Proper True Yarn

The final part with John Rayner is one big love letter to the bush, and it starts in Fred Brophy's boxing tent at the Birdsville races. After days patrolling the Simpson Desert, Johnny fronted up to the tent chasing the family legacy, his grandfather was a tent fighter back in the day. Jessie got caught in the crush at the front, and when the RFDS bloke helping Fred asked if there was anything he could do, she dobbed Johnny straight in: he really wants to fight. Hand up, on the board, matched with the tent champion Afro Savage, who reckons he's never lost.
Then the kicker. Unbeknown to Johnny, his grandfather had picked that exact year to tow the car up from Goulburn to Birdsville, spotted his grandson's name on the board, and ended up in his corner as ring man, calling the shots while Johnny went three rounds with a bloke who could've flogged him into next week. Afro bought him a beer afterwards and had the hide to claim Johnny broke his nose. Last year the crew went back for the final Brophy tent at Birdsville, and the trip out was half the fun: hot artesian baths at Charlotte Plains, bathtub races and a rock carrying comp at Quilpie lost by two seconds on a technicality with a grand on the line, yabby races at Windorah where the cheap yabby costs $800, and a mate's charity fight with his young fella screaming go dad from the front row.
It all lands on the message both blokes finish the series with: get out and see your own country. Stay at the pubs, buy the meat pie, get your fuel local, put money into the small towns doing it tough after the floods, and if you're struggling in the city, maybe the answer is a little further west. As Johnny says, the bush is good to everyone.
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Part four with John Rayner is the ranger years, and it opens with how he got there: taking the pay cut from mining money to a National Parks traineeship, moving down to Barmah on the Murray with his now fiancee Jessie after four months together, and walking into an Echuca bottle shop to tell the manager he'd work that night for free and be given a job by close. Advice to the young fellas, that's how it's done. The bottle shop yarns from houseboat party season are worth the listen on their own.
Then it's into the good stuff. Learning tree felling from the old forestry boys and dropping burning giants on fire jobs, cultural heritage lessons from the local mobs, ring trees and sacred country from the Murray to The Rock at Wagga, then landing the dream posting at Diamantina National Park, seven hours from Longreach, seven from Mount Isa, halfway pub and nothing else. Out there he watched floods to rival 1974 rip hundred year old trees out of the ground, met a bloke driving a camel wagon from north of Alice to Taree with chooks hanging off the side, had a plane club land uninvited and drink the social club's grog, and waged war on a dirty old cow that learnt to hold the floodgates open and let the whole herd into the only springs on earth where one tiny fish exists.
And the title moment: filming an inland taipan during bilby surveys, the world's deadliest snake, one bite and you're gone, and it wandered over, had a sniff of his boot and kept going, looking for mice. His boss called him an idiot. Johnny agrees. Knuckles also drops a proper true Middleton pub yarn of his own about how close his old man came to owning the loneliest pub in Queensland.
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Part three with John Rayner opens with the maddest scheme of the series. The same cousin from part two, now unlicensed and living back at mum and dad's, loses the plot when his mum vacuums a blonde wig out from under his bed and wants to wear it to a 70s party. His explanation: that's me licence. When he drives with the wig on, the cops think he's a woman. Her reply, God bless her, is the best line of the episode: mate, you've got a beard.
From there it's back to the Cudgegong River, hundred pound handlines, loaves of bread and carp as long as a shovel handle, plus a riverbank yarn about that same cousin, a hidden magazine and the clay bank that you'll simply have to hear for yourself, because there's no writing that one down. Then the old quarry at Mudgee: a three storey jump into crystal clear water, rope swings, a track mowed through the Bathurst burr, and a generation that looked after the place until the next lot drove cars through the fences.
The back half turns into something both blokes clearly care about: kids these days aren't allowed to climb a tree, let alone live on a push bike, build bows out of willow, go yabbying or hit the old man's golf balls into the paddock. Johnny's take is that if you've got the skills, fishing, hunting, fixing cars, any of it, passing them on to the kids in your community is your job. That's how you learnt it, so get out there and teach it.
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Part two with John Rayner is about the cousin he idolised, the bloke he describes as Stifler: smooth as anything, great with women, would pump you up one on one and shit on you the second there was an audience. The same bloke who once woke a sleeping Johnny up by putting a steak knife in his leg.

The yarns get wilder from there. The tin dropped in the car park on the way to the Mudgee food festival, a carton of rum throwdowns, and the night of hazing that ended with 15 year old Johnny passed out on the grass with a ring of fire lit around him and a blue heeler digging its toy out of his pants. That was the night he swore off drugs for good, and looking back, he reckons it was the moment that changed his life, even if it took him years longer to walk away from the bloke behind it.

Then Knuckles shares one he's maybe never told before, about his own idolised cousin, a Queensland swimmer and Australian judo talent who went off the rails, and what happened when that cousin turned up at his 21st after ten years. The ep lands on the advice both of them wish they'd had as young fellas: if you've got that person in your life, you don't have to burn bridges, just move away.
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Fresh out of the Proper True Yarn fight camp, John Rayner sits down with Knuckles ahead of the seven man royale at Podcast Royale 3.0, and he's not there to make friends. No gym, no weight set, no boxing gloves. Johnny's training farm strong, throwing 44 gallon drums and tyres around and belting the bag in riggers, and reckons the city pricks on the card are in for a rude shock. There's respect for the legend Benny, but as Johnny says, no more sympathy votes. Whoever fights the best gets the win.
Then the yarns start. Growing up in Mudgee when it was still a small country town, the unspoken deal where the league boys did the fighting during union season and vice versa, and punching their way to a famous schoolboy rugby title against one of the biggest schools in the state. Later came the Woolpack in its days as the most violent pub in Australia, and the army application where he passed everything with flying colours until the psych test, where a contractor heard how many fights he'd been in, told him getting smacked as a kid was domestic abuse he should sue over, and marked him down as a psychopath.
From there it was industrial tiling in the mines and a proper welcome to manhood alongside wiry blokes with man strength, 18 hour shifts, poly welding out in the bush, then giving up two and a half grand a week for a $750 national parks traineeship he's never regretted. Twelve years on he's still a parks man, and part two digs into the national park yarns.
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