EHO Knows: Dead End Job w/ Ben Lees

Shane: [00:00:00] Welcome to the next episode of EHO Knows. Now, I’ve been told when you do professional speaking, never ever start with an apology, but this episode, it needs an apology up front.

I’m just gonna forewarn you, there are going to be bad puns. This is gonna be the punniest episode ever. we are interviewing someone who was stuck in a dead-end job, um, and putting it out there, it’s gonna be a grave mistake if you miss this episode. So, so forewarned, they’re the puns that are gonna be coming into this episode. Now, at the same time, ser-serious warning. Uh, we are gonna be talking about, uh, cemetery. We’re gonna be talking about dead people. Uh, and so yeah, if that’s, uh, an issue, we’re, yeah, just forewarning you. Um, we are also gonna be unfortunately laughing at some pretty bleak sort of stories, so it is black humor. Um, but then we are talking about environmental health. Um, [00:01:00] and it’s too serious not to take funny at times. Uh, so, so forewarned, this is going to be one weird, weird episode. Uh, and if you want to do a weird, weird episode, who else would you get but Ben Lees? Uh, so welcome Ben to EHO Knows.

Ben Lees: Thanks, Shane. Great to be on

Shane: Now, um, anyone who’s been to an environmental health conference has probably seen you, um, uh, talk from stage or, uh, be on a stand. Um, we’ll at the end let you do a plug for where you are at now. Uh, but you’re an environmental health officer. What’s, what’s your professional background here in Australia in 30 seconds?

Ben Lees: Yeah, thanks, Shane. Look, people might know me from, uh, I came over from, qualified from the UK. I worked at the City of Sydney. I was the, the public health lead there, um, and was the partnership manager at the Food Authority. And then also I did a lot of work with the, the Small Business [00:02:00] Commission and setting up Resilience New South Wales in the face of all those disasters and, um, you know, bushfires, COVID, and all the rest.

Um, yeah, that’s my environmental health background as people would know me

Shane: Yep. So, so a typical sort of career. But you actually started in a dead-end job, uh, a-and that’s

Ben Lees: love that. I love that. Yeah,

Shane: so, so, so what was the dead-end job?

Ben Lees: Yeah, look, I, I get to talk about the bit of my career that I never talk about, which is when I was a, a, um, junior environmental health officer, and in fact, a student environmental health officer. You’re not allowed to do a lot in the UK. There’s a licensing scheme, you know, accreditation scheme, so you’re not allowed to do a lot of food inspections.

You’re not allowed to do a lot of health and safety inspections and things. But one thing you are allowed to do is oversee the exhumation of dead bodies. Um, so,

Shane: I,

Ben Lees: that

Shane: the logic of

Ben Lees: was my first role.

Shane: you’re not gonna kill anyone. We’ll let you do this

Ben Lees: Yeah, don’t su- don’t judge someone making a sandwich, but digging up a body, [00:03:00] that’s fine. Get a student on that. And of course,

everyone at the council where I was a student was delighted to make me the exhumation officer. Like this was, this was a great day

Shane: So we think, you know, oh yeah, here’s newbie, we’ll make them go off and, yeah, get a long wait from Bunnings or whatever. In, in the UK they go, “You’re off to the cemetery.” Um, yeah. Okay. So, uh, s- to say which cemetery or are we gonna just avoid all the… We’ll, we’ll avoid the legalities. Okay. How big is this cemetery?

Ben Lees: Oh, look, uh, we were in the, the largest cemetery in the UK, so it’s, uh … I, I am allowed to say where it is, although, as you say, I’m gonna keep,

Shane: away

Ben Lees: I’m gonna, I’m gonna keep some, uh, details obviously vague because we’re talking about, um, real people. But, uh, this is Brookwood Cemetery. Uh, it’s near the town of Woking in the county of Surrey.

It’s kind of halfway between London and the South Coast. It’s absolutely beautiful rolling countryside. [00:04:00] Um, and they, this, uh, amazing graveyard, uh, was absolutely packed with bodies, and very often we were having to exhume them. Yeah

Shane: Uh, center of town, just in case that that joke goes past. Okay. Um, so how Choccas?

