co pilot podcast 50 tapes

In the 1990s, Gabrielle Shank completed a pioneering journey across Australia on horseback, documenting her experiences on 50 microcassette tapes. The tapes provide valuable historical and geographic information about her trek along the Bicentennial National Trail. To extract and correlate this data, specialized equipment is needed to play and digitize the tapes. Through transcription and cross-referencing with historical guidebooks and maps, the project aims to map out the trail as it was in the '90s. Google Earth is used for verification, allowing for a virtual exploration of the landscapes described. The project also involves reaching out to key individuals for official records and archives for additional information. The tapes offer unique insights into trail experiences and navigation challenges, making them crucial for the correlation project. Somewhere in a collection right now, there are 50 microcassette tapes from the 1990s. And on them, a woman's voice describes river crossings, freezing nights, pack horses, and a journey across the entire length of Australia. The problem? Nobody can hear them yet. Today, we're getting into how you actually extract usable information from Gabrielle Shank's tapes, how you match that audio to real trail data and historical maps, and what modern tools can do to bridge a 30-year gap between a 1990s journey and today's landscape. By the end of this, you'll understand the full process, from pressing play on a dusty cassette all the way to pinning a location on Google Earth. My co-host has been deep in this research, so let's get straight into it. Walk me through what we're actually dealing with here. So the starting point is understanding what these tapes actually are. According to the search results, there are approximately 50 original dictaphone tapes recorded between 1994 and 1999. They document the journey of Gabrielle Shank along the Bicentennial National Trail, the BNT, from Cooktown all the way to Tasmania. And Gabrielle isn't just any trekker. The BNT officially recognizes her as one of the first people to complete the entire trail with horses, specifically for her 1994 to 1995 trek. Wait, one of the first with horses? That's not just historically interesting. That's record-breaking territory. Exactly. She's listed in what the BNT calls the 5000K Club, which is their official recognition for completing the full trail. So these tapes aren't just a personal diary. They're the primary source audio of a genuinely pioneering journey. That's what makes the Correlation Project so significant. Okay, so before we even get to matching anything to maps, there's a physical problem, right? These are micro-cassettes from the 90s. That's the very first hurdle, yeah. The search results are clear on this. The number one priority before any transcription or correlation can happen is sourcing a professional micro-cassette transcription player. The tapes are aging magnetic media, and you can't just plug them into a modern laptop. You need specialized equipment to safely play them back without damaging the recordings. The grant application to the Royal Australian Historical Society actually includes a specific budget line for that equipment. So the micro-cassette player is literally the key to the whole project. That's exactly how it's described in the research notes. The micro-cassette player is the key to unlocking all those memories from the 90s. And once you have that, you also need digital interface tools to transfer the audio from analog to digital without losing fidelity. So there's a whole technical setup before a single word gets transcribed. And we actually have a window into what these tapes sound like because one of them is already out there. Right, and this is fascinating. Cassette Tape 31, covering May 8th to June 7th, 1997, is available on audio.com. It was uploaded by Melanie Potter and Gabrielle Schenk. It runs one hour and 32 minutes. And when you listen to it or read the transcript, you get this incredibly vivid picture of what life on the trail was like. Gabrielle is talking about her horses, about meeting a farrier named Wayne who gave her spare horse shoes, about a family called the Bonds who let her use their shower and sleep in their caravan. That's such a human detail, a farrier showing up with spare shoes. And that's exactly the kind of detail that never makes it into an official guidebook. The BNT guidebooks tell you the route, the distances, the water points, but they don't tell you that on May 31st, 1997, a woman named Gabrielle was camped at a showground, it was getting cold, she'd just washed her saddle blankets in the shower, and a farrier came and sorted out her horse's shoes. That's oral history. That's irreplaceable. So how do you go from that kind of personal stream of consciousness recording to something you can actually match to a map? That's the core of the correlation process, and it works in layers. The first layer is transcription. You listen to the tape and write down everything. And I mean everything, because you don't know yet which details are going to be geographically useful. In tape 31, for example, Gabrielle mentions Teviot Brook, she mentions a creek called Cullendaw Creek, she mentions a tick boundary crossing, she mentions distances, 17 kilometres one day, 10 or 11 kilometres another, all of that