (29:39)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

David (29:56)
So there's something for everyone. You can do it comfortably but still be in those really wild places. But you can do it with a few of the creature comforts.

Timothy Sweeney (30:05)
Yeah. wanted to ask

you too about, Cahils crossing is something that pops up on a lot of social media This is Arnhem land, just to be specific. It's a road that would be well underwater in the wet season, I guess, but the videos you can see.

on your social media and other places, the crocs just line up because I guess the fish, barramundi is it, that's the big thing to fish in the fresh and brackish water there. Kind of swim over the little channel or the road, et cetera, and the crocs wait to eat the fish. But the things people do driving across this little,

I mean, it's a few hundred couple hundred meters maybe across. They just drive across when they definitely shouldn't at certain tides. it's amazing that I don't want to say dumb, but it's kind of dumb what people do. And it's totally safe if you do it, not when the water's rushing, correct?

David (30:56)
Yeah, so there's nowhere else like it. Kales crossing every day of the week. There's something to see there. So as you said, it's a wet season There's heaps of fresh water pushing down. It's flooded right up. It's impassable. It's completely shut. Can't get anywhere near it. But once it drops, although you're 80 kilometres from the coast, it's a long way from the coast. We have eight meter tides. So I don't know how to do the conversion into massive tides. Some of the biggest tides.

Timothy Sweeney (31:08)
Yep.

Yeah.

Now it's 25 feet or something. Yeah, that's a lot. 880

David (31:23)
Well...

Timothy Sweeney (31:23)
K away from the coast and an eight meter tide. Wow.

David (31:24)
80 kilometres away because we have 8 meter tide so you get over a

meter of water pushing upstream at high tide. So you can get washed upstream because of the amount of water pushing upstream with the tide and that's what the crocodiles are waiting for. You've got this causeway where you've got all these rocks piled up to sort of they're putting the concrete road and as the water hits that point and floods over the diamond scale mullet these big fatty fish and barramundi as you said they all push upstream and the crocodiles line up

Timothy Sweeney (31:31)
Mm-hmm. Wow.

Okay.

A mullet, okay, okay. Yep.

David (31:54)
they put their little fingers out the water and they use those sensory organs they can pick up really minute vibrations so even in that dirty water they can feel the fish when they're close enough and bang they spin their head and eat them so you've got 50 crocs all eating fish and at the same time all this water make more than enough water to push you off and someone will rock up in a car and look at that and go ⁓ give it a crack and and head across and and I this year I mean I cross it all the time and I you know I've

Timothy Sweeney (32:20)
It's insane.

David (32:24)
in some pretty hairy situations but you need to know what you're doing and every year people get washed off that crossing and it's just a simple matter of just wait a while, wait till the tide turns, goes out and then you know maybe you have to wait an hour but the upside is you won't get eaten by crocodiles.

Timothy Sweeney (32:41)
Right. Yeah.

to do it just to risk the water would be one thing, but then the crocodile sitting there like ratchets it up to another level altogether of risk. It's crazy to me to see.

David (32:52)
you just shake your head and I put up another video this year of a family there fishing and you've got this tiny little kid probably 5 or 6 years old and mum's just letting this kid climb over the rocks a couple of inches away from the edge of the water and you've got this muddy water she can see 50 big crocs crocodiles will take those opportunities and a little child like that is such an easy target there's signs everywhere, there's even signs warning of recent fatalities there's been two fatalities of that crossing

Timothy Sweeney (33:00)
I saw that.

Mm-hmm.

David (33:22)
1987 famously a fella had his head bitten off in front of a bus or a tourist. you know, it's not like they don't know. It's just, I don't know what it is, but people just take these crazy risks.

Timothy Sweeney (33:25)
Gee... Wow.

Yeah. Do you think it's, mean, are they locals or they're just tourists from overseas and they don't quite understand like crocodiles. I guess we can get into this a bit. didn't want to spend all the time on crocodiles, but it's quite fascinating because people think in the U S when I've told them about trips to these areas, they say it's like an alligator has it. No, not quite.

crocodile is, is like a dinosaur, like just like a Tyrannosaurus Rex in the water. They want to eat basically anything they can get to. when I went to lunch,

David (34:01)
They're two different animals.

Timothy Sweeney (34:03)
Yeah, two different. And when I went to lunch, I remember was a river near where we were having an outdoor lunch, and they take every group there. And the guy said, before we get off the bus, we are not the highest thing on the food chain out here no longer. So stay back from the water. You know, you don't get that speech on many tours, but,

You clock it unless you're foolish. it's a different beast.