Ben Lees: Yeah, look, it, it was actually built for 6 million people is what they expected this cemetery to take in. Um, the size of it was absolutely whopping. So when they planned out this cemetery, um, it was… I, I looked up some equivalences. It was about the size of Sydney CBD. Um, it was, uh, it was bigger than the whole of Waverley Borough Council on the Eastern, uh, beaches, bigger than Northern Sydney Council area.

So this is, like, a pretty big cemetery

Shane: It’s just an inconceivable, yeah, number of people. Yep, okay. Uh, whereas now if developers went in, we’d have like 50 stories going [00:05:00] down.

Ben Lees: That’s right. Yeah, yeah, absolutely

Shane: okay. So, uh, we’re, we’re just gonna run through a whole bunch of weird stories. So story number one, pitch it.

Ben Lees: Well, I, I described it to you as the head on a pitchfork. Um, and basically, uh, my first ever exhumation that I ever oversaw with my manager standing beside me, and me with my training wheels, ended up with basically a worker waving a skull on a pitchfork. Um, I immediately was thinking, “This is not how…

Surely, what is an EHO doing here? What are we doing? This is just insane.” So, the– Just to give you the background of what an exhumation should be like, the day before an exhumation, you– they have the permits in place. There’s a list of conditions. One of them is that they can dig down four feet, right? So you’re still a few feet above the body.

Um, but they can do that with a backhoe or whatever the day before. On the [00:06:00] actual day, you go down at about four in the morning. W- Like in, of course, the UK, it’s freezing cold. You’re wearing all your big, long overcoats. You’re carrying a big lantern. You really feel like you’re in the 19th century, right?

And you go through into this wooded area

Shane: all you’re missing is the beak.

Ben Lees: missing the beat for sure. But, wade out into the cemetery. You- it’s a big wooded area. There’s a hole in the ground, and we came along, and what was really disturbing was the guy who’s supposed to be waiting for us is in the hole, and he’s digging away already.

He had actually been there an hour before we’d got there. He’d got there at 3:00 in the morning, uncovered the body, taken out bits of the broken-up old, um, you know, coffin, uncovered the skeleton, kinda like a, you know, he was trying to do, be an amateur archeologist. He’s there carefully s- and immediately we’re saying to him, “What are you…

What the hell are you doing? You know, you’re not allowed to uncover the body before we’re here. We’re supposed to [00:07:00] be documenting this. We need to confirm it’s the right guy, you know, confirm it’s the right grave.” So he got extremely angry. He went to hoist himself out of the grave, and this was a pretty big, uh, pretty big fella.

As he goes to get out of this dug grave, he pushed the sides, and they all collapsed in on this work that he’d spent an hour, like, doing. So he just got furious. He grabbed his pitchfork and started pitchforking out the body. “Well, that’s it,” you know. “It’s all coming out.” There’s bones flying everywhere.

We’re shouting at him to stop. Uh, he’s just continually, like, the shovel and the pitchfork, and we gathered all of the, uh, remains that he’d scattered about, you know, wondering how on Earth, what we’re gonna do about this situation. Uh, so we’re very reverently trying to, you know, control the scene. But we couldn’t find the skull anywhere.

Like, he’s looking. We’re looking. And of course, eventually he jumps back in the grave, holds up his pitchfork, and the skull is on the pitchfork. [00:08:00] And, “Here it is. I found the skull. I found the skull.” And, uh, oh, I was just mortified. Like, to this day, like, you, you’re just thinking, “Oh, God. Is, is there a spare grave around here, like, that I can jump into?

Like, this is just out of control, like, out of control.”

Shane: Mind you, the coroner’s job so much easier because the coroner’s going, “I can now see the cause of death. It’s the pitchfork.”

Ben Lees: The ritual. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s crazy. And, um, yeah, it, it really, um, I guess led me to wonder why EHOs were, what, what public health risk there was. This was like a, a man who’d been buried in the ’80s and was being exhumed in the early 2000s, right? So, uh, this was a skeleton, you know? The, the public health risk, you’re, you’re sort of thinking, “What’s, what’s the public health risk?

