Podcast: Stuck in a lift and property soft landings

If you’ve ever wondered whether you really need to set aside funds or organise a loan for future lift repairs or replacement, try getting stuck in one for half an hour.

Jimmy tells of his brief incarceration (and escape) in this week’s podcast and he and Sue discuss maintaining old lifts and even adding new ones to older buildings.

But first we look at property prices, with the latest figures suggesting there may already have been a soft landing.  That’s good news for apartment owners and even prospective purchasers and renters, as Sue explains.

Then there’s a chat about all the bells and whistles you can now get with luxury apartments and the key element missing from too many less salubrious unit blocks.

Plus, there’s a survey about your relationship with your strata managers (or lack thereof) which could score you a $50 gift card.

And finally, there’s news about Sue’s new book, That Bligh Girl, out this week – nothing to do with apartments, except that it was written in one. Enjoy.

TRANSCRIPT IN FULL

Jimmy  00:00

I got stuck in our lift the other day.

Sue  00:01

Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh; it’s a serious thing. Was it traumatic?

Jimmy  00:05

Well, not really. I mean, it was a bit dramatic, when the cleaner next to me took his shirt off. Fortunately (I thought he was going to be half -naked, because it was quite warm), he had a singlet on, so it was just a moment of panic. We couldn’t phone, because there’s no signal…

Sue  00:23

Of course, on your mobiles…

Jimmy  00:25

That’s a weird logic! So I pressed the button, and a woman said they’d send somebody around. They were going off in an hour… She said “we’re closing in an hour, but if you call me in the next half-hour, I’ll tell you when the lift maintenance guy is going to get there.” And then she said “whatever you do, don’t open the door.” Okay, so we’re standing there, and noticed that it had stuck on level three and it wouldn’t move in either direction and it occurred to me, if she says “whatever you do, don’t open the door,” that must mean the door can be opened. That’s the kind of logic I use.

Sue  00:33

But doesn’t she mean you could damage the whole internal mechanism and cost thousands of dollars…

Jimmy  01:08

I think she was more concerned about a lift being stuck halfway between floors and people…

Sue  01:14

Trying to crawl out and then suddenly, the lift goes up…

Jimmy  01:16

And falling down the lift shaft, or getting caught halfway through. Yes. So I opened the doors and there we were, on level three; just exactly as it would have been, if the lift doors had opened properly.

Sue  01:19

Oh, that’s a bit of a nightmare, isn’t it; getting cut in half?  And did the cleaner put his clothes back on, and hug you?

Jimmy  01:35

He said “you’re a genius,” which I think was overstating it slightly. So anyway, we’ll take this opportunity today to talk about lifts and we’re going to talk about house prices, which are on the up (see the connection there)?

Sue  01:50

Very funny.

Jimmy  01:51

And we’re going to talk about a survey that we’re doing on the Flat Chat website, where you can win a $50 gift card.

Sue  02:00

And we’re also talking about apartments with fabulous amenities, which are coming back into fashion.

Jimmy  02:05

We’d better get going then. I’m Jimmy Thomson, I write the Flat Chat column for the Australian Financial Review.

Sue  02:11

And I’m Sue Williams and I write about property for Domain.

Jimmy  02:14

And this is the Flat Chat Wrap.

[MUSIC]

Jimmy

So, property prices have started to rebound already?

Sue  02:33

Yes. Which is kind of good news.

Jimmy  02:35

It’s good if you own something.

Sue  02:37

Well, you kind of think it’s bad news if you’re trying to buy something, but at the same time, a slight increase shows that there’s increasing stability in the market, which gives everybody confidence. Because you might be a buyer and prices might be at rock-bottom, but if you don’t have much confidence, you think that they might fall even further, so that’s kind of scary. A slight increase is good news for pretty much everyone, really.

Jimmy  03:02

Apart from renters.

Sue  03:05

Well, for renters it’s still a tragic situation; it’s still awful. But, you know, maybe for renters, it’s better when prices are going up a bit, because it encourages developers to come back in the market and build more homes.

Jimmy  03:18

That’s true.