David (34:22)
that.

I mean I've worked a lot

with crocodiles in captivity and in the wild and you see what they're capable of but I've also worked with American alligators in captivity and they're too like you jump in a pen with six alligators big alligators and you walk up to them and you give them a pat on the tail and you go hey mate you know they'll still bite you you still gotta be careful but it's like working with a cat and then working with a lion it's they're two different things estuarine crocodiles are crazy you get in a pen with them they're charging out of the water you know they're territorial they're eating much

Timothy Sweeney (34:26)
Okay.

Right, okay.

David (34:53)
larger game and where they can take down full-grown buffaloes. you know, we're easy. We're well and truly in that, in that range of food size. Crocodiles are a whole different game.

Timothy Sweeney (35:03)
even in Darwin, so you're in the big city up there and no one goes to the beach. mean, it was hot as hell when I was there, humid and you know, people go and watch the sunset. It's beautiful. And no one goes near the

So it.

David (35:19)
Yeah.

Saltwater

crocodiles or another name we call them estuarine crocodiles. They're found from northern Australia up to southern India So it's quite a big distribution in most of their range that there's not many northern Australia's the last stronghold But they're quite happy to live their whole life up in freshwater But every beach will have crocodiles in northern Australia that they're they utilize those saltwater areas and they'll eat sea turtles They'll eat mud crabs, you know They need a bit of access to to brackish or saltwater often to go and breed but there's Darwin Harbour alone So Darwin Harbour is part of the

management zone and they remove over 200 crocodiles a year out of that one harbour. you know trying to reduce the risk of crocodile attack around where there's so many people but as you said while you were there you've got box jellyfish the most venomous creature in the world. You go for a swim and you get tentacles wrapped around you, you can be dead in half an hour. So we look at beaches differently you know we enjoy the sunset we walk along the beach you just stay out of the water.

Timothy Sweeney (35:51)
Mm-hmm.

Your tour

group would love this. Most venomous, we're talking about crocodiles, most venomous creature in the world. But please come out and join us. But like you said, as long as you're smart, you don't put yourself in any danger.

David (36:23)
Yep.

funny.

Whenever we get up to our coastal camp so we're in paradise, you know We've been driving through the bush for five hours or whatever You know bumpy dirt roads in middle nowhere and you hit the coast and all of a sudden you see these pristine beaches azure blue water You can't imagine how beautiful it is and every time without fail the guests say what a shame we can't swim here What a shame there's the crocodiles and I say the same thing every time I said If you want to go somewhere where they used to be crocodiles and they killed them all so you can swim go to Bali go to Thailand and they go it's too many people

go that's exactly right that's why you come here because because of the crocodiles because they keep it wild there's there's not many places left in the world where us humans have to think about what we do and go okay the water out in the beach isn't for us you know that's for the crocodiles so it makes it unique it's why people come and see somewhere truly wild

Timothy Sweeney (37:20)
I guess I should ask you then, ⁓ given your life and profession, any close calls, any, any wild stories, you, you've worked, said with snakes, you've traveled to work with snakes. but you must get it a lot ever been in any danger with a crocodile or et cetera, or got surprised because as careful as you can be, you're still up close and personal with this stuff. You're not in a zoo.

this is the real deal.

David (37:45)
Yeah.

Yeah we were sleeping on a really small boat one night, we'd been fishing, taking a boat back from the coastal camp out in Arnhem, Land and five days via the coast and we're pulling into these little creeks. Unbelievable fishing for barramundi but we're asleep there, really rough, stinking hot and three in the morning we just feel the head and the teeth of this crocodile scraping the bottom of the boat. This thing's trying to put big holes in the boat and sink us. And it was high tide so with those big tides there is no land. We're up in the mangroves, the water

has flooded through this impenetrable maze of mangroves. If this crocodile sinks us and puts us in the water, we're done. So we're shining a spotlight on the water, heart rate's going through the roof and I've got a spear. Eventually the crocodile pops up and I've just thrown the spear, hit the crocodile in the head. It would have done next to no damage to the croc, but enough for that crocodile to go, okay, maybe this isn't worth worrying about. And then finally when we got back into town, we looked at the bottom of the boat and sure enough, you know, it pretty close. There was these big scrape marks. Crocodiles have

Timothy Sweeney (38:38)
Wow.

