Proper True Yarn

Part five with Luke Geiger is the Mount Isa Rodeo yarn, and it might be the funniest five minutes of the series. The setup: Luke and the boys land one of their biggest gigs ever, playing the Isa Rodeo alongside O'Shea, the Screaming Jets and Aussie rock royalty The Angels. After the Friday crowd thinned out on the Jets, the promoters flipped the Saturday order, so The Angels went on first and Luke's crew got the closing slot, sharing a green room with the Brewsters and Dave Gleeson, who spent the arvo singing cowboy songs with them out the back.

Earlier that day the barbecue boys on site had handed Luke, a self-confessed chilli man, a bottle of their hot wing challenge sauce, the Ghost of Chainsaw. He had a respectful amount on some roast meat, fiddled with the bottle, and thought nothing more of it. Ten minutes before showtime, packs on, ears in, guitar on his back, he ducks into the single portaloo for a nervous piss. What follows is the discovery that ghost chilli does not wash off your hands by itself, a door flung open with one leg in and one leg out, jeans at the ankles, a handful of portaloo soap, and a man scrubbing himself for Jesus and everyone to see while The Angels rip into Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again twenty metres away.

He made it on stage, still smouldering, and opened the set by thanking The Angels for opening for them, only to look across and find Gleeson and Rick Brewster standing side of stage listening. Gleeson stayed for the whole set and ended up jumping up to sing a Johnny Cash song with them, which Luke rates as one of the coolest things the band's ever done. The ep wraps with the world record stakes: one adjudication slip-up across 120 hours and the whole thing counts for nothing, which is roughly 30 four-hour gigs back to back, unpaid. Watch this space.

Part four with Luke Geiger is the touring yarns, starting with a crash course in hospitality riders and the piss-takes buried in them: six mandarins, three peeled and three unpeeled, green M&Ms picked out of the bowl, and one bloke whose rider ends with a framed picture of Trace Adkins. Luke's had his own rider rinsed by another artist who shall remain nameless but absolutely knows who he is, and there's the all-time Mackay classic from his pub days with Big Sexy: play a packed Friday night at Malloy's, tell the barman to tab the drinks up, then go to collect the cash at the end and get told you owe us 300 bucks.

Then the main event, the night that became a song. Luke, Big Sexy and Luke's wife Carly rock up to the Honky Tonk of Texas in Silsbee, outside Beaumont, for a Tuesday night gig at what looks like an empty feed shed. By showtime you couldn't get a park. The second the locals clocked the accents, the shots started coming, Texan-sized 60 mil jobs, and they didn't stop. Luke got so poisoned he couldn't play his guitar, greeted his own wife in the hallway with pure amazement that she'd made it all the way to Texas, got carried from the car to the motel with his boots dragging, and took two days to come right.

The kicker came at the next venue, the famous Sengelmann Hall in Schulenburg, when he opened his gear and found a stack of love letters written on napkins, bar receipts and bits of cloth. Turns out blackout Luke had spent the night telling every woman at the bar he went to uni with Keith Urban and personally promising to deliver their letters. So Keith, if you're listening, there's mail waiting for you in Silsbee. The episode rounds out with the song the whole disaster earned, so stick around for the outro.

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Part three with Luke Geiger, and it's the big exclusive: Australia's wildest cowboy party is going after a Guinness World Record. Luke's whole thing is taking requests, not breaks. He plays six and seven hour sets without stopping, and Knuckles has watched him do eight and a half hours straight at the Gympie Muster's Lights on the Hill bar with three trips to the dunny, after already playing all day at It's a Bloke Thing in Toowoomba and getting choppered between the two with James Johnston. The only reason the man stops is a flat battery.

So he looked up the longest continuous music marathon, found the mark sitting at around 105 hours, and decided he wants to be the bloke who beats it. The target: 120 hours. Five days. The plan, hatched years ago with Graeme Connors' sons at their Mackay venue and now revived for next year's Gympie Muster, is dead serious. He walks you through the actual Guinness rulebook: no repeating a song within four hours, 20 seconds max between songs, adjudicators watching around the clock, and five minutes of banked rest earned per hour played, all of it saved up to survive the 3am to 5am dead zone when the diehards have collapsed and the early risers aren't up yet.

Mates can jump up and accompany him, guitars, fiddles, spoons, tambourines, whatever you've got, as long as he never stops. The finish would be staged for the main stage with a countdown. The last problem to solve is his fingers, which already bleed after a big night, so there's talk of lighter gauge strings, a rack of backup guitars, and the silicon fingertips he can't stand for reasons best left to the episode. Watch this space, because if anyone's mad enough to sing for five days, it's this bloke.

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Part two with Luke Geiger opens with maybe the most innocent mistake ever made by a country footballer. Fresh out of Chinchilla and playing footy in Sydney, 18 year old Luke discovers the whole squad shaves, and the trainers won't rub you down before a game if you're hairy. After a leg waxing attempt back in Toowoomba ended at one leg, two girls and a lot of swearing, he spots a sign under his unit block: painless Brazilian waxing. He chews on it for a couple of days, wondering what's so special about this wax from Brazil, then walks in with all the confidence in the world and asks for the Brazilian on his chest. The beautician calls the hairdresser over just to hear him say it again. Once it's explained, Luke's out. They wax his chest with the regular stuff instead, it draws blood between the pecs, and as he puts it, painless my arse, but my arse did remain hairy.

The back half is the bush kid landing at Central Station with a bag of clothes and a swag, straight into the famous Souths player house next to the Juniors leagues club. Crazy Dave the minder in the front room you never saw, groceries lined up the hallway, grass past your knees, and a brand new mower big Ricky couldn't start because he'd been told to hold the primer button until fuel ran out of it. When Luke finally mows the yard, the apprentice in him horrified at the state of it, he starts hitting forks. Then spoons. Then he looks up and sees plates, cups and tomato sauce all over the roof. The boys' explanation: we had a roof party, better view up there. Fair play. The ultimate bachelor pad, and as Luke says, there's plenty of yarns from that house that can never come out.

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New guest series with one of the best blokes Knuckles knows, Queensland cowboy country singer Luke Geiger, and the pair front up fresh from trying to drink rum for Australia at the 16th It's a Bloke Thing prostate cancer luncheon, hosted by their good mate Jack Wagner at Wellcamp Airport. The lunch raised $39,000, and the cause is a beauty: a testing truck partnered with Heart of Australia that's already checked 541 blokes in rural Queensland, with 12 per cent sent for follow ups. That's near 60 blokes who'd never have been checked. If you see it out west, walk in.

Luke's job at the lunch was the grand entry, driving the auction Kenworth from one end of the airport to the other, then jumping out with guitar and mic. What the room didn't know is that he'd been out bush long enough to need a favour first, which is how he learnt the greatest airport secret in Australia: they confiscate hundreds of aerosols a day, so if you ever need a spray of deodorant at Wellcamp, they've got you covered. One donated can of Rexona later, he was fit to sit beside Knuckles and Ray Martin. Yes, that Ray Martin, and yes, he's coming on the pod.

The main event is Luke's teeth. Four implants and 18 crowns at the top clinic in Vietnam for about $10,000 all up, versus the $10,000 his Mackay dentist wanted for one implant. The catch: Luke refused to be put under for three and a half hours of drilling into his jawbone because he was convinced they'd knock him out and take his organs, ignored the dentist's warning that shade number one was too white, and learnt both lessons the hard way. There's also the small matter of Knuckles buying the South Sydney VIP box at auction purely as a thank you to Luke, a bloke he ribs relentlessly for supporting them.

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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