Sue  03:19

So maybe, it’s good news for absolutely everyone. We had the latest Domain house price report come out just last week, for the March quarter of 2023. And it showed that across combined capitals, prices increased over the March quarter for the first time in a year. It was only small; the pace of quarterly growth is 0.4%, which is pretty moderate. In previous years, it’s usually (the historical average) about 2.6%, so it’s way down, but it is the first glimmer of hope that the housing market might be in a recovery. And unit prices (which is what we’re really interested in); they didn’t do very well over the combined capitals, but they did well in different cities. Unit prices in Sydney, Canberra and Hobart increased over the March quarter. Brisbane and Adelaide stabilised, but Melbourne, Perth and Darwin went down. So it’s very mixed, but you know, in Brisbane, Adelaide and Hobart, apartment prices remained close to a record high.

Jimmy  04:27

We all expected them to fall away dramatically, because the market was supposedly over-inflated before it started to fall. And I think a lot of us were thinking, well, even if it does drop a lot, it will still be better off than we were maybe three years ago. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. It sounds like it’s the soft landing that everybody was hoping for.

Sue  04:53

Absolutely. Because they went up hugely during COVID and they’ve gone down steadily in the last year, but they’ve not gone down as much as before. And now, most cities are starting to bounce back; that’s kind of a really good sign. And they expect apartment prices to continue to either rise, or to start going up, or the rate of acceleration to decline, because migration is going up now, hugely. And most new migrants who come into the big cities will go straight to apartments; they won’t go to houses. Household sizes are declining… After COVID, we didn’t really want to go into shared houses anymore, so young people are increasingly buying apartments. With house prices going up again, houses are still a bit unaffordable, so unit prices look pretty attractive comparatively, so people are still going to apartments. So we expect that the market has bottomed in apartments, as well as in houses, and that they will improve from now on.

Jimmy  05:57

Houses are unaffordable for people who don’t have disposable income. But obviously, if prices are starting to go up, somebody can afford them. The problem is that the sector of the community that’s been excluded from house ownership is suffering and I’m starting to hear rumblings from government, that maybe long-term rentals are not such a bad idea, after all. They’re talking about having a national minimum rent-lease period (I think of a year, which is okay). They’re going to cut the tax on build-to-rent.

Sue  06:39

Yes. They’re really boosting build-to-rent. That’s right.

Jimmy  06:41

They’re halving the tax on that, so they’re really encouraging developers to get into that market. But you know, it’s this whole thing of the government being reluctant to look at the whole picture and see what is distorting the market and nothing distorts the market more than negative gearing.  And I know that’s a terrible thing to say to investors, but it’s the people who are the single family… You know, the mum and dad with one property… That’s their kind of investment (their superannuation, if you want), that’s bringing them a bit of income, and it’s increasing in value. And that’s okay. You know, that’s to be encouraged, if they’re actually putting it on the residential rental market and not the holiday rental market…

Sue  07:32

Absolutely. But as prices are going up; they’re starting to go up again, and rents are going up massively… There’s not so many people who are negatively gearing their properties; there’s no reason to. So the negative gearing ratio is going down and so maybe, with apartment prices bouncing back up, the market… The free market is far from perfect; you’re quite right. And we need to change some of the legislation around the market, but it’s a really good news story that it’s going up, because people will start building more, and investors are coming back into the market now, because they’re having a lot more confidence when they’re seeing prices jump a little bit more. Hopefully, they will be putting more stock on the rental market.

Jimmy  08:19

There’s a finite number of properties around at the moment; until they start seriously building large numbers of medium-rise apartment blocks, then there’s only so many properties available.

Sue  08:35

There are developments are ongoing at the moment. I mean, some of them have paused, because so many builders have gone out of business. Other people are hopefully moving in and picking up the slack there. You know, there are quite a lot of big builders who are very financially secure, and they are often buying the sites and continuing the programme. So there is building going on and this will only encourage more building to take place, I think. We need to do lots of things, like negative gearing; looking at that again.

Jimmy  09:08

Short-term rentals is a factor; empty properties. There’s a lot of empty properties around and some cities in the world are saying “well, if you’re going to keep your property empty, we’re going to double your rates for that.”

Sue  09:24

Which is pretty good.

Jimmy  09:25

Yeah, absolutely, because it makes people think. People are going “oh, well, I can pay the mortgage on that; I don’t need to put anybody in there, and the property is there if I ever want it.” Well, great for you, but we’ve got a housing crisis on. The problem with the whole negative gearing thing (and anything like that), is it’s so political… It’s so polarising, and every government is scared to even look at it, because the other side will go “oh, you’re demons; you’re ruining it! The mums and dad are going to be homeless.” Which is all nonsense, of course.

Sue  10:05

And developers have always been whining about bureaucracy at local council level, and how long it takes them to approve development applications. Sometimes I’ve been a bit sceptical of that, because I think well, they have to assess whether there’s going to be people disadvantaged by the developments, and they’ve got to check that they’re going to be sustainable, and they’re good developments; all that kind of thing. But at the same time, I’m sure bureaucracy could be cut, and the process could be speeded up. We had a call from a friend who is building a place in Southern Highlands, in New South Wales and he was outraged, because the local council said to him it would take six months for his DA to go through and it’s now been eight months and no sign of anything, and he doesn’t receive any updates. You think how frustrating that must be; all those people out there waiting for homes and, you know, local governments… Maybe they just don’t have the money to employ staff, but they should really be looking at ways to cut the waiting time.

Jimmy  11:09

It’s all about priorities. You know, what they consider a priority. You’re building new houses, they might think “well, actually, we don’t want many more houses in our local community.”

Sue  11:18

Because they might face a backlash from the NIMBYpeople.

Jimmy  11:21

People who have moved out to the country for peace and quiet and find they’re having a small apartment block built next door to them. Anyway, there’s so many variables, that it’s one of these things that the government, rather than going “oh, we can’t have a one-size-fits-all solution,” should say “well, let’s get the fundamentals right and let’s get people housed.” When we come back, we’re going to talk about a subject that became very dear to my heart, at about five o’clock the other day, when I got stuck in the lift. That’s after this.

[MUSIC]

Jimmy

We live in a building that is a bit more a bit more than 20-years old, which is apparently, the natural life of a modern apartment elevator. Some of them last longer. Some of them in old buildings have been lasting way past their use-by-date, but gradually, things wear out; things break down. And because there’s a lot of safety measures in lifts, if the sensors on a lift tell the lift that it isn’t exactly at the floor that it’s supposed to be at, it will just stop working. I don’t know exactly why I got stuck in the lift the other day, but the lifts stopped working. And the funny thing is, that that button on the lift that says ‘press this button; hold it for two seconds,’ actually works.

Sue  12:52

That’s very reassuring, isn’t it?

Jimmy  12:54

Yes, because we couldn’t phone anyone.

Sue  12:56

And would it work on a weekend as well?

Jimmy  12:58

I hope so. I think it’s a case of, during the day if the office is actually open for the lift company, then it’ll get clicked on to emergency numbers. But it was interesting that our concierge in our building; he only realised the lift wasn’t working when the lift maintenance guy turned up and said “you’ve got two people stuck in lift number one.” It made me think about the levies and maintenance funds, and how in some buildings, people are very, very reluctant to put any money into maintenance funds. I think it’s valid to say “well, we will deal with this when we need to deal with it by maybe, getting a loan.” It’s an expensive business, fixing a lift, especially if the lift is 20-years old. A lot of the spare parts just don’t exist anymore. So it does make sense for owners corporations to sit down and say “how long is this lift likely to last? How often is it breaking down and do we need to put money aside to fix it in the future?” Because people have come to the Flat Chat website, saying “our lift has stopped working properly. It’s unreliable. We think it’s unsafe, but our owners corporation basically says (or our strata committee says) ‘look, it works (mostly), most of the time.'” I don’t think that’s what you want in a lift.

Sue  14:36

Are there any real lift disaster movies; like you know, you always have aeroplane disasters in films? Because you think it would be fertile ground, really?

Jimmy  14:45

Well, we saw in the comedy The Office (which often gets quoted in this podcast), when one of the characters got somebody to change the buttons, so that the button to go up went down as a prank, to confuse the owner of the office building. And of course, inevitably, the lift got stuck. And then immediately, one of the people decided “we’d better establish a pee-corner.” I didn’t do that in the lift; I resisted the temptation. I love those old-fashioned lifts; you see them in French movies. They put them in the stairwell, kind of thing. When you think that in the past, lifts had to have a big cable mechanism at the top, to pull the lift up and let it go down. Well now, they use hydraulics, so you don’t need a giant piece of machinery on the top of the building (depending on the height of the building, of course). But now a lot of older apartments are putting lifts in. You put them on the outside; you clip them on the outside of the building. As long as you can get a landing on the stairway and they can put them in relatively cheaply.

Sue  16:18

I guess as all us baby boomers are getting older, we’re putting in internal lifts. They used to be incredibly expensive, but they’re a lot cheaper now, aren’t they?

