New Beginnings

My name is Ben. I'm a storyteller and Find and Tell. I grew up on Durall Country. I'd like to recognize the traditional Castanians of this continent whose land was stolen nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, in particular the Cameagle and Onere people whose land this podcast was recorded on. And we extend our respect to all Aboriginal Torrestraight islander peoples, the rich storytelling history of the world's oldest living culture.

Hello, I'm Jamilla Risby and this is Find and Tell, the search for the next generation of Australian storytellers. Each episode, our storytellers go head to head to find and tell a story based around a theme. The best story wins. Now the steaks are getting high. This could be the last time we hear from one or both of our storytellers today. This is big, guys. If you haven't been keeping score, here are how things stand. Ben, he's sitting pretty on two wins. Mark and Kate have one win each,

Naan, welcome back to Find and Tell.

Hi, Jamilla, it's good to be back.

We're here, we're about to hear.

Well, it might not be your final story, but it also might be your final story. It's the final of this trio that we've started off with.

How does that feel?

I thought this day would never come. It's been an adventure, it's been a journey, Naan.

You have already served us up some really interesting interviews. You're good at finding people with a story to tell. How do you pull that off, especially in a short time?

Prame, I'd like to say it's probably my nosiness. I'm just very no natural curiosity. Yeah, whichever way you want to spin it. Yeah, when it comes to people, I feel like everyone has a story to tell, and especially with this one, I came across this event and the organizer of the event, and I thought they were too good not to interview and meet.

So will extraordinary characters make for extraordinary stories? I'm excited to hear yours. This is New Beginnings, which is your third contribution to Find and tell, let's hear it.

The sender tables in here, which is your stuff? Like, as you say, there's angle grind, a commercial vacuum, you know, pumps, generators, surfboards, scooters, power tools, all of that type stuff.

That's easy Mike. He's arranging a catalog of items for an auction. A lot of common household appliances and tools and some not so common items.

Tricky little bits in the auction. There's a bud cutter, which is a big machine for cutting up budheads, which could be lavender. Yes, why don't know?

They've all been lost, stolen or seized because this is a police auction.

The stuff is exhibits, all right, so they're from events like it could be a drug raid, it could be a theft, a break in, stuff like that.

Until now, they had all been sitting in storage for months. Police either haven't been able to find the original owners or just don't have the space to hold it forever. So they give easy Mic a call. He picks up all the items and then sells them off.

Very few of these happened now the old school style police socials. Everything now so online you've lost all that. So a lot of people use these as like a social event. I have people messaging me during the year when's the next auction?

The next one is tomorrow. Easy's been doing this for thirteen years and he likes to make sure every item gets a second life.

Absolutely none of this comes home, not one thing. If I have to sell that fight for a dollar, it'll sell for a dollar.

As you can tell, Easy Mike doesn't like waste, but he does love to have a love. That's his real name, by the way, how do you spell it?

Yeah?

Yes, why?

And that's your That's on my birth certificate, Medicare card, license, passport everything.

Easy's mum was hoping for a girl, so she hadn't picked out any boys' names. She sent his dad to sort it out.

She said, you go down the front and register it, something Easy like Mike. He said, yeah, in norries it all. So I went down. He registered Easy. Mike sent Pikes my middle name.

Another It pulls up at the showground with the next load. There's scooters, golf sets, TVs and baby seats all up. There's thousands of items to be sorted, jewelry watchers and silver bullions.

Don't you touch anything, Nick, don't you buy anything.

Natalie and Nick are married and they've been helping Easier run his auctions for thirteen years. They all met playing online poker.

So we took our chances, didn't We.

Took our chances.

Didn't know whether it was a serial killer or not.

But it worked out. It worked out.

There's still dozens more items to unload and label. When a visitor drops in unannounced.

Oh here it is, mister, or I come every time the day before and buy nothing. He never buys in.

In his play, a stout man wearing suspenders struts into the hall and immediately starts poking around.

And if he does, he doesn't rhyming because he's You can't eat strawberry Jam, because you can't pass the seage. It's a tight ash. Hey, Strawberry Jam, here you got.

II let you out of a home.

Strawberry Jam promises to come to the auction tomorrow. He never shows. On auction day. People arrive early for the viewing, which sounds like a funeral but feels more like a garage sale. Easy greets everyone like family.