is data. Oh, interesting. So the distances she mentions on the tape become waypoints. Exactly. And then you cross-reference those against the historical BNT guidebook editions that were active during that period. The research identifies Guidebook 8, which covered the E-board to Nowandock section, as particularly relevant. The BNT itself describes the trail as a living trail, where access details change constantly, which means the 1990s guidebooks are snapshots of a version of the trail that in some places no longer exists. So the tapes and the old guidebooks together give you a picture of the trail as it was, not as it is now. That's the key insight, yeah. And that's why the correlation matters so much. If you only use modern maps, you might be looking at a route that's been rerouted, or a property that's changed hands, or a water point that's dried up. But if you have Gabrielle on tape saying we crossed Cullendaw Creek and there was good water and lots of grass, and you can find that creek on a 1990s map, you've just pinned a real moment in time to a real location. And then Google Earth comes in as the third layer. Right. The research describes using Google Earth to build what's essentially a live verification layer. You take the landmarks Gabrielle mentions, a creek, a hut, a fire trail, a steep descent, and you search for them in Google Earth. The 3D terrain view lets you see the actual steepness of the country, the depth of the gorges, the ridgelines. And Street View, where it's available on fire trails, lets you virtually stand on the track and look around. That's kind of wild when you think about it. You're listening to a woman describe a river crossing from 1997, and then you can go look at that river crossing right now. It's genuinely a form of time travel. And the research specifically calls out two sections that are particularly useful for this. The Nowandock area, which is described as beautiful, quiet timber country with rolling hills that suddenly drop off into deep, challenging valleys. You can see exactly that on the 3D view. And the Kosciuszko High Country around Jarangobowbli Caves, which is described as deep, karst gorges, dramatic limestone bluffs, and open snowgum country where wild horse herds roam. And that's also Brumby Territory, which connects to another part of this project. Yeah, and that's a really interesting dimension. The heritage pack horse routes that Gabrielle was riding in the 90s intersect directly with wild horse country. So the geographic correlation isn't just about historical accuracy for the book. It also has relevance for understanding how those landscapes have been used by both domestic and wild horses over decades. Okay, so let's talk about the archive side of this, because you can't just rely on the tapes alone. You need the official records to cross-reference against. Absolutely. And the research identifies some very specific people who hold those records. Neil Ward, who has been a long-time chairman of the B&T board, is described as essentially the keeper of the records for trekker registrations. If Gabrielle's completion of the trail was officially logged, Neil Ward would have seen that registration. His email is ward.hawkley at bigpond.com. And there's also someone who handles the maps specifically. Mal Keeley, who is the Trail Updates Coordinator, he deals with the nitty-gritty of maps and route changes, so he's the person to ask about which 1990s guidebook editions correspond to which sections of the audio. And then there's Nick Jacomas, a former board chair who was heavily involved with the B&T Museum at Gatton. He's described as likely to have a personal interest in the 50 tapes from a heritage perspective. So you've got the trekker registration guy, the maps guy, and the heritage guy. That's a pretty solid triangle of contacts. And the research also points to the National Film and Sound Archive, the NFSA, as a potential source for news footage. The search results suggest that if there was any television coverage of Gabrielle completing the Tasmania leg in late 1999, it would most likely be in the NFSA collection, or possibly in ABC regional archives from Tasmania or Victoria. The recommended search window is December 1999 to January 2000. That's a really specific tip. Why that window? Because most people finishing the trail in Tasmania try to beat the end of the year, so news coverage tends to cluster around those two months. And if there is footage, it would be a follow-up to the 1994-1995 recognition, a story about Gabrielle completing the full journey, including the Tasmania leg. That kind of human interest story is exactly what regional ABC would have covered. Now, I want to go back to the tapes themselves for a second, because tape 31 is really detailed. There's a moment where Gabrielle is riding and she's talking about the trail markers being wrong, like a marker pointing through a gate that actually goes up a driveway for a kilometre before turning. Yes, and that's a perfect example of why these tapes are so valuable for the correlation project. On Thursday the 3rd of June, she records herself describing exactly this problem, a marker pointing straight across a fence with no gate, which made it confusing. She says she fixed some of the markers herself. Now, that's not just a personal anecdote. That's a documented record of a specific