Why is there a, an EHO being allocated to come out here and supervise this?” And, um, yeah

Shane: case scenario is you could [00:09:00] choke on a bone. Like, yeah, it, it- there’s nothing organic. There’s no

Ben Lees: There’s nothing organic. No. No, that’s right.

Shane: but you had to be there. Um, and okay, so police aren’t there or like, so, so nowadays when we watch, I don’t know, CSI or whatever, uh, you’ve got, you know, police all around and, you know, CSI there and blah, blah, blah, it’s all contained. You’re saying that there literally was a guy with a, a shovel and a pitchfork

Ben Lees: Mm-hmm. And, and two people from council. Yeah.

Shane: a couple council workers.

Ben Lees: Yeah.

Shane: uh, so why are you there? Like-

Ben Lees: Yeah, look, I sort of love my history, so I went back to look at, like, why, why medical people were involved at all, and I came across this guy who basically ha- played a huge part. Uh, it’s this guy called, um, Dr. Walker. Uh, he was, uh … In the 1830s, he started to prowl around graveyards [00:10:00] because, uh, obviously just taking you back to that time, you’ve got London.

It’s this booming city. Everyone’s moving into the cities. It’s overcrowded. There’s disease running rampant. all jokes aside, child mortality out of control, disease mortality out of control, cholera, typhoid, uh, typhus, and, uh, and, you know, tens of thousands of people in a tiny area are dropping dead every week.

Um, the Victorians were very religious. They were very sentimental and spiritual and, um, you know, th- they wanted the dead to be nearby so they could go and visit, right? So you can imagine suddenly you’ve got these tiny little London graveyards being filled up over and over and over again. And of course, over time, as we’ve just discovered, you know, remains break down.

So over hundreds of years, every now and then they’ll uncover a plot, and they might find a bone, but they’ll just move it aside and bury the new person. But because death was happening at such a rate, this Dr. Walker [00:11:00] was going along and saying, “You’re walking through graveyards, and the ground is creaking.”

You c- you’re, like, walking on the coffins ’cause they’re just burying, stacking them up and stacking them up. Every now and then you’re going through the coffins, you know? There’s, um, you know-

Shane: about modern developers just going deep,

Ben Lees: Yeah.

Shane: what

Ben Lees: They’re way ahead of you, those Victorians, I tell you. And, you know, he was saying that their, uh, the smell, you know, they believed in those days, even though he was a doctor, they had the miasma theory. You were talking about the big beaks. You know, they, they thought the smell was causing the disease.

So he wrote… He actually, um, wrote under a pseudonym called The Graveyard Walker. He didn’t- he sort of wanted people to know he was Dr. Walker, but he, he sort of wanted to hide it too. So he wrote these lurid stories under the, the title Graveyard Walker about the, uh, these horrendous scenes with, you know, body parts sticking out of the ground, and the smell, and the…

You know, because he was a desperate health reformer, and he wanted to get people’s attention. Now, he definitely [00:12:00] did, so

Shane: So,

Ben Lees: was the first

Shane: to be

Ben Lees: time,

Shane: here’s this guy who’s exploiting horror stories get a message across

Ben Lees: Oh, that w- that would never happen, would it? You know? With, I know he published in the tabloids, you know? Like, so, uh, yeah, he was very good at getting his message across, and wrote a bestseller about the, the graveyards of London, you know

Shane: So all I need to do is change my name and come up with a really cool title. Um, yeah. Okay. So, but it is actually really interesting. Total tangent. Here’s a guy who saw a problem, uh, and he basically went to the, the masses, the, the tabloids with horror stories.

Ben Lees: Yeah

Shane: so I was talking to someone yesterday who said, “Yeah, the problem environmental health officers have is that, you know, what’s the legal ramifications for what you’re saying?