David (38:46)
3.6 tonne of jaw pressure. That's the most any animal has ever had. More than dinosaurs. These things can crush a big thick aluminium hole like nothing, put holes in it and you can suck. That's just one of many many stories because I've also done crocodile egg collecting. There's a farming industry in Darwin for crocodiles. In the 70s when we protected crops we decided to also farm them.

Timothy Sweeney (38:49)
Yeah.

David (39:16)
that you know no one would have to hunt wild crocs anymore it's been really successful conservation through commerce but we go out in the wild there's a quota of eggs we can collect from the wild and you're flying around in helicopters you get dropped out of the helicopter you're walking through the swamps all you've got to protect you is a bamboo pole and you're coming into these crocodile nests these big mounds of organic matter they'll have a big wallow dug next to it and the female she might be three meters three and half meters she doesn't get as big as the male but she's big croc more than big enough to kill an each

and you've got to protect the guy while he's carefully getting all the eggs out of the nest and we pick up the eggs, you've got to pay attention because you've got to mark the top and put them in the crate the same way they were laid otherwise the yolk crushes the embryo so this guy's getting through the nest getting 120 eggs out or 60 eggs however many she's had and I'm there on a pole this big female croc's coming out trying to kill us and I'm just keeping her away with a bamboo pole it was the most wild job I've ever done

Timothy Sweeney (40:13)
Wow.

David (40:15)
You got paid hardly anything for it, but it was just such a wild experience. And every day is a cost of all we're doing that. It's always a story.

Timothy Sweeney (40:24)
Yeah.

Wow. That's it. So in hindsight, like the sleeping on the boat, is that something you would do again? Or cause that was out of, you just get really unlucky for.

David (40:31)
absolutely, I'll do it again.

We were unlucky, yeah we were a bit unlucky and you know we had something there to... yeah lucky and unlucky. This was, it was October so it was that time of the year where crocodiles are starting to mate up. Big dominant males are becoming territorial and us snoring away on the hull of a boat after a few too many beers would have sounded like something worth investigating so but yeah you just you do that sort of stuff all the time up here it's just yeah it's a wild place as I said.

Timothy Sweeney (40:36)
And lucky.

Okay, well, so before I let you go, I wanna let a kid ask a question. You're the type of guy, I'm sure if you showed up at a school, they would go crazy. I don't know if you've ever done that, but the questions must be hilarious. So I have a question here from Magda.

David (41:09)
Yeah, I forget.

Timothy Sweeney (41:15)
Hi David, my name is Magda and I have a question for you. What's your favourite animal in Australia?

David (41:22)
It's a tough question. I try not to play favourites. At the moment we're looking after some fruit bats. We're talking about these giant bats with a wingspan of about 60-70cm. It's really big. We're looking after orphan babies that have tried to fly away too soon and fall and ended up on the ground and they'd die. At the moment I've got to say black fruit bats are my favourite but it changes all the time. love snakes. I've always been drawn to these venomous and dangerous

things to snakes and crocodiles are things that people find unlovable. I've always been drawn to.

Timothy Sweeney (41:54)
Mm-hmm.

How do you get comfortable around snakes? Cause most people freak out there if they're around a snake.

David (42:02)
I just have this memory

of being a young fella and I was up on a water tank and saw this big eastern brown, in the top two deadliest snakes in the world, most venomous snakes in the world. And I was safe and I got to see this big venomous snake do its thing and in a situation where I was safe and I remember it just flipped this switch in my head. I was fascinated with snakes. And from then, that's all I would think about. I'd go in the bush and find snakes. Over time, you watch them, you get comfortable and then it slowly progresses into doing silly things and I was in a kid's playground.

Timothy Sweeney (42:10)
Yes.

David (42:32)
at about 18 years old and there's this big eastern brown and so people are trying to kill the snake if it bites a kid the kid's dead so I've caught this snake and having never caught a venomous snake in my life walked it through the main street of this town and released it into the bush and from that moment on I was sort of hooked I was like well I could have a real impact here I can help save the snake you know help save people since then I've traveled the world I was on a research project in southern India in the Western Ghats

Timothy Sweeney (42:41)
Yep.

Alright.

David (43:02)
where we were catching and tracking King Cobra the biggest venomous snakes in we're talking 20 foot venomous snakes really big really really big snakes they're just yeah I mean yeah the ones we had a 10 foot and a 12 foot but they get up to sort of 18 really really really big it's a whole nother game they can stand up they put their hood out and they look straight in the eye and it was just amazing to spend every day in the forests of the western gats following the biggest venomous snakes in the world as they hunt

Timothy Sweeney (43:11)
20 feet. That's a big snake.

