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AJ Blythe: Welcome to The DownUnder Mystery Club.
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AJ Blythe: I’m AJ Blythe and joining me is fellow mystery author Ava Ness.
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AJ Blythe: Every week we dive into curious cases, cracking good reads and all things mystery.
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AJ Blythe: Grab a cuppa, settle in and let’s get sleuthing.
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AJ Blythe: Hi everyone, AJ here and I’m so glad to be sitting down once again with the wonderful Ava Ness.
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Ava Ness: Hello AJ.
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Ava Ness: I’m very happy to be here to chat to you again about all things mystery.
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AJ Blythe: In a moment, I’m going to outline the Australian mystery.
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AJ Blythe: I’ve done the research.
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Ava Ness: And I’m coming in blind.
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AJ Blythe: And after we’ve discussed the case, we’ll talk about the mystery novels the case brings to mind.
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AJ Blythe: Eva, I’m going to start this one with a question for you.
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AJ Blythe: Could you imagine driving down a completely isolated, unlit dirt highway in the dead of night, deep in the Australian outback?
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AJ Blythe: Think that the sky above is an ocean of stars and all around you is pitch black, silent desert.
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Ava Ness: Yes, I can imagine that.
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AJ Blythe: Have you ever been out in Western Queensland and done that?
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Ava Ness: I haven’t.
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Ava Ness: I have been out in rural South Australia.
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Ava Ness: So I think that’s a reasonable comparison.
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AJ Blythe: Absolutely.
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AJ Blythe: Well, I have two and on more on one occasion.
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AJ Blythe: And I’m disappointed to say I didn’t get to experience the mystery we’re talking about today.
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AJ Blythe: And I gather from what you’ve just said, you probably didn’t get to see it either because this one is based in Western Queensland.
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Ava Ness: I definitely don’t remember anything interesting about that experience.
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Ava Ness: Other than the, worry of perhaps hitting a kangaroo.
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AJ Blythe: Well, there’s always that worry, even on the lit streets of Canberra, there’s that worry.
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Ava Ness: Correct, correct.
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AJ Blythe: But some people who have done this report, they’ve spotted something in their rear view mirror, a strange glowing ball of light.
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AJ Blythe: It looks like a car headlight, but it’s hovering just above the ground.
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AJ Blythe: If you speed up, the light speeds up with you.
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AJ Blythe: If you slam on the brakes, it stops, hovering effortlessly right behind your vehicle.
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AJ Blythe: It starts changing color from a cold blue to a brilliant white to an eerie yellow.
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AJ Blythe: You push the accelerator to the floor to outrun it, but the light effortlessly glides alongside you, keeping perfect pace.
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AJ Blythe: And then, just when you think the panic can’t get anymore, it vanishes into thin air.
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Ava Ness: Oh, I’m very glad I haven’t experienced this from the sounds of what you’ve just said.
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AJ Blythe: Have you seen the light, dear listener?
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AJ Blythe: Do you think it’s legend, myth or real?
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AJ Blythe: Make sure you drop us a comment on the website.
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AJ Blythe: I give the website at the end of this episode.
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AJ Blythe: An outback town in western Queensland called Boulya is a place of long-standing accounts of eerie coloured orbs appearing after dark.
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AJ Blythe: a mysterious light phenomena that totally freaks out people who’ve seen it.
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AJ Blythe: In the Bulliashire Council region, the Min Min light remains an unsolved modern mystery.
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AJ Blythe: Witnesses have described the lights as floating, fast-moving balls of colour that glow in the night sky and follow travellers for long distances, leaving some feeling confused and frightened.
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AJ Blythe: For a couple of years, I worked in that exact area of Channel Country northeast of Bullia.
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AJ Blythe: I never witnessed the Min Min Lights, but I did hear accounts from locals, which makes today’s case a bit more personal for me.
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AJ Blythe: I’ll start by covering the history and the cultural legend behind these glowing anomalies, and then we’ll dive into first-hand accounts and the scientific reasoning behind trying to crack the case.
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AJ Blythe: The phenomenon actually gets its name from an old abandoned settlement called the Min Min Hotel.
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AJ Blythe: It used to stand on the boundary of two massive cattle stations, Warenda and Lucknow, about 100 kilometres east of Bulia.
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AJ Blythe: The pub itself burnt to the ground back in 1918, although some reports say 1924, leaving very little of the original small settlement behind.
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AJ Blythe: Legend has it that shortly after it burnt down, a stockman passed by the ruins in the middle of the night.
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AJ Blythe: He saw a strange light orb rise from the ashes, which chased him all the way to the nearest station, and he arrived completely terrified.
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AJ Blythe: And that was the first known encounter in current times of the Min Min Lights.
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AJ Blythe: The first documented Western sighting was in 1838 in a book called Six Months in South Australia, but European settlers weren’t the first to encounter these lights.
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AJ Blythe: Indigenous Australians have known about them for thousands of years, deeply embedding them into spiritual law.
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AJ Blythe: Elders often tell children never to follow the lights, warning they’re the spirits of ancestors or ancient entities guarding the land.
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AJ Blythe: According to local law, if you try to walk toward a Min Min light, it will deliberately retreat into the distance to lure you away, causing you to get hopelessly lost, disoriented and eventually perish in the unforgiving desert heat.
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Ava Ness: Oh my goodness.
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AJ Blythe: But what do these orbs actually look like when you come face to face with them?
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AJ Blythe: Well, they’ve been described as mostly white, but sometimes yellow, red, green, and even blue.
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AJ Blythe: They appear as floating, fast-moving, fuzzy-edged balls roughly the size of a watermelon, glowing and following people.
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AJ Blythe: It’s been reported that hardened outback men can be brought to tears by this thing because it really is quite alarming.
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AJ Blythe: And I’m surprised actually that you haven’t heard of this one, Ava.
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Ava Ness: No, I haven’t.
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AJ Blythe: I guess it’s our equivalent of America’s jack-o’-lantern, something trying to lure us away to perish in the desert.
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AJ Blythe: And obviously with something like this, and it’s been witnessed by so many people that it has some credence as an actual event.
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AJ Blythe: So it’s caught the attention of serious scientific minds who’ve tried to find a rational explanation for this paranormal claim.
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AJ Blythe: And the most prominent is from an Australian neuroscientist, Professor Jack Pettigrew from the University of Queensland.
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AJ Blythe: And he actually travelled out to the channel country to study the phenomenon firsthand.
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AJ Blythe: And he did actually witness the Min Min lights when he was out there, which I’m a little jealous of because I didn’t get to see them.
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AJ Blythe: When he first encountered them himself, he actually thought maybe it was the planet Venus in the sky, but it didn’t set.
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AJ Blythe: It went all the way down to the horizon and then just sat there for an extended period of time.
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AJ Blythe: On another occasion, he was driving with colleagues and they spotted what they thought was the reflective eyeshine of a cat about 50 metres in front of their vehicle.
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AJ Blythe: But when they stopped and turned out the headlights, the glow was still there, bobbing around as if it had a life of its own.
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AJ Blythe: Apparently, word is they had a massive argument because no one could agree on what it was or how far away it was.
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AJ Blythe: To try to solve the debate, Pettigrew and his companions drove across the flat plains and used a car compass to track the light’s direction.
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AJ Blythe: They had to drive 5 kilometers before there was even a slight change in the compass direction.
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AJ Blythe: They ran the calculations and then realized the light source was actually over 300 kilometers away, meaning it was well over the horizon.
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AJ Blythe: They later confirmed a car had been driving straight towards them from that exact distance.
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AJ Blythe: He has published his findings, Jack Pettigrew, in the journal Clinical and Experimental Optometry, and claims the lights are actually an inverted mirage of distant light sources over the horizon.
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AJ Blythe: It’s an optical illusion known as a Feta Morgana.
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AJ Blythe: And I know, such a, you know, flash name.
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AJ Blythe: Such mirages are caused by a temperature inversion where cold, dense air gets trapped next to the ground underneath a layer of warmer air.
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AJ Blythe: And this specific shape of temperature inversion refracts light near the ground so perfectly, it travels in a curved path around the globe.
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AJ Blythe: It acts exactly like light traveling inside a fiber optic cable.
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AJ Blythe: So no matter how much you bend the fiber, the light still travels through it.
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AJ Blythe: So the light can be carried hundreds of kilometers by this trapped layer of air, preventing it from dispersing.
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AJ Blythe: The chance of seeing this
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AJ Blythe: is exceptionally high in the channel country, again very disappointed, because the landscape is perfectly flat with gentle hollows where cold air loves to get trapped, offering a completely clear view of the horizon.
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AJ Blythe: And for anyone who hasn’t been to the channel country, it’s called channel country because it is completely flat with lots and lots and lots of rivulets and channels and creeks and streams.
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AJ Blythe: When there is rain in northern parts of Queensland, the water runs inland to this channel country which takes
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AJ Blythe: it down to South Australia.
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AJ Blythe: And it’s very much a flash flooding situation.
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AJ Blythe: When I worked out there, I had to constantly be on alert on the horizon for any grey clouds because if it did rain, you didn’t have a lot of time sometimes to actually get safely through the channels and back into a slightly higher ground.
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AJ Blythe: To prove it, Pettigrew actually successfully created a minimum light.
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AJ Blythe: He chose a cool evening after a hot day with little wind.
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AJ Blythe: He drove 10 kilometres away over a slight rise into a watercourse, so below the normal line of sight.
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AJ Blythe: He had six independent observers watching from a distance as his car’s headlights floated vividly above the horizon.
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AJ Blythe: The next morning, a spectacular fatal Morgana of a distant mountain range rose up into the sky before sinking back down as the sun warmed the air, proving the atmospheric conditions were exactly right.
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AJ Blythe: And I have seen that effect when I was in channel country.
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AJ Blythe: I did see what looked like a mountain range that I was sure didn’t exist sort of disappear as the day went on.
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Ava Ness: My goodness.
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AJ Blythe: I know, and I didn’t realise.
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AJ Blythe: that Fader Morgana existed or what it was.
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AJ Blythe: I just thought it was really odd and that I wasn’t seeing things properly.
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Ava Ness: So it really is the definition of your eyes playing tricks on you.
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AJ Blythe: Oh, absolutely.
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AJ Blythe: But of course, despite the scientific explanation, Outback locals and seasoned travelers are fiercely unconvinced.
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AJ Blythe: While physics can explain how a distant car headlight or a campfire can bend over the horizon, skeptics note that the Midland Lights have been witnessed moving erratically against the wind, splitting into two separate glowing spheres, and appearing in eras long before cars or modern artificial lights even existed in the deep outback.
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Ava Ness: Sounds like aliens to me.
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AJ Blythe: Well, that is one of the theories.
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AJ Blythe: It is one of the theories is that, maybe they’re alien encounters.
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AJ Blythe: The Shire Council of Bouleur, of course, have turned this into a tourist.
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Ava Ness: Yeah, of course.
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AJ Blythe: Attraction, I guess, that, you know, come to Bouleur to see the Menin Lights.
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AJ Blythe: I mean, they’ve got a sign out there explaining it.
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AJ Blythe: There are tours that companies and so on that will take you to try to see the Menin Lights.
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AJ Blythe: But I worked out northeast of Bulia, not too far actually from one of the stations where the Min Min Hotel was.
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AJ Blythe: And it really was at night.
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AJ Blythe: It was the most spectacular sky.
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AJ Blythe: There were no lights.
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AJ Blythe: You know, we’d drive not far away from the accommodation and it was just
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AJ Blythe: black that swallowed you, but I never got to see the minimum lights per se, although it does seem like I did get to experience a possible answer in the mountains that did rise up and come back down.
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Ava Ness: Yeah, wow.
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AJ Blythe: I think that this is one of the fascinating, you know, mysteries of Australia that has no possible human explanation.
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Ava Ness: And there’s no sort of environmental
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Ava Ness: Possibility?
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Ava Ness: Like I’m thinking like phosphorus or something like that.
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AJ Blythe: No, because these moves, so people are travelling in their cars and there are…
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AJ Blythe: lots of people hitting the accelerator to get away from this glowing light.
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AJ Blythe: So moving quite a distance away.
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AJ Blythe: And if it was a phosphorescence, it would stay still.
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Ava Ness: And no fireflies or anything like that.
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AJ Blythe: No, And you know, for the example even of this scientist who was out there to research the men in lights, you know, with others in the car and they saw them and they turned the car lights off and these lights still glowed.
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AJ Blythe: And if it had been something like a phosphorescence, it does need another light source to help see the glow in a lot of times.
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AJ Blythe: It’s very interesting.
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AJ Blythe: I mean, and the fact that, Indigenous Australians also tell stories about these lights does indicate they were there for a very long time.
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AJ Blythe: And the first documented sighting in 1838 was definitely before there would have been much in the way of lighting in that part of Australia.
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Ava Ness: Well, that is a mystery.
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AJ Blythe: I know.
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AJ Blythe: I obviously having worked out there and I heard of the Min Min Lights before I went out there, it does have that kind of
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AJ Blythe: connection to me and I always wished I’d seen them, but at the same time, I don’t know how I would have reacted.
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AJ Blythe: It’s a very different experience going, oh, I’d love to see them to then I think being in the shoes of somebody who has seen them because the stories of people is that they were quite terrified.
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AJ Blythe: I said that I did work out there and I did get local accounts and I did talk with a station owner and for people who aren’t aware, Australian cattle and sheep stations are massive.
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AJ Blythe: They’re the size of whole small countries in some cases.
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AJ Blythe: And so they cover very, very big areas.
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AJ Blythe: And one of the station managers said that he had seen them in min lights when he’d been out repairing fences in the back part of his property and was traveling back at night.
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AJ Blythe: And so he wasn’t on a standard rd, he was on the tracks that just ran through the property so there was no one else around.
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AJ Blythe: He was on a road that perhaps somebody ahead of him might have been to get that curved effect of the fate of Morgana.
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AJ Blythe: And he said that they followed him for a while and then seemed to go off in a different direction.
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AJ Blythe: He was quite matter of fact about it.
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AJ Blythe: He didn’t seem at all perturbed.
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AJ Blythe: He was just like, this is what happens.
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AJ Blythe: And when I spoke to him, it had actually just happened like a day or two before, but he said that he wasn’t the only one on the cattle station.
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AJ Blythe: Actually, it was cattle and sheep.
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AJ Blythe: who had seen the lights and there were definitely other locals who reported seeing them as well.
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Ava Ness: I think there’s too many people that have seen them for it to be any doubt that it exists.
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Ava Ness: It’s just what it is.
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AJ Blythe: Yeah, I think that this is 100% something that happens.
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AJ Blythe: There’s no dispute anywhere by anybody that this is a made up or a
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AJ Blythe: confusion on somebody’s part.
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AJ Blythe: This is a definite event that happens in this part of Australia.
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AJ Blythe: The mystery is why?
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AJ Blythe: What is it?
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AJ Blythe: How does it happen?
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Ava Ness: Well, it sounds like they’ve already done a scientific study though and discovered what it is.
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Ava Ness: And then people are rejecting those findings that maybe it’s just a mystery people don’t want to have solved.
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AJ Blythe: Well, there is that too.
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AJ Blythe: I think some people like that element of
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AJ Blythe: of suspicion, but if they’re correct and they’re saying it does, the orbs split in two directions and they go up and down and come back together and those sorts of things, maybe there is something else that needs to be solved with the Min Min Lights and not just the fade of Morgana.
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Ava Ness: I think it’s kind of the opposite of truth is stranger than fiction.
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AJ Blythe: Yes.
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Ava Ness: In this case, the fiction is more interesting than perhaps than the truth.
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AJ Blythe: That’s right, that’s right.
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AJ Blythe: But I think for the moment, there’s probably not a lot more to say, so I think we can go case closed.
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Ava Ness: Indeed.
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AJ Blythe: When it comes to thinking of mystery novels that echo this case, apart from authors who’ve directly taken the legend of the Min Min Lights into their story, I think supernatural cosies certainly spring to mind.
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AJ Blythe: What do you think, Ava?
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Ava Ness: Yes, I think Mysterious Lights is a recurring
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Ava Ness: theme in lots and lots of mystery books.
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AJ Blythe: I think, for example, we come back to Amanda Emily, who we’ve mentioned before, the alien anomaly, which is a Charlie Rhodes mystery, has that same thing.
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AJ Blythe: It’s suspected to be aliens because of these mystery lights that appear and disappear and so on.
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AJ Blythe: And I think there’s a lot of supernatural.
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AJ Blythe: cozies that at least at some point have that as an element of their story.
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Ava Ness: Yes, they do.
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Ava Ness: And I was also thinking of the Mothman prophecies.
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AJ Blythe: Oh, I don’t know that one.
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Ava Ness: By John Kiel.
00:15:54.000 –> 00:15:59.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, it’s like reports of mysterious lights, UFOs, strange creatures.
00:15:59.000 –> 00:16:02.000
Ava Ness: It’s very creepy and atmospheric.
00:16:02.000 –> 00:16:03.000
AJ Blythe: Oh.
00:16:03.000 –> 00:16:05.000
Ava Ness: Yes, that’s one to look up.
00:16:05.000 –> 00:16:18.000
AJ Blythe: Another one that I thought of, which is another cozy, which takes a slightly different perspective of the lights is called Uneasy Spirits, which is #2 of Victorian San Francisco mystery series by M Louisa Locke.
00:16:18.000 –> 00:16:26.000
AJ Blythe: And it’s set in 1879 and the protagonist is a widow and she’s asked to investigate a fraudulent trance medium.
00:16:26.000 –> 00:16:35.000
AJ Blythe: So she looks into the intriguing world of 19th century spiritualism, with true believers and of course the naive dupes and the frauds who actually conducted.
00:16:35.000 –> 00:16:37.000
AJ Blythe: They have lights coming on and off.
00:16:37.000 –> 00:16:43.000
AJ Blythe: There’s tables that shake and so on, but these lights that come on and off just made me think of the minion lights and that.
00:16:43.000 –> 00:16:51.000
AJ Blythe: it’s giving a scare factor, I guess, to allow naive members of the public to be duped by the frauds.
00:16:51.000 –> 00:17:00.000
Ava Ness: Yes, I mean, it’s just, there’s just so much story potential in all of these kinds of mysteries.
00:17:00.000 –> 00:17:01.000
Ava Ness: We got a light.
00:17:01.000 –> 00:17:02.000
Ava Ness: I mean, it could come from anything.
00:17:02.000 –> 00:17:09.000
Ava Ness: It could be aliens, it could be monsters, it could be humans with sinister motives.
00:17:09.000 –> 00:17:11.000
Ava Ness: You know, there’s just
00:17:11.000 –> 00:17:17.000
Ava Ness: so many different possibilities and I think that’s why there’s so many stories that are based around it.
00:17:17.000 –> 00:17:18.000
AJ Blythe: Exactly.
00:17:18.000 –> 00:17:23.000
AJ Blythe: And in fact, there’s quite a few stories that use the Min Min lights directly in Australia.
00:17:23.000 –> 00:17:26.000
AJ Blythe: Quite a few of them tend to be a little bit more young adult.
00:17:26.000 –> 00:17:29.000
AJ Blythe: There’s one called the Min Min, for example.
00:17:29.000 –> 00:17:40.000
AJ Blythe: You know, they take that story of the Min Min lights and use it directly in terms of a young child might vanish and the thought is that they followed the Min Min lights into the bush and that sort of thing.
00:17:40.000 –> 00:17:41.000
AJ Blythe: But
00:17:41.000 –> 00:17:48.000
AJ Blythe: I found another one which I actually think is quite a good example, which is called The Lantern Men by Ellie Griffiths.