Like, you know, are you disclosing stuff? Are you blah, blah, blah, blah.” Uh, combined with, in 10 years’ time, what you say today will still be public, and will you be h-held accountable in 10 years’ [00:13:00] time for blah. And so EHOs are so afraid to say anything in public, even on LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever. Um, but here’s a guy who went, “Here’s a problem. I’m just gonna write horror stories about it. I’m gonna put them in the newspaper. People are gonna go…” Uh, and then, yeah, okay. So getting

Ben Lees: I, I love that. Yeah, that’s it

Shane: Grave Walker, um, yep, sorry. Yep. And so he’s out there publishing all these horror stories of, of stinky smells, foot

Ben Lees: Hmm.

Shane: coffins, blah, blah, blah.

Ben Lees: Yeah, that’s right. And that’s why essentially, uh, you know, f- fast-forwarding through, this is eventually why EHOs are out there trying to, you know, look after burial, lo- burials and exhumations. Um, which was in the 21st century, I guess, was a very different story to what the Victorians had thought about.

And just to give you an idea of like how different our [00:14:00] situation was from what they were imagining, you know, graveyards were like these sacred spaces when, when they were there, so people were generally very reverential. And one of the roles of the EHO, and this is set out in the 1857 Burial Act, Section 25, they gotta get a license.

It’s got like, you know, conditions, and some of the conditions are that the EHO’s over- gonna oversee the privacy of the, the scene, the, uh, the identification of the person, and the dignity of the dead, right? As well as the public health aspects. But in, in the early 2000s, that meant dealing with things like there was one, uh, exhumation we carried out where I’m standing over the grave and very focused.

I, I wanna make sure we, we don’t miss, uh, anything, you know? Um, and I’m looking over and making sure this guy’s doing his job, and make sure that guy’s doing the job. And I look beside me and there’s just a guy with like a flat cap and his dog, gone for a walk, ducked under the tape, and he’s just [00:15:00] standing there like, “Oh, look, look over there.

Like, look, let’s check out the grave.” So, you know, you as the EHO, suddenly, like it’s my duty to stop this guy. Luckily he, he sort of, uh, eventually wandered away but, um, you know, it’s, uh, I guess I was supposed to be the bouncer as well, try to keep interested bypassers away.

Shane: Yeah. But it is, you said, the, the changing standards. So yeah, 100 years ago, uh, you’re talking about, uh, burial after burial. So chances are, yeah, chance people know someone who’s nearby or whatever, combined with the fact that,

Ben Lees: Yeah.

Shane: it stinks, but these people are up there in their, their mourning clothes, and so you’re meant to be respectful, combined with decaying stuff all around or whatever.

Ben Lees: Yeah

Shane: would’ve been just, just weird. Um, I don’t think I’ve seen a TV show or movie that would even get close to giving it justice.

Ben Lees: No, that’s right. And, um, Dr. Walker [00:16:00] actually wrote about this se- um, there’s a suburb in London where there’s four churchyards, and it was a very popular suburb because you’re very close to all these churches. Uh, but of course, suddenly he was saying they were sort of hemmed in on all sides by stinky miasma.

You know, the whole suburb stunk of dead bodies because there were so many churches

Shane: yeah, so churches all want to go, “Oh yeah, this is sacred ground.”

Ben Lees: Mm.

Shane: yeah, whatever. And so it gets to the stage where you’re sitting in mass on Sunday, and that’s probably a really, really good argument for all the bells and smells is, uh there’s an interesting one. I should investigate that further.

But yeah, incense, you know.

Ben Lees: Yeah, that’s why I’m sure they fired up the incense for those, I tell you.

Shane: Let’s

Ben Lees: Yeah, it would’ve been horrendous.

Shane: in this week. Um,

Ben Lees: that’s it.

Shane: wind’s in the wrong direction. Um

Ben Lees: yeah, I should say that Brookwood Cemetery, the, the reason it was so huge was they wanted it to be different. So Parliament had written an act, uh, of Parliament to [00:17:00] establish Brookwood, and what they called it was the London Necropolis.