David (43:32)
other snakes. Yeah, this love for snakes has certainly led me down a path of some extraordinary experiences. I recommend it. Get into snakes.

Timothy Sweeney (43:43)
get into snakes.

You have to be comfortable with that where you are, guess, because if you're, mean, I'll tell you the day the guy said, yeah, just be careful here. Cause death adders can hang out. mean, I was like thinking, I wrote it in my book. think I positioned myself about fourth in the group and the line of people. Cause they say sometimes they miss the first one, but they get the second guy. I was like, well, fourth is good. There's about 10 people here. Maybe fourth or fifth, someone's going to stir it up. But you start, even when I'm out, you know, I've been out and

David (44:05)
Yeah.

Timothy Sweeney (44:11)
California in places and seeing rattlesnakes are on my mountain bike and man, the rest of the ride, it's hard to get that out of your mind that you're just going to ride up on one or step on one or whatever.

David (44:21)
Rattlesnakes are amazing. I was in California. I was catching rattlesnakes with a venom researcher and I'd never seen rattlesnakes I was so excited but what a friendly snake you got a snake that lets you know if you're too close you're walking through the bush and you hear this and you go hey mate sorry I didn't see you there he's just giving you a warning so you know you walk away I thought what a lovely friendly snake you know ours don't give you the warnings

Timothy Sweeney (44:36)
Right. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a good way. That's

a good way to look at it.

David (44:46)
But I walk everywhere

barefoot, that's the other thing. I'm that comfortable in the bush that I haven't worn shoes in the bush in memory. yeah, so potentially that's more dangerous because you're not wearing socks or gaiters or boots or anything like that. yeah, every time I come across a snake, which is fairly common, just stand still. It looks at me, I look at it, make sure it knows I'm no threat and they go about their business. It's one of those perceived threats, I suppose.

Timothy Sweeney (44:50)
Barefoot.

Yeah, boots and, yeah.

it's really cool, the career you've made, I mean just acquiring all this knowledge, you've gone off to learn abroad and come back. What's the goal? You wanna keep doing what you're doing?

And you, can tell the passion you have in your voice for this stuff. And you really care for the creatures and the places you go to. I would imagine the Aboriginal culture, they protect who they let in. In some ways you have to earn their trust. You want to keep doing that and keep doing what you've been doing and learn more. What's the goal?

David (45:48)
It's an extremely addictive lifestyle. Having the opportunity to spend so much time with Aboriginal people and as you said, I've been adopting to that kinship system, the most complicated kinship system in the world. We're touring between the top of Western Australia all the way through the North and it's such a vast area of land. It's pretty addictive. I'm hoping to, in the future, get into bit of naturalist cruise ships. There's these small cruise ships that take guests to the most remote pockets of the world.

they have a few guides on board that are naturalists and guest speakers so when they go and visit you know remote tribes in Papua New Guinea or they go up to Madagascar or all these little little places yeah I'd like to expand some of the wild places I travel and these really small naturalist cruises I think they're an option for the future but still keep doing this it's too too attractive lifestyle like once it gets under your skin you can't go back to a normal boring life.

Timothy Sweeney (46:44)
Yeah. Well,

David (46:47)
you

Timothy Sweeney (46:47)
it's a long

way from a chef's kitchen. That's for sure. That's incredible. I didn't realize that was your, that was your start, but

David (46:51)
Yeah.

It feels like another life,

it really does, it feels like I've lived two separate lives and I mean I use those chef skills all the time so that's great, you know I'm cooking a lot on tour so I'm very glad I did that because it was an extraordinary experience working in those sort of kitchens but yeah I just, if I spend a few days outside of the bush I'm just pining for it, you know I need to get back in there and be surrounded by trees.

Timothy Sweeney (47:20)
last question, I guess, is then a bit of advice, travel advice. If someone, people go to Australia and they go, yep, I went to Sydney.

And I said, you didn't go to Melbourne? I lived in Melbourne. It's amazing. I felt like, and I wrote this in my book, people go to all the touristy stuff. They see Sydney, they go, wow, because it's a fantastic place and you can absorb it all really quickly. All the things you've seen on TV, Melbourne, you spend a little more time, Adelaide, even really cool sort of country town, as they say, but not every, you have to make an effort to get to places like where you go, right? It takes a little more to, to fly up, fly to Darwin to then get out.

take some time, see the place, What would be your recommendation? Why should they come visit you?