We opened the door there at eight point thirty. We had people here waiting. We opened the door. They were they were registring. They were queued out this door.

It's hot and sticky inside the hall. People are stepping over each other to get a good look at the display. Greg is here showing his son his very first option.

He's starting to buy.

His own tools now, so I'm trying to teach him how to go to options. He hasn't lean to it one yet.

A lot of farmers and traders come to the police action for tools, even the ones that don't work. Before the auction. Easy make sure they all have some fuel in them, or at least a sticker to let people know it needs some fixing up. Like he says, none of this stuff comes home. It all kicks off at ten am. Sharp trailer.

It is an ex police vehicle. What's the having been? We've got a couple of thousand to kick it away? One thousand making tall fifty anywhere one thousand calls.

A man wearing a blue flannel and a Cubra hat ends up getting the police trailer for around two thousand dollars. The serious buyers have put up with their own trailers, ready to score a few bargains. There's even families with prams, camping chairs and eskis settling in for a big day out. A group of young guys are loading up their use.

But it's a six hundred cc engine off a sports bike. It goes very fast.

Jack's and Worlder by trade and nabbed this engine for two hundred bucks. He says, they usually go for one and a half grand. But the boys are actually more excited about where it could have come from.

I mean, I don't know. My bike engine, for example, could be from, you know, some sort of getaway vehicle. You never really know. A few ovens on the back as well. There were a few ovens for marijuana, yep, bug clippers, whatever you wanted.

They didn't get the ovens, but it made for a good story to tell their mates.

Yeah, so we were standing at one of the tables and we saw that there were a couple of lights, funny lights in front of us, looked like a big, massive array, and the auction that says said it was Ta Tree equipment, and a couple of the blokes the back had a chuckle and then it dawned on me this was actually being used for drug operation.

He's planning to make an off road go cut with his purchase while his brother scored a couple of surfboards for themselves.

We weren't picking up this stuff and it all go to landfill, so it'll just be chucked out and you know, wouldn't have a second life.

As the auction wraps up, people prepared to hold their winnings home. They're loading their trailers as others are waiting for their ride. Even though all these items have had some sort of criminal past, just like people, they deserve a second chance. Once again, all these unclaimed stolen goods have a home. Police can welcome new items to their storage while all the proceeds go back to state revenue. And it's all thanks to a guy named Easy.

You know, I'm not the devil, you know, Okay, I don't need to sell this stuff, like I'm really I'm like the undertaker, but I'm just finalizing things.

Naon.

That was like an infinitely less posh version of antiques Rocho.

I was so into it. That's awesome, thank you.

Honestly, that was like it was a delight to listen to. I felt like I'd been transported from being here in a studio. Yeah, I really feel like I was there and like I saw some of the things that you were using the audio to bring to life.

So congratulations, great work. Thank you.

So being a news reporter by trade, do you need to be able to spot a great story? What initially captured you about Easy Mike his name?

Not only that, but I never heard of a police auction, let alone thought it was accessible to the public. It was in Kempsey, which was a foreigner half our drive from Sydney. But I thought, you know, surely there's got to be stories out there as well. So and yeah, it didn't disappoint.

Yeah, so you drove out there and then you spend you know what, like half a day or more around this auction, talking to Easy Mike, talking to others and trying to get a sense of what's going on. That's going to mean you collect an enormous amount of audio. How do you make sure you've got all the bits you might need later?

Well it turned out I had too much audio in the end, I think, because that was my only chance to get everything that I needed at the time, so I think I over recorded. I ended up just recording the whole day, which turned out to be hours and gigabytes of audio. So I kind of kind of shot myself in the foot because that I had to go through all that, but it also made the cutting down easier. I was a bit more ruthless in terms of getting rid of chunks of audio.

Looking back on your experience, not just creating this episod, but over the trio of episodes, what are you most proud of?

Oh, good question, I'd say sneaking to my gut. Even when I felt the pressure of time and the deadlines, there were certain stories that I was really fixated on or a bit stubborn about, and I felt I wanted to do something to see a story that I was one hundred percent committed to, rather than settle for something and do something half fast. So I'd say listening to my intuition and letting that lead the way sometimes.