They identified, you know, London was the city of the living and Brookwood was gonna be the city of the dead. So they built a dedicated railway line all the way from London to Brookwood. Huge site. They could bury everyone where they wanted to be buried. Um, they actually had like a, an Anglican stop on the train and then a Catholic and other religion stop so that we didn’t accidentally, you know, get buried next to each other.

but obviously that meant there was a train line running right through the middle of the, the graveyard, which meant one, one time when we were doing an excavation, a train full of commuters pulled up and stopped. And it, it’s on a big embankment, like overlooking the cemetery, and they couldn’t have stopped at a worse spot.

They were literally overlooking us as the sun’s coming up. It, it was a waterlogged area, and it was actually quite hard to raise this coffin. It was breaking up, and it was really, uh … And [00:18:00] they just had like an eagle-eye view. And of course, this being the early 2000s, suddenly everyone had camera phones. So you look up and there’s 1,000 phones and faces, you know, poked out try- video recording and taking photos of you trying to

Shane: Yeah.

Ben Lees: act with dignity and respect.

Shane: So this isn’t gonna make sense to anyone who’s listening to the podcast, uh, but for everyone who’s watching the podcast, what’s really interesting is Ben just held up his camera in front of him pointing, you know, out of the window. Whereas now if it happened, everyone would be having the

Ben Lees: Oh my God, you’re so right. You are so right.

Shane: in it going, “Yay.”

Ben Lees: Hey. With the panicked looking EH Joe standing outside like, “Go away everyone, nothing to see here. Move on.” You know?

Shane: Um, and so getting back to what you said before, protect the dignity of the body. But, and, and you’ve suddenly gone from one man with his dog going, “Oh, look at this,” to a whole train load of people going,[00:19:00]

Ben Lees: Yeah

Shane: they– This is such a cool start to my day,” or, think I’m about to bring up breakfast.” Um,

Ben Lees: Yeah, I know, right?

Shane: yeah. And so, so there goes dignity. Um, but from your point of view, that’s not a stop. The train never stops there. So

Ben Lees: stops there. No, no signals, nothing. It must… I can’t remember the circumstances, but it was like a breakdown on the line and they just randomly stopped at this spot. We’d rated it as quite unlikely that anyone was gonna come along, and we had screens and all that sort of stuff, but it was just, it was just terrible timing and terrible location.

Like, it was just diabolical. What do you do?

Shane: Risk assessment, chances of train stopping right next to zero. Oh, we’re gonna have to reassess this one. Yes.

Ben Lees: Yeah, absolutely

Shane: but it’s also then, like Sydney’s got the same deal with the train stations. Uh, and in fact, we’ve still got the station at Central, is half the station, and then they stole the other half and [00:20:00] it’s in Canberra, I believe now. Um, so, so we had the same sort of deal. But it’s a bizarre concept that you’ve got enough dead bodies that it’s worth putting a train line in, um,

Ben Lees: Yeah.

Shane: to,

Ben Lees: do you know who helped make this happen? Was, um, Edwin Chadwick, who people, EHOs might know this name because he, he was the sort of founder of the Sanitary Inspectors Association and the sort of father of the public health movement. So he wrote this story of, uh, you know, sanitary conditions in towns, and he got the environmental health profession started.

Um, but his great passion before, just before he retired, was burial. So he was the one who was sort of writing reports.

Shane: at my job, so let’s at least put them away decently.

Ben Lees: I know. I know. That’s exactly right, because it was a real crisis. They called it the Cadaver Crisis. There were just too many bodies in, uh, in a modern industrial city, and they were just terrified that they were gonna be overrun, like [00:21:00] everyone was gonna die from the miasma that was leaching out of the graves, was just gonna kill everyone in London, you know?

Shane: And so that concept of, oh, let’s just throw a couple dead bodies on the back of the, um, the cart and have the horse and blah through. You go, “Okay, let’s, let’s clean that up, and let’s just put them on a train and let’s just get them straight out of town,” is,

Ben Lees: People could do that, but the Victorians really hated it because they, you know, they had a close connection with the dead. If, I mean, um, uh, you know, this is a horrible fact, but if you’d have eight kids, and two of them would live to adulthood if you’re lucky. You know what I mean? So, you know, you’re, you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna send your loved ones to a nondescript grave in Oxfordshire.