00:17:48.000 –> 00:17:53.000
AJ Blythe: And this is actually set in that misty, isolated marshlands of Norfolk in England.
00:17:53.000 –> 00:18:05.000
AJ Blythe: And the whole story is framed about a local legend, the Lantern Men, and their mysterious phantom lights that appear in the dark fens to trick, disorient, and lure innocent travelers off the safe path to drown in the mud.
00:18:05.000 –> 00:18:07.000
AJ Blythe: And it’s the 12th book in the Dr.
00:18:07.000 –> 00:18:09.000
AJ Blythe: Ruth Galloway mysteries.
00:18:09.000 –> 00:18:16.000
AJ Blythe: And I thought that was quite similar to what we’ve got in our indigenous Australians.
00:18:16.000 –> 00:18:21.000
AJ Blythe: The same thing, the warnings to their children don’t follow the lights because they’re trying to lure you away.
00:18:21.000 –> 00:18:24.000
AJ Blythe: And I think the same story comes back to the jack-o’-lanterns in America.
00:18:24.000 –> 00:18:31.000
AJ Blythe: It’s that lights that are trying to get you to follow them and something tragic will happen if you do so.
00:18:31.000 –> 00:18:36.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, And I think that, you know, I mentioned the Mothman prophecies before.
00:18:36.000 –> 00:18:39.000
Ava Ness: That was actually a non-fiction book, but there’s
00:18:39.000 –> 00:18:46.000
Ava Ness: a lot of fiction books that have been inspired by all the cases that he details in that book.
00:18:46.000 –> 00:18:47.000
AJ Blythe: Oh, okay.
00:18:47.000 –> 00:19:01.000
Ava Ness: And I think, when you start to look at some of the work, we talked about, we’ve talked about Stephen King before, strange lights and unexplained events in small towns is, cornerstone of a lot of his stories as well.
00:19:01.000 –> 00:19:06.000
Ava Ness: So you see it across a number of authors, and again,
00:19:06.000 –> 00:19:16.000
Ava Ness: some of them do cross into horror, but as you’ve mentioned, there’s definitely still some in the cozy mystery space as well, so that it can be scary as well as a bit of good fun.
00:19:16.000 –> 00:19:17.000
AJ Blythe: That’s right.
00:19:17.000 –> 00:19:28.000
AJ Blythe: And I think that I’ve also seen it cleverly done where, for example, smugglers use it to stop people coming to investigate what they’re doing and got a book in my head and I haven’t been able to think of the title of it.
00:19:28.000 –> 00:19:34.000
AJ Blythe: So if I do think of it, I will add it to the podcast notes for this episode.
00:19:34.000 –> 00:19:38.000
AJ Blythe: It was a smuggling ring and they were trying to keep people away.
00:19:38.000 –> 00:19:44.000
AJ Blythe: So they sort of started this myth or rumor of this, supernatural event.
00:19:44.000 –> 00:19:45.000
AJ Blythe: And then they had the lights.
00:19:45.000 –> 00:19:53.000
AJ Blythe: So people, when they saw the lights, would stay away and it let them carry out their, criminal actions without the fear of somebody stumbling across them.
00:19:53.000 –> 00:19:59.000
Ava Ness: Yes, I feel like that was probably also a recurring
00:19:59.000 –> 00:20:03.000
Ava Ness: theme in a lot of those famous 5 books that we both loved to read as children.
00:20:03.000 –> 00:20:05.000
AJ Blythe: Yeah, absolutely.
00:20:05.000 –> 00:20:06.000
AJ Blythe: Those as well.
00:20:06.000 –> 00:20:12.000
AJ Blythe: And I think that in some ways, when I did some research on this, it seems to be a theme that is a lot more common in.
00:20:12.000 –> 00:20:14.000
AJ Blythe: kids books than it is in adult books.
00:20:14.000 –> 00:20:15.000
Ava Ness: Yes.
00:20:15.000 –> 00:20:20.000
AJ Blythe: These lights, it’s a lot of the books that I found when I was looking into this tended to be kids books.
00:20:20.000 –> 00:20:27.000
AJ Blythe: And in fact, there’s a Hardy Boys book, again, that is also based on a very, very similar thing as well.
00:20:27.000 –> 00:20:30.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, I think it’s just, there’s lots of possibilities.
00:20:30.000 –> 00:20:33.000
Ava Ness: Like I said, it really does open up your imagination.
00:20:33.000 –> 00:20:40.000
Ava Ness: And as with the Min Min lights, you know, you do want to think about all the things
00:20:40.000 –> 00:20:42.000
Ava Ness: all the possibilities rather than perhaps the truth.
00:20:42.000 –> 00:20:48.000
Ava Ness: You don’t really want the scientific explanation for things like this.
00:20:48.000 –> 00:21:01.000
Ava Ness: It’s much more fun to speculate that it could be aliens or it could be supernatural beings or it could be somebody with sinister or other motives.
00:21:01.000 –> 00:21:07.000
Ava Ness: creating these lights artificially, it’s much more fun to think about it that way than for a scientific explanation.
00:21:07.000 –> 00:21:10.000
Ava Ness: And that’s why I think you see it in so many different books.
00:21:10.000 –> 00:21:20.000
AJ Blythe: And I think when we come back to the actual case, when people have been terrified and scared, they don’t want to admit that they were scared of some headlights that were just down the road a little bit further.
00:21:20.000 –> 00:21:25.000
AJ Blythe: I think they like to think that their fear was genuine and came from something that should genuinely be feared.
00:21:25.000 –> 00:21:32.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, and I think it sort of also buys into a lot of that Australian fiction of
00:21:32.000 –> 00:21:33.000
Ava Ness: Yeah.
00:21:33.000 –> 00:21:34.000
Ava Ness: Of the Outback, you know, this.
00:21:34.000 –> 00:21:35.000
Ava Ness: That’s right.
00:21:35.000 –> 00:21:36.000
Ava Ness: That’s right.
00:21:36.000 –> 00:21:41.000
Ava Ness: This huge expanse, you’re alone, you’re in the dark, anything’s possible.
00:21:41.000 –> 00:21:53.000
Ava Ness: And, you know, we do see that in lots, in lots of Australian fiction in particular, that the setting itself is part of the story, you know, in a way that you don’t see that perhaps in a lot of other books.
00:21:53.000 –> 00:21:54.000
Ava Ness: I guess.
00:21:54.000 –> 00:22:02.000
AJ Blythe: The Outback keeps its secrets tightly held and the true nature of the moon and lights may never be fully solved.
00:22:02.000 –> 00:22:05.000
AJ Blythe: But I think that we do have some scientific explanation as to why they happen.
00:22:05.000 –> 00:22:13.000
Ava Ness: Yeah, I was going to challenge that to say that perhaps it has been solved, but perhaps we don’t want it to be solved.
00:22:13.000 –> 00:22:17.000
AJ Blythe: And on that note, I think that will bring us to the end of this episode.
00:22:17.000 –> 00:22:22.000
AJ Blythe: So until next week, keep your tea warm, your book open, and your detective hat on.
00:22:22.000 –> 00:22:26.000
AJ Blythe: We’ll be back soon to untangle the curious case of Somerton men.
00:22:26.000 –> 00:22:27.000
AJ Blythe: See you then.
00:22:26.000 –> 00:22:28.000
Ava Ness: Bye.
00:22:28.000 –> 00:22:30.000
AJ Blythe: Thanks for joining The DownUnder Mystery Club.
00:22:30.000 –> 00:22:35.000
AJ Blythe: If you enjoyed the show, follow so you never miss an episode and share it with a fellow mystery lover.
00:22:35.000 –> 00:22:40.000
AJ Blythe: We enjoy hearing from you, so drop us a comment at ajblythe.com/podcast.
00:22:40.000 –> 00:22:43.000
AJ Blythe: Until next time, club adjourned.
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