Naan, I just I want to congratulate you on all three of your stories. You have got such a fantastic talent for finding people who have a perspective or a story that's just not one we hear all the time, and I really look forward to hearing more of that from you in the future.

Well done, Thank you, Jumally.

It's been a blast.

What a fantastic story to kick off today's theme, New Beginnings. We're going to hear what Kate came up with in just a moment. This is Find and Tell and this week's theme is New Beginnings. Kate's previous stories have been so beautiful, and she's had some really impressive guests like Elizabeth Day, and she's shown a lot of vulnerability by sharing quite intimate details about her personal life. Let's see what she's made for us this time. Hey, Kate, welcome back to Find and Tell.

It's the final countdown.

I know now with you, we've sort of we've taken this almost trilogy approach in that we've been tracking your experience of a really significant breakup.

New Beginnings. What does that mean for you?

It means joy. It just simply means joy. It means releasing everything that we've gone through in the first and second story and starting the next chapter.

Was there a moment in this process where it just felt like it was impossible, like you weren't going to get to joy?

I mean I feel that weakly. I think, yeah, going through a breakup, it's not a linear journey by any means, but you just have to celebrate the winds, and you have to celebrate the growth and the change and there was so many things in telling this final story that just made me smile.

How do you feel we're on the verge, We're about to press play, nervous still or if we settled in over a couple of weeks.

I'm just excited for this one. It's yeah, I hope, I hope everyone feels really happy listening to it, because to me, it's a bit of a like, fuck.

Yes, that sounds like time to press play. This is Kate's new beginnings.

So we did these marriage of ours together as a group, and by the end of it, everybody was screaming them and crying. My kid was there, who's twenty one, and she was like, Mum, I've never seen anything like this. This, this is electrifying. And then basically the DJ kicked off and everybody danced their hearts at and there were people crying.

That's Humi Stein's author, podcaster and basically someone who I've been obsessed with since her Channel V days. She's telling me all about the divorce party that she held back in feb to celebrate the end of her marriage. Yeah you heard that, right, celebrate. I'll let her explain.

I got divorced myself after a ten year marriage last year, and I was like, now what. And the whole process of getting divorced, it's not just you know, signing some papers. It's a marriage first, and then it's the disintegration of a marriage. It's a marriage breakdown. It's finally accepting that the marriage is no longer. It's a really long, elongated process that's really quite painful, and actually the divorce part is kind of really good.

So just to be completely transparent, I've never been divorced and I haven't even been married, but I absolutely can relate to what Yumi are saying.

We've done the hard thinking and the hard decision making and now we can finally kind of tie a bowl around it and say, well that was now in the past and we're moving on. And what I discovered was just there aren't that many rituals or to celebrate divorce. So I wanted to ritualize in a joyful way and a feminist way. The end of a relationship.

Last year, just like you me my eight year long relationship ended, and this conversation it really made me realize that I'd been unintentionally creating my own small rituals to try and help process my heartbreak. I'd done really tiny things like getting a fringe groundbreaking I know, or just remembering the date that i'd been broken up with and telling my friend AJ about it viral whatsapped voice message. Yeah this week, it's four weeks, so almost at the

And so we got maybe seven different people to come up and talk about a really good story that they want to share about their divorce. You know. One was like, I gave birth to my daughter. It was our second kid. And then my husband was like, I think I want to leave because I really like my weekends.

No, the audacity of men is unparalleled.

I really like my weekends, and now having kids, things seems to just get in the way of me doing all the things that I want to do. And it was heartbreak, but it was also like rage. So it was a bit of a blood letting, like let's pour it out and let's scream it out.

After the blood letting, you me held her own version of a wedding.

A ceremony of marriage to ourselves, where we chose ourselves. And one of the things that I did was reconceptualize marriage vowls. If you think about what you can remember off the cuff of the marriage vows, it's we are gathered here today and it's also till death to us part. That's the bit that people remember. So in the new vows that we wrote, where we marry ourselves or we commit to loving ourselves, I just mentioned that when we die, like where we're going to be the ones that we

Also incredibly freeing, right.

I totally agree. So we did these marriage vows together as a group, and by the end of it, everybody was screaming them and crying.

And so what did that feel like for you to be in that space?

Oh? It felt amazing, you know, because there was a whole spectrum of people there in attendance. There were quite shy people who said to me really quietly. I've never really even acknowledged that I got divorced. It was my own private pain. And then there were other people who were just like making an absolute rucous about it and have been for years. It was such a great feeling to kind of facilitate people being able to ritualize their divorces.

I've found that coming to terms with the end of a chapter of your life it can be really tough, but it also can be so freeing The impermanence of it all feels really important. Things that we never expect to happen just do, and things that we expect to stay the same just don't.

If somebody runs a cafe, let's say, for seven years, and it's really good and it's popular, but then it starts to not make so much money, and so that he decided to close. Technically they've failed, But for seven years it was really successful. So did they fail or did they just decide to wrap up when the time was right. So that that, for me is kind of

And it's it's really the rituals that mark the endings of these relationships and that help us to move on. And so I just wanted to take what Yumi had said and just really commemorate the end of my breakup year and just celerate the start of the next chapter something that felt feminist and joyful, but also a little bit like home Tod b.

Shepherd that been kidde in care chickat the person who was so ungrateful or did not deserve money. Yeah, this is going cry now.

In Persian culture, we have this ritual called halahafez when around Maru's which is our your ear, you put your hand on a book of poetry, ask a question and get an answer half as his poetry is. It's kind of like trying to untangle shake experience Old English, though, and so even if you speak fassy, the meaning is one hundred percent of for debate, which is perfect if you're my mom and my aunt and you're essentially telling my fortune.

The loss of love, what it does to you. Again, I'm not just saying she's.

But as I listen to them, even the skeptic in me was really shocked.

I cried a lot from that.

Aless lover Mayam Dick. Can they goa the babe, Babe nice, my little Astra chicken, Give me a glass of wine.

Let me enjoy, enjoy the life you never know your destiny has got for you.

I've definitely struggled to rEFInd myself this year, but listening back to all of the voice messages from this time, it's really helped me to realize how far I've come. I feel like it's such a gradual process of learning to spend time with myself and enjoy my own company, just like you me. I needed to make a commitment to myself and I bought this like silver ring. It was kind of like a promise to myself to like look after myself and my names and have that be

I mean, I think that's the thing too with the ritual of breakup is it's telling your story. I said that looking at you in a very meaningful way, because we're doing your podcast. It's telling a story, and then hopefully that's the bow you tie around that chapter of your life and then you can kind of push it to one side.

Thank you so much, Umia, I've been talking to you in this beautiful room with all of your mum's beautiful objects.

I know she's got. It's like a little shrine to Japan with a treadmill, like it's so Asian.

A day. The friend that I've been what's up voice messaging? She started out being a friend of a friend, and over the last twelve months we've sent each other so many messages about heartbreak but also lowliness. To be honest, that's all shifted now. We're talking more and more about everything else that's going on in our lives in romantic relationships. They're not really the focus of our conversation. But of course, when my breakup anniversary rolled around, she remembered.

Hello, just wanted to say congratulations on pioneering the way forward for yourself and going on so many adventures and leaning in so well to pursuing your artistic and creative endeavors and upholstering your own furniture, all the things that you do Cape. You are really amazing and it's been nice to get to know you over the last year in such a strange format. I hope we actually hang out sometime soon. But I hope you're well and yeah, no need to get back, just wanted to say hi.

It was really nice to hear from AJ again. I feel like I've missed Aj. I have just a giant list of things I need to comment on very quickly. I was excited to hear from AJ again. I didn't realize your fringe is a breakup fringe. It's a great fringe. You should always have had a fringe. And was that your mum or your auntie saying asshole?

It was so good? It was my maa well.

Done, well done mom, hey, and well done you. What a beautiful end to your your trio of episodes.

Congratulations, thank mama.

I feel like the question you were asking in this episode was really clear, Like I felt like I from the beginning, I had a sense of we are going to ask why we don't commemorate the new beginnings that come from a sadness like a divorce or a breakup. I'm interested though. It makes a lot of sense for me having listened to it, But beforehand, when you're conceiving of this episode, doesn't necessarily make sense to put divorce and new beginnings together.

So where did that come from?

To me? It's a really obvious link. Yeah, I think divorce breakups, they're really reburseed, and as Yumi says, like, it's not all failure. And I think we often have in our societies and in our groups of people that surround us, we often have this notion that divorce and the end of a relationship can be so sad, but for so many people it's not. It's so freeing, and it's such a celebration of refining yourself and reconfiguring yourself

I loved there was a moment conversation between you and Yumi where you talked about the fact that it seems quite bizarre. I think that something has to last a lifetime for it to be valuable or good. There's nothing else we apply that that measure too, I suppose that measure of success. Tell me about talking to Yumi Steins.

It was so fun. It was quite weird because she was in Melbourne with her kids, staying at her mum's house, and so she just said coming over to my mom's and I was.

Like, okay, of course I'll just.

Come to Umi Stean's mom's house. Sure that's not weird or different. And at the time, my mom and my aunt were staying with me, like my aunt was visiting from overseas, and so I had them in my house and they were like.

What are you doing?

And I was like, I'm going to do an interview at someone's mum's house. I know, it's very confusing. And they were like, well, what are you taking? And I was like, oh my gosh, I haven't even thought about that. Of course, I can't chrup to someone's mum's house without bringing herself.

Bring a plate kicked or something exactly.

And so I brought her some mangoes. The reason I did that was because the morning after my breakup, when my friends came to pick me up and the things I chose to take with me when I left my house were in order. My laptop great, practical, good love that for me. My wallet great, also practical, my passport like I was just.

Sure, yeah, and I wanted to flee the country.

I know.

I think that's what I was thinking, like tomorrow morning, I'm And then I took from the football a single mango interesting, and I think that was like the vindictive part of me that was like, I love mangos so much.

Mango's are so expensive.

I'm taking this with.

Me, this yours.

Yeah. And so there was a really nice moment where I was like on the street walking to Yumie's mum's house with my mangos in my hands, being like, come a long way.

You have come a long way. I want to I'm gonna go.

I'm going to hold this to podcasting, the podcasting journey.

What are you most proud of?

I think that this has been such an emotional process to go through, but it's been so healing. Like I thought that I was all good and then going through this process, I had to relive a lot of stuff.

Kate, your willingness to share, I think what for many of us is super relatable but also deeply personal has not gone unnoticed.

I really hope that this series has helped you.

Heal even further past the version of you that we met back in episode one. Now, this could be the last time we talked to you on Find and Tell, but I hope I get to hear much much more work from you in the future. You have done a wonderful job.

Thank you so much for listening, Jamela.

When we come back, who will win today's episode, Naan or Kate?

I am going to need a moment to think.

This is a Find and Tell and the theme this week was new Beginnings, and this could be the last time that we hear from one of our brilliant storytellers. Nayanne's character development in this work, her scripting, her narration, the way she genuinely went out finding a story, finding a police auction which I'd never even heard of, and bringing easy Mike's Gloria's voice and personality to all of us was really insightful. I think she showed some real skill,

Right.

I can picture that police auction in my mind's eye. I can see what's going on. Huge congratulations to Naan on that episode. Kate has made this horribly hard to call. It's rude, how difficult these two have made this decision for me because this was again an excellent episode. There's some beautiful wisdom in Kate's episode, and she delivers it in a way that is warm and friendly, doesn't feel condescending or sort of annoying, like you're being told what

If I was judging them as a three, oh my gosh, I haven't.

I just think it was absolute perfection, But I have to judge them individually, and individually, I think we could have seen a little bit more experimentation this week, moving away from the same structure, branching out with the way Kate does things, and I'm sure she will do that in future, because she's super talented. After hearing both stories, I've really wrestled with this one, Guys. I've gone backwards and forwards inside of my head trying to figure it out.

Congratulations, awesome, yay. I feel like we did this for easy.

Mike Ah too easy, right, Thanks so much for having me, Timilo. It's been a blast, and this whole experience has been unforgettable, all right.

The way the scores line out, things are about to get very very interesting. Make sure that you do not miss our next episode because we are going to be hearing the two final tales before two of our storytellers bow out. Who is it going to be? Don't miss it? Press follow in whichever podcast app you are listening on.

A big thank you.

To our show partners Afters and Road Australia. Find and Tell is a co production between iHeart Australia and the black Cast podcast network.

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