You know what I mean? You, you want them to be nearby, you know? They had a really close relationship with the dead, the Victorians. Uh, y- you guys, you know the sort of, the hooded skeleton Grim Reaper with the scythe that was like the medieval Black [00:22:00] Death figure, and then sort of disappeared from culture, but the Victorians brought it back because they felt so close to,

Shane: Okay

Ben Lees: Yeah

you know, similar thing. Like, they were just seeing whole neighborhoods, whole generations scythed down, you know?

Shane: Yes. so we’ve now got a man and his dog. We’ve got a train full of people. Uh, we’ve got a, um, a pitchfork. okay, next story. Holyhead

Ben Lees: Oh, the holy head. So, uh, I just wanted to point out one other use for this giant graveyard. So during the wars, world wars, they used it for soldiers, in particular soldiers who were far from home, right? So if you were an Allied serviceman or a prisoner of war, um, then you’d be buried at Brookwood because, uh, Brookwood’s in this sort of military triangle where there’s a lot of military bases nearby, so it was very handy, and it’s a big space and all that.

So there’s some really beautiful, um, uh, really sort of beautiful areas for soldiers and [00:23:00] graveyards and all this sort of stuff. But those soldiers, often there’s a pressure for them to be repatriated by the families and others. They don’t want them to be buried in England forever. They want them back home.

Uh, and of course, it’s very … I felt very honored to be part of several of those, as, you know, times when we would send, um, remains back home for these brave people of any nation that, you know, stood up to go to war. So, um,

Shane: ‘ Cause

Ben Lees: I-

Shane: talking about England who just took soldiers from everywhere. So you’re

Ben Lees: Yeah, that’s right.

Shane: empire, um

Ben Lees: I used to walk up and down these rows, and it’s exactly like, you know, the beginning of Saving Private Ryan and they show the D-Day beach, uh, cemeteries where it’s just rows and rows and rows of white marble graves, and that’s exactly what it’s like. And you walk up and down. There’s a guy from India, and there’s a guy from, uh, Australia, and there’s a guy from New Zealand and South Africa and, you know, uh, uh, all mixed together, all sort of in, in, uh, rows, like together.

[00:24:00] Um, and on this occasion, we found that these beautiful rows, which I’d stupidly assumed, right, Shane, you’re gonna back me on this, there’s a grave marker, the person’s gonna be buried there, right? That’s where they’re buried.

Shane: that’s a good place to

Ben Lees: That’s what you think. That, that’s what I’d guessed, right? So of course, um, we uncovered these graves, and we found out that they, they had, you know, gone with the architecture rather than the actual grave, so we’re trying to find the right bodies.

Shane: we’ll

Ben Lees: They weren’t,

Shane: the theme. Like it’s, it’s convenient

Ben Lees: you know… Yeah. Yeah, nice perpendicular facing north or whatever, but the people who buried the bodies didn’t get the memo, or they buried the bodies and then the people came along and said, “Oh, that’s, that doesn’t look very straight. I’m gonna put the rows here.” So, um, we were uncovering the graves, and at that time it wasn’t just the EHO and the gravedigger.

We had, um, foreign [00:25:00] office officials and military attachés, and in, in the distance, you know, the, the press and, you know, things like this. Um, and of course our-

Shane: gonna stuff up, you have to stuff up on scale.

Ben Lees: Exactly. So I did not put these bodies in the ground, but now it’s my responsibility to correctly identify the bodies and make sure that they get home safe.

And, you know, that’s a very … That’s really serious. So we were doing our absolute best to identify ranks and medals and, you know, find any kind of sign of who someone was because we thought, “Well, at the very least, we kind of know what order they’re buried in, so if we identify one, we can kind of work our way down.”

That’s what we did. We identified a, a gentleman and, uh, you know, the day was progressing. We’d actually had to close the graveyard. We couldn’t do it all at 4:00 in the morning. We had to do it all day. Um, but we got to a soldier’s remains, and this is where the holey head came in because it was super obvious that this guy had a big hole in his head, right?