Jimmy  16:26

Absolutely. We have friends who live in an apartment block; it’s a former school, or a college. It’s got three stories, and it’s only got stair access. Now, our friend’s brother is in a wheelchair; he can’t visit. Can’t ever visit; can’t ever come to stay, because there’s no way they could get him up and down the stairs. Now, there are points in their building where they could go “actually, we could put a lift there.” You know, the problem is the people on the ground floor. “Why would we pay for anything to do with it?”

Sue  17:05

But the value for the whole building would go up.

Jimmy  17:08

Yeah, but mostly for the upper floors.

Sue  17:11

They would kind of benefit, wouldn’t they?

Jimmy  17:14

Not enough.

Sue  17:16

Could they work out a different equation for people paying more on the top floor and less on the second floor and then not so much on the ground floor?

Jimmy  17:24

I think the simplest way (and it’s not simple), would be to re-evaluate all the unit entitlements.

Sue  17:31

That’s difficult, because that affects everything; the landscaping and the outdoors….Any work that has to be done.

Jimmy  17:39

It’s a complicated thing. Or, you’d set up a separate company that instals and maintains the lift, which is partly owned by the owners corporation, and only certain apartments are expected to contribute.

Sue  17:58

That’s a good way of doing it.

Jimmy  17:59

I’m saying this without any knowledge of it ever having been done, by anyone. Maybe someone will come back to us and say “look, you can do this,” but it’s not simple. Because strata is evolving faster than the law… We are finding that we need to do things; we want to do things and it’s just not easy to get it done and stay legal.

Sue  18:23

Sure. Well, maybe in 10-years time, we’ll have really powerful drones, that can lift us up to different floors.

Jimmy  18:30

And then inevitably, something will go wrong and the wrong person will be landed in the wrong apartment. Oh, there’s one in Melbourne, where your car comes up to your floor…

Sue  18:32

In a lift.

Jimmy  18:44

Because they couldn’t think of any other way of parking cars. It was going to be an expensive apartment block and then they heard about this apartment block in New York, where you’re very expensive car sits next to you’re very expensive apartment

Sue  18:58

With a glass wall between, so you can actually sit and admire your…

Jimmy  19:02

Lamborghini, or you’re Bentley, or whatever.

Sue  19:05

I can’t think of anything worse, really. Well, I can think of lots of things worse, but it doesn’t sound very appealing.

Jimmy  19:11

I think for the expense… These are for people who just have too much money.

Sue  19:16

And they probably have people cleaning cars and polishing them all the time. If I looked at our car, it would made me feel sad that it’s so dirty.

Jimmy  19:22

It wouldn’t be so dirty if it was sitting next door. And talking of luxurious attachments to apartments, that’s what we’re going to do next, Sue.

[MUSIC]

Jimmy

Sue, you had a big feature in Prestige Domain the other day, about fancy amenities?

Sue  19:54

Yes, that’s right. It’s quite astonishing now. Do you remember, 20-years ago, an apartment pool was considered a really fantastic thing? In Melbourne, it was all about tennis courts. Brisbane was about pools, as well and it was always about outdoor areas, as well. And then for a while there, they fell out of favour, because people were saying “oh no, we want very modest apartment buildings, to keep prices down.” But at the top end of the market, amenities have gotten off-the-scale. I looked at a few buildings, and some of the common facilities in the buildings included a cocktail bar, a business lounge, a spa and a library. I mean, they’re all things that you’d expect maybe, in an upmarket resort, but not so much in an apartment building. But now with so many empty -nesters now moving into apartments, the pressure is on developers to provide the fabulous amenities that they really want and that give them a reason to move into an apartment and away from the family home, because many of them had pulled in their family homes and had separate rooms for cinemas and home theatres and gyms, and things like that. But now, the pressure is on apartments to provide the same level of facilities.  People want the things that normally come with houses (or can come with houses), but they can’t necessarily afford to buy the kind of houses that would have those things in them. And pay for the maintenance of them. Pools and things; they can be very expensive to maintain. But if you’ve got 20 apartments, or 100 apartments, or 200 apartments all sharing the same things, the cost can be minuscule.

Jimmy  21:33

I remember writing recently about a place in Washington DC, where it was like a residential resort. It was for young government employees and people who needed to be around the government. High-end apartments, but the apartment blocks had so many facilities. They had upmarket dining rooms, they had a cocktail bar, they had an indoor golf-driving range. You could only go into the cocktail bar if you were a resident of the building, or with a resident of the building.

Sue  22:12

So if you were a resident, you could hold your 50th birthday in there.

Jimmy  22:17

Or just meet somebody for drinks. Just say “come to the front door; I’ll buzz you in, or come in with me.” I wonder if anybody in Sydney has picked up on that idea of exclusivity within a community?

Sue  22:32

Absolutely. That is happening, because many of the developers are taking inspiration from apartments in London and the US and Southeast Asia. They’re leading the way in these kinds of facilities. There’s one being developed on Sydney’s lower north shore, and that’s got a kid’s playroom, two cinemas, a music room with two Steinway pianos, a golf room, a gym, a sauna, yoga, pilates, a library, and a dining room that sits forty people. So therefore, anybody who lives there as a resident (they could be an owner or a tenant),  can book that dining room and have a big dinner for 39 other people. How fantastic! Why do you need two pianos? Good question, really. Maybe to play a duet?  No you sit side-by-side, don’t you? Maybe to play a quartet? No, apparently it’s a big music room and there’s a dividing wall that you can roll out and seal, so you can have two people practising at the same time. A Steinway piano looks incredibly expensive and exclusive.

Jimmy  23:37

Well, because it is.

Sue  23:40

I mean, if you put a trumpet or a recorder on a little music stand, it wouldn’t look half as flashy.

Jimmy  23:46

But that’s been one of perennial complaints in apartments… We have always encouraged the idea of families living in apartments, but then you’ve got a kid who’s learning piano and has to do one hour of practice every night and the neighbours (unless it’s very well soundproofed), are going to be deeply disturbed by this.

Sue  24:08

Yes, it’s actually quite good, having a sealed music room, where people can go and play their instruments. You could go down there and you could say “my kid has got a drum kit; can he bring his drum kit down?” It’s pretty safe. I mean, all these buildings have a lot of CCTV around the buildings and so you could keep the drum kit in there and anyone could have a go.

Jimmy  24:31

I don’t think you should encourage drum kits in apartments.

Sue  24:34

But look, if it’s in a sealed music room and they have lots of underlay on the flooring (because they want to make sure that they don’t disturb anybody), and if it’s really well built, then no problem.

Jimmy  24:45

I just recall that in the early days of Flat Chat, we had somebody write to us that their neighbour (it was townhouse complex), had given their garage over to the teenage son, to practice his drums. And the reason they wanted him in the garage was so that they wouldn’t be disturbed by the noise. Unfortunately, other people were disturbed by the noise. And they said “well, that’s tough. Our son is going to be a rock star someday, so he needs to practice.” It was just people’s being inconsiderate and selfish. If it’s not a problem, have him in your house.

Sue  25:26

That’s right, you enjoy him being a rockstar! Exactly. This is happening all over Australia now, these nice facilities, which is great to see. It’s happening in regional areas, like Gosford and Geelong and those kinds of non-traditionally wealthy areas, where apartment buildings grow up. In Melbourne, there’s one on the Yarra’s edge; it’s a riverside project. And that’s going to be absolutely amazing. It’s a very tall building, with  lots and lots of apartments, so the costs are going to be shared. And that’s got a teppanyaki barbecue and games room and golf simulator. And as well, there’s a big trend now again… I mean, I think it’s coming around again, for apartment buildings to have a hotel somewhere in  the building, often in the lower levels. And that hotel has fabulous facilities and looks after them. The apartments actually sharing them and they only pay a small cost; the hotel pays most of the costs, because they’ve got lots of guests coming in and using the facilities. The apartment residents pay a lower cost and as long as the unit entitlements are worked out well…

Jimmy  26:37

Well, you can make them separate stratas. Because that was one of the problems with the place in the North Shore, a few years ago… It was a hotel and apartment complex and every time the hotel wants to do a refurb of the common areas in the hotel, they just put the bill onto the whole building. So all the people in the apartments, were paying for re -carpeting, re-wallpapering the hotel, which is just wrong and stupid, but they hadn’t thought it through, when they set up the strata scheme.

Sue  27:08

And there was another building where there was a hotel there and everybody bought apartments, because they thought they could use the facilities and then the hotel, I think, closed down… Closed all the facilities and converted them to apartments. So they suddenly had no facilities and yet, they’d bought in, because of that. So I think there can be a real downside. But now people will seem to be a lot more careful about how they create the infrastructure and how they…

Jimmy  27:34

Set up the schemes.

Sue  27:35

That’s right, you know, that’s great, because you can have a cocktail bar in a hotel and the residents can then start using it and they don’t have to pay for it… They can have a tab, I suppose; they can pay monthly.

Jimmy  27:49

You made me think about something I’ve been meaning to do something about… It’s a couple of young women on the North Shore (in two different areas), that have put together a kit to get to know your neighbours, for people who are moving into apartments. And it just makes me think; we’re talking about high-end apartments, with cinemas and music rooms and things… Most apartment blocks in our cities don’t even have a sniff of that. But one of the things that these two women discovered, was that people coming from overseas, move into apartments here and basically say “where’s the communal area?Where’s the area where everybody just hangs out?”

Sue  28:29

There’s nothing like that.

Jimmy  28:29

Remember, when friend of ours moved into a nice apartment, in a nice block? She didn’t realise that there was a lot of people in the building. This tends to happen everywhere; people cluster where their ethnic communities’ cluster. It could be Lebanese, it could be Greek, it could be Scottish people, it could be Vietnamese… Once you hear “this is a nice building,’ then the word goes around. So she moved into this building and there was a lot of nice Asian people there and she got on really well with them, except they tended to work late. They tended to come home, make a cup of tea, and then come out looking for the communal area and the communal communal area was the lift lobby outside her apartment. Just when she’s getting ready to go to sleep, they’re coming out, and they’re coming out with their cups of tea and they just want to have a chat. Which is great, but not if you’re on the other side of a thin door, trying to get to sleep. But you know, that’s something that, rather than putting in all these fantastic facilities  (which are great for people who can afford them); just a basic meeting place. A lot of new apartment blocks would really benefit from that. And my goodness, wouldn’t it help to build a sense of community? I’m going to try and track those women down and maybe, get them on the podcast sometime soon.

Sue  29:57

Absolutely.

Jimmy  29:58

And before we go, we have, with our very good friends Strata Choice, who are sponsors of the Flat Chat website, put out a survey. Basically, the survey is saying to people, do you have a strata manager? Are you happy with the strata manager? Do you wish you didn’t have a strata manager? Or do you not have a strata manager and wish that you had? Basically, getting a sense of how people feel about the relationship with strata managers generally and if you fill in the survey, you go into the drawer for 20 $50 gift cards, that you can spend anywhere.

Sue  30:37

It’s a nice idea, actually; strata companies wanting to know how people view them and how they can improve their services.

Jimmy  30:46

We make assumptions… We think that small buildings don’t need strata managers, until you discover that the smaller the building, the more likely conflicts are to be personal, and they need a referee sometimes. And then people assume that big buildings need a strata manager, but we know of fairly big buildings, where they do their own management, because they’ve got the skill-sets and the time to do it. This doesn’t apply to Melbourne. If you’ve got a building (I think it’s over 100 units), you’ve got to have a strata manager. But then, as our new best friend, Julie McLean says, to qualify to be a strata manager in Victoria, all you need is a chequebook, a mobile phone and a steady pulse.

Sue  31:32

And how do you complete the survey?

Jimmy  31:34

It’s on the website; just click on the thing.

Sue  31:37

flatchat.com.au?

Jimmy  31:37

Yes. Click on that and off you go. Good luck, on winning the gift cards.

Sue  31:50

Excellent.

Jimmy  31:51

Sue, thanks again. Once again, we’ve come to the desk, thinking “what are we going to talk about today,” and then we end up running over time? Oh, you’ve got a big week! Your new book comes out?

Sue  32:01

Yes, my new book comes out tomorrow. It’s a book about Mary Bligh, the daughter of Governor William Bligh, the notorious survivor of the Mutiny on the Bounty…

Jimmy  32:10

And the Rum Rebellion.

Sue  32:12

Yes, exactly. He had four rebellions against him. You have to think well, he must be to blame somewhere.

Jimmy  32:20

He’s the common factor.

Sue  32:21

The book is called That Bligh Girl and it’s available in all good bookshops. It’s had very good preliminary reviews. It’s had fantastic reviews.

Jimmy  32:41

And Tom Keneally even has a word on the front.

Sue  32:44

Tom Keneally loved the book; what a nice man.

Jimmy  32:46

He is. Thanks again, Sue. Good luck with the book and thanks for listening to the Flat Chat Wrap podcast. You’ll find links to the stories and other references on our website flatchat.com.au. And if you haven’t already done so, you can subscribe to this podcast completely free on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your favourite pod catcher. Just search for Flat Chat Wrap with a W, click on subscribe, and you’ll get this podcast every week without even trying. Thanks again. Talk to you again next week.