trail navigation issue at a specific point in time, which you can then try to locate on the historical guidebook maps. So the frustrations she's recording in real time become data points for the research. Exactly. And there's another moment in tape 31 that's really telling for the correlation process. She mentions stopping at a little box on the trail where there's a notebook and everyone writes down their names, who's gone through on the BNT. She says she read the whole thing. Now, if those notebooks still exist in any archives, they would be a cross-reference for who was on the trail at the same time as Gabrielle. Oh, that's a really interesting thread. Trail registers. And the BNT office would be the place to ask about those. Neal Ward specifically, given his role in trekker registration. If those registers were kept, they'd be a way to verify dates and locations independently of the tape. Let's talk about the photo side of this, because the topic is matching tapes to trail data and photos. Where do photos fit into the correlation process? Photos are actually a really powerful verification layer. In tape 31, there's a moment where Stefan, who was riding with Gabrielle at that point, drops his camera and has to ride back nearly 12 kilometers to find it. He ends up doing something like 43 to 50 kilometers in a day just because of that camera. The fact that he was taking photos throughout the journey means there's potentially a visual record that corresponds to specific tape recordings. So if you have a photo and you know roughly when it was taken, you can match it to the tape from that date. That's the idea. And the research notes mention that photos are one of the key things to correlate alongside maps. The handwritten notes in the project list specifically say photos and maps to correlate. So the workflow is tape gives you the date and the narrative, the guidebook gives you the route, Google Earth gives you the terrain verification, and photos give you the visual confirmation. It's like a four-way triangulation. That's a good way to put it. And the more layers you have, the more confident you can be about pinning a specific recording to a specific location. Like if Gabrielle said on the tape, we're at Teviot Brook, it's about 17 kilometers today, we stopped early, and you have a photo of a creek with a particular landscape, and the guidebook shows Teviot Brook at roughly that distance from the previous camp. Those three things together give you a very solid location fix. And the KML file approach for Google Earth, that's where you'd actually plot all of this out visually. Right. The research describes building a custom map in Google Earth using KML or KMZ files, which are just digital files containing map lines and pinned locations. As you extract landmarks from the tapes, campsites, water points, creek crossings, old fire trails, you translate those into geographic coordinates and build a custom 1990s trail map. The research even suggests color coding the pins. Blue for historical campsites and water points, green for original 1990s trail alignments, gold for heritage areas. That's actually a really elegant system. You end up with a visual map of the trail as Gabrielle experienced it. And that map would be genuinely unique. Because the BNT is a living trail, the research specifically uses that phrase. The 1990s route in some sections is different from the current route. Modern bypasses have shifted alignments, properties have changed, access points have moved. Gabrielle's tapes combined with the historical guidebooks are one of the only ways to reconstruct what the trail actually looked like in that era. So when you step back from all of this, here's what this really comes down to. The tapes are not just a personal record. They're a historical document of a trail that has changed. That's exactly it. And the correlation process is essentially the work of making that document legible. Right now, the information is locked in analog magnetic media that requires specialized equipment to access. Once you get through that first barrier, the microcassette player, you can start the transcription. And then the real work begins, matching what Gabrielle says to where she was, using every available layer of evidence. I want to ask about something that struck me in the tape transcript. There's a moment where Gabrielle is talking about the tick boundary crossing. She says they're in tick-free country now. That's a very specific geographic marker. It is, and it's a great example of how the tapes contain embedded geographic data that you might not immediately recognize as such. The tick boundary in Queensland and New South Wales is a real mapped line. If Gabrielle records herself crossing it on a specific date, and you know roughly where she was based on the distances she'd been covering, you can use that boundary as a cross-reference to narrow down her location on that day. And she even mentions the cost of the tick spraying, $6.6 per horse. She says it's getting expensive, over $50 total. That's the kind of detail that dates the recording precisely. Exactly. And she names the DPI officer who came out, Dave Doyle. That's a verifiable person. If Dave Doyle was a DPI officer in that region in 1997, that's another confirmation of location and date. These tapes are full of that kind of inadvertent documentation. It's almost like she was keeping a research log without knowing it. That's a really good way to frame it. She was recording for herself to process her experiences, to stay connected to something while she was out there alone or with a companion. But in doing that, she was also creating an incredibly detailed record of the trail, the people, the logistics, the landscape. The research notes describe the background sounds on the tapes, the wind, the sound of horse hooves, the strain in a voice, as carrying immediate historical and emotional weight. And that's where the expressive arts dimension of this project comes in, right? Because it's not just data extraction. There's something deeply human about listening to these recordings. The research frames it that way, yeah. Listening to those 1990s audio recordings is described as a profound sensory trigger. The idea is that expressive journaling, sketching a memory of a sandstone cliff face, pasting a fragment of an old guidebook map, letting words come out underneath, is actually a way of unlocking the subconscious memory that the tapes carry. So the correlation process isn't purely analytical. It's also creative. That's a really interesting tension. You've got this very systematic data-driven process of matching audio to maps. And at the same time, there's this deeply personal, almost artistic dimension to engaging with the recordings. And I think that tension is actually what makes the project compelling. Pure data extraction would give you a spreadsheet of locations and dates. But the research book that this project is aiming to produce, correlating the audio data with historical BNT guidebooks and maps, is something richer than that. It's a documented account of what it felt like to be on that trail in that era, grounded in verifiable geographic and historical evidence. Let me push back on something slightly. Is there a risk that the personal nature of the recordings makes the geographic data harder to extract? Like, Gabrielle is talking about her feelings, her relationships, her health, not just trail conditions. That's a fair challenge. And yeah, tape 31 is a good example. There are long stretches where she's processing a relationship, talking about allergies, describing a dream. That's not immediately useful for trail correlation. But the approach the research describes is essentially to transcribe everything and then tag the geographic data points. You don't throw away the personal content. It's part of the historical record. But you build a separate layer of location markers that you can then work with. So the transcription is the raw material, and then you do a second pass to extract the geographic data. Right. And the research suggests a logbook-style approach for this. Date, activity, and location. Business or research purpose specifying the chapter or tape number and associated costs or receipts. That same structure works for the correlation process. Date, location mentioned on tape, corresponding guidebook section, Google Earth verification status. It's a systematic way to work through 50 tapes without losing track of what you've confirmed and what's still uncertain. And the grant application to the Royal Australian Historical Society is what funds all of this. That's the plan. The RIHS Heritage Grants are specifically designed for projects like this. Oral history preservation, digitization of primary source materials, research that connects personal records to broader historical narratives. The research notes mention that the RIHS often likes to see that you're working with the custodians of the history. So having the BNT office's support, having those contacts with Neil Ward and Nick Jacomas, actually strengthens the grant application. So the outreach to the BNT isn't just about getting information. It's also about building credibility for the grant. Exactly. And the BNT itself might be interested in receiving copies of the digitized audio once the project is complete. The research notes suggest that organizations like the BNT love adding personal stories to their archives. So there's a potential for this to be a two-way relationship. The project gets access to historical records, and the BNT gets a unique primary source document for their own archive. That's a smart framing. You're not just asking for help. You're offering something in return. And that's actually how the best archival research works. You come in as a collaborator, not just a requester. The letters drafted to Neil Ward and Nick Jacomas are framed exactly that way. Here's what we have. Here's why it matters to the BNT's history. Here's what we're hoping you can help us verify. I want to come back to something you said earlier about the trail being a living trail, because that phrase really stuck with me. What does it mean practically for the correlation process? It means that the BNT you can walk or ride today is not the same BNT that Gabrielle was on in 1994 to 1999. Access details change constantly, properties change hands, gates get locked, new bypasses get established. The research notes specifically say that the 1990s tapes are valuable snapshots of how the trail used to be. So when you're doing the correlation, you have to be careful not to assume that the current guidebook sections match the 1990s route exactly. Which is why you need the historical guidebook editions, not just the current ones. Right. And the research identifies guidebook 8 as covering the Ybor to Nowendok section, which is one of the key areas. In the current BNT system, Nowendok to Kostuszko covers roughly sections 10, 11, and 12. But the numbering in the 1990s may have been different. That's exactly the kind of thing the BNT office can clarify, which is why the outreach to Malkeely, the trail updates coordinator, is so important. So you've got this whole ecosystem of sources, the tapes, the historical guidebooks, the BNT contacts, the NFSA, Google Earth, and the photos. How do you actually manage all of that without it becoming overwhelming? The research approach is to keep it simple and systematic. Start with what you have, the tapes, and work outward. Transcribe one tape, identify the geographic data points, check them against the guidebook, verify on Google Earth, flag anything that needs archival confirmation. Then move to the next tape. The research notes are very clear that it's better to go deep with a few tapes and really nail the correlation than to try to process all 50 at once and end up with shallow, unverified data. And the to-do list that comes out of all this research is actually pretty manageable when you break it down. It is. The research identifies four key tasks, send the BNT inquiry email to Neil Ward and Nick Jacomas, send the RAHS grant inquiry, source the microcassette player for transcription, and contact the National Film and Sound Archive for 1999 footage. Those four things, done in sequence, unlock the next phase of the project. And the microcassette player is still the first domino. Always. Because without it, everything else is theoretical. You can have the best correlation methodology in the world, you can have contacts at the BNT and the RAHS and the NFSA, but if you can't play the tapes, you've got nothing to work with. The physical equipment is the foundation of the entire project. There's something almost poetic about that, this massive historical research project, and it all hinges on a piece of hardware that most people haven't thought about since the 90s. And that's actually a broader issue with oral history preservation. Magnetic media degrades over time. The longer you wait, the more signal you lose. The research notes describe the tapes as fragile, aging magnetic media, and the transcription equipment needs to be professional-grade specifically to avoid damaging them during playback. Every year that passes without digitization is a year of potential data loss. That's a real stake-setting point. These tapes are not going to last forever. No. And that's part of what makes the grant application urgent. The RAHS Heritage Grants are specifically designed for preservation projects, and the argument here is straightforward. These 50 tapes represent a unique firsthand account of a record-breaking journey on one of Australia's most significant long-distance trails. Once the magnetic media degrades beyond recovery, that account is gone permanently. So when you step back from everything we've covered today, here's what this really comes down to. The process of extracting information from Gabrielle's tapes and matching it to trail data and photos is not one thing. It's a layered system. You've got the physical challenge of accessing the recordings, the analytical work of transcription and geographic tagging, the archival research to verify locations against historical guidebooks, the digital tools to visualize the route, and the human network of BNT contacts who hold the institutional memory. And what ties all of those layers together is the recognition that these tapes are primary source documents, not just personal diaries, not just interesting stories, but verifiable historical records of a specific journey at a specific time on a trail that has changed significantly since then. The correlation process is the work of making that historical record legible and usable for future researchers. And the real-world implication for anyone sitting on a collection of old recordings, whether it's cassette tapes, reel-to-reel, whatever, is that the window for preservation is not infinite. The equipment to play them back is getting harder to find, the media is degrading, and the people who can provide context for what's on them are getting older. That's the actionable insight, yeah. If you have analog recordings that document something historically significant, a journey, a community, a way of life, the time to start the preservation process is now, not later. Get the equipment, start the transcription, reach out to the institutions that can help you verify and archive what you find. The methodology that this project is using, tapes plus guidebooks plus Google Earth plus archival contacts, is actually a replicable framework for any oral history project. And if you happen to be sitting on 50 tapes of someone who was one of the first people to ride the entire Bicentennial National Trail with horses, well, you might want to move a little faster. The microcassette player really is the key. Everything else follows from that first step. We started this episode with 50 tapes that nobody can hear yet. By the end of this project, if the methodology holds, those tapes will be digitized, transcribed, matched to historical maps, verified against Google Earth terrain, and cross-tested.