[00:26:00] Which, uh, the military attaché immediately said, “This guy’s got shot. Show me his papers.” And so we pulled out who we thought it was, and of course, they died in a car accident. So the military attaché is shouting about war crimes. He’s phoning his embassy. We’re phoning the foreign office and getting the home office and everyone on the phone, you know?

Oh my God, this is going down. This is a disaster. Um, we’re getting ever increasingly urgent and senior phone calls from people, you know? And I’m sort of like, “I, I’m a student EHO. I’m doing my best,” you know?

Shane: Yeah, yeah

Ben Lees: We’re … The, um, the military attaché, I’m trying to keep it going because we wanna get this done, um, and saying to him, “Look, we’re gonna pack up these remains, and they’re going with you.

And you can figure out, you know, you guys can do the assessment later on. They [00:27:00] all r- you know, the remains will be in your custody, and you can do whatever assessments you want with them once we pass them over.” But he was to the point where he’s kind of grabbing his gun. He’s, like, got his hand on his pistol, and there’s me thinking, “I’m gonna get shot for this.

I’m gonna get shot over trying to execute my public health duties.”

Shane: Which war or when did the pers the soldier die?

Ben Lees: It was the second mobile, yeah

Shane: So it’s not like you’re going, “Okay, here’s a major cover-up.” The, the current prime minister happened to be the, the minister for whatever at the time, and he’s the one who had this person shot. So you’re talking about just history. But yeah,

Ben Lees: Mm. You

Shane: Yep.

Ben Lees: know, and there’s something really special about the kind of, um, the experience. It’s very solemn. There’s flags, and there’s nationalistic, and soldiers at attention, and you know, it’s, it really was… You know, it was, I actually, it was very tense all the way through. You know, there was not a moment you didn’t feel a bit [00:28:00] tense about the whole situation

Shane: How many bodies did you have to dig up before you went, “Oh, we’re pretty sure this is the one”? So

Ben Lees: no, we, uh, we identified the right patch for sure, yeah. But we, we definitely, uh, couldn’t identify the first few that we, we uncovered. We had to… I think it was the third or fourth that we sort of said, “Yeah, we definitely know who this one is.”

Shane: I could just imagine, you know, 10, 20 meters worth of, yeah, bang, bang, bang, bang. Ah, yep, okay.

Ben Lees: Oh.

Shane: this time. Hey, we’ve got a general.

Ben Lees: pressure, right? You wanna get it right. You don’t wanna put the wrong tag on the wrong person

Shane: Ah. So there you go. so in the end, how did they die?

Ben Lees: Well, officially car crash. So we’ll, you know, I don’t know, maybe, maybe took, took the bullet and recovered. I feel better now, you know? You never know.

Shane: Uh,

Ben Lees: Uh, so either that or we m- you know, the implication we got the wrong body is always one that you’re [00:29:00] terrified of. So, uh, all we can do is just, you know,

Shane: Yes.

Ben Lees: yeah, like, do, do your best and, um, yeah

Shane: I’ve got a friend who used to be an officer in the army, and so we asked about, you know, are there bad, leaders? and he goes, “Oh, the army’s just filled with bad leaders. Uh, but when you’re seeing action, you tend to have less bad leaders.” Uh, and we went, “Why is that?” And he goes, ” Friendly fire

Ben Lees: Oh my goodness

Shane: yeah, if you’ve got someone who’s just sending men to their death, then

Ben Lees: No

Shane: a stray bullet accidentally fixes the problem. So

Ben Lees: You never know. You never know. So that is the problem with it. Sometimes things are, are a mystery. You don’t always get the answer, you know?

Shane: Yeah.

Ben Lees: would,

Shane: But just putting it out there, you could have, like, had instead of CSI, we could have had

Ben Lees: EHO, exactly.

Shane: go,

Ben Lees: EHO uncovered, you know.[00:30:00]

Shane: and, and suddenly you’re solving crimes, and then next you’ll be running around with a gun and kicking in the doors, um, all because an EHO’s is, is never clