Hello. I'm Jamilla Risby. I've been a journalist for oh god, too long, maybe ten years now. But growing up as an Indian Australian, I heard and I read and I watched stories being told by people who didn't look like me, whose experiences weren't like mine. Whether it's our first people's or our most recent arrivals, Australia is full of diverse storytellers. Enter, find and tell. This is the search for the next
generation of Australian storytellers. We've taken four diverse Australian storytellers, We've trained them up, and then we've set them loose to find and tell weird and wonderful stories from all around the country. Every episode, our storytellers are going to go head to head, competing to give you the best story to get one step closer to taking home the grand prize. Think of it like a TV talent show, but for poker. In the first episode, you will hear
it from Ben and Kate. They're going to match up to find and tell the best story they can on the theme of silver linings. In our first story, Ben investigates a mysterious teddy bear invasion in the small country village of Neith.
Here's a taste.
Welcome to Neath, a small country village on the outskirts of Cesnok in the Hunter Valley region, Duckward Young Country. It's a real blink and you'd miss it. Top of town, one rode in and one rode out. It has a population of four hundred and ninety people, a bus stop, a servo and in true blue Australian country town fashion, one pub. You'd be forgiven if you've never heard about Neath. Not many people have. But for a short period of time, Neath was the talk of the region. All unknown country
town became home to a mind boggling mystery. This story begins a few years ago at the peak of covid Lockdown in New South Wales. Morale was at an all time low and there was nothing to look forward to, work, home, work, and back home again. But that's exactly how this story starts. See. I would have to drive on that one lonely road through Neath on my daily commute to work, and that's when I first encountered the teddy bears. That's right, teddy bears. And I wasn't the only one.
Would someone tell me the significance of the teddy bears inneath. They're all over the place, and some are even sitting in chairs now, so the road to neath has become a gallery of hanging teddy bears. I dig the kindergarten lad the impaler aesthetic, but does anyone know the deal?
Yeah, it's disgusting.
Hopefully they get pulled down soon the place look filthy.
It's a beautiful gesture to make kids, and us big kids smile.
People who get upset by them must have had very sad childhoods.
In the following weeks, the teddy bears began to multiply, and what started as five or six soon turned into twenty, then thirty, then not before long, there was too many beers to count inhabiting the village. Beneath the trees, the parks, the benches, the telegraph poles, the signal boxes, the bus stops. The teddy bears had even infiltrated the pub. Then one day they all vanished. Where did the bearers come from?
Who put them there? And where did they go? This local mystery has perplexed me for far too long, and it's about time I figured out some answers. So starts my investigation to unravel the Mystery of the Neath Teddy Bears.
And in our second story, Kate poured over voice notes she sent to a friend following a devastating breakup. She enlists the Elizabeth Day to craft a love letter to the friends who hold us together.
I consider my romantic breakups some of the most visceral periods of grief in my life. But the mere act of living through that and surviving it had made me understand I was so much stronger than I thought I was. It taught me a lot about my capacity for resilience.
That's author and podcaster Elizabeth Day in her book Friend of Hollick. It's had such a big impact on me this year. My copy is underlined and tabbed like a textbook, because I think that breakups, they really often, shine a light on all of our relationships a bit, in particular our friendships.
One of the most momentous breakups in my life was three weeks before my thirty ninth birthday. I remember so vividly that breakup happening and me opening the window of my rented flat and smoking a cigarette. I don't smoke, by the way, but it felt like the only appropriately tragic thing to do.
When your life gets unexpectedly turned upside down, like Elizabeths did, like mine did. The balance in the scales of everything kind of skews, including in your friendships. All of a sudden you become that friend who is kind of a miss. But there's also something so beautiful about friendship that is born out of a time when there's no expectation of anything in return.
I do not know what I would have done without my friends after that breakup, literally to the extent that the first person I called was Emma, my ex was still in the flat, and I said, this has happened, and she was right, but he doesn't mean that I mean, because it seems so ludicrous to her. She's like, right, but he's joking, isn't he. I was like no, and she said, Okay, my darling, this is what we're gonna do. And she basically gave me a plan of action.
That's just a little taste of Find and Tell. If you love hearing stories told by people from all walks of life, then search and follow Find and Tell in the app that you're listening on now.