David (48:03)
So I mean, yeah, most people, as you said, they fly into places like Sydney and Sydney is a beautiful city. It's got its charm, it's unique, but a city is a city. You go everywhere in the world, they're all a bit different, but there's lots of similarities. You come up somewhere like Darwin, you've got this small frontier town in the top of Northern Australia with a vibrant multicultural culture, these phenomenal markets, seeing so much great food. You can't throw a rock without hitting something delicious to eat. And to have that as your base and then be able to go out to places like Kakadu National Park,

extraordinary landscapes and meet the oldest living culture in the world see this rock art that's, you know, don't have to be interested in art to look at these phenomenal big paintings and say, you know, 35,000 years ago someone painted that on a rock and imagine 35,000 years ago, you know, when the rock art was painted our ancestors hadn't even arrived in Europe yet. So like it's just the time scale. You're looking at rocks that are 1.65 billion years old, almost half the age of the planet.

It's just a vast landscape of dizzying numbers really. It's definitely worth seeing for someone who wants a different experience and go home and tell their friends they went somewhere really different.

Timothy Sweeney (49:19)
Yeah. And we didn't even get into Darwin. mean, Darwin has its own unique history. There's some, ⁓ world war two history, even with the heart. ⁓ the cyclone is going to say hurricane that blew through. that in the 70s, sixties, but 74 like, yeah.

David (49:31)
1974 Cyclone Tracy, couple hundred people died.

And then the bombing of Darwin, that's the big one. mean, certainly for Americans, the same fleet that bombed Pearl Harbor flew onto Darwin, bombed Darwin Harbor, sunk more ships in Darwin Harbor than Pearl Harbor, and they dropped more bombs on Darwin Harbor than Pearl Harbor. Over 60 consecutive bombing raids. So it's, you know, it's got this phenomenal wartime history and it's a resilient town. It's been knocked down several times, completely flattened by the bombing of Darwin and Cyclone Tracy. And even before that, there were several cyclones that wiped the town out.

But it's this thriving little little city right up the top of northern Australia with its own unique culture. There's nowhere like it.

Timothy Sweeney (50:09)
I agree with you of all the experiences. I was fortunate to have a lot of them in Australia. That was a unique, unique thing to see. And there's so much more to when you look at the map

only scratched the surface. I went three hours in this direction, two hours in this direction, but so much more to see. So I appreciate you sharing the stories. It's really cool. And I would encourage people to follow you online. Maybe you can share your, your Instagram is what.

David (50:33)
Yeah, David McMahon Australia on Instagram, TikTok. I'd like to share a bit of the knowledge I've been lucky enough to accumulate and people seem to enjoy it. So follow along and get up to Northern Australia, come out with Venture North Safaris. I'd love to take you, anyone out bush, the more the merrier. It's fantastic to be able to share this stuff with everyone.

Timothy Sweeney (50:51)
Yeah, well, I appreciate it. Thank you. I appreciate the time. Thanks for joining me.

David (50:55)
My pleasure.

Tim Sweeney (50:56)
Okay. A massive thank you to David McMahon. I told you that guy had some stories and man, knows how to tell them. So I hope you enjoyed that. I enjoyed talking with him. And if I go back to the Northern territory, definitely going to link up with him because I think he'd be an amazing guide for that company he works for. They're called venture North safaris. So check them out online. If you are ever thinking about going there and you should, it's a unique and special.

place. If you want to hear my stories from the Northern territory, you can find them in my book, Yank Down Under, a drink and a look around Australia. That's available on Amazon and elsewhere online where books are sold or on my website. You can go to twinthievesmedia.com and there's a tab there for the book and for this podcast. So ⁓ check it out. What a experience I had there. Some funny things happened to me, funny people in the group.

⁓ one point a guy put his arms over the boat to take a picture and I had to tap him on the shoulder and remind him that a crocodile could rip his rip his arms off his shoulder at any moment. So, luckily that did not happen. That would have changed the title of the book considerably. All right. Thanks again, everyone for listening. Please subscribe to the podcast, share it with friends. Maybe someone you know is going to Australia or has always wanted to, and, ⁓ David's got the stories to, to pull them in and hold their attention. think.

Thank you for listening. We'll be back with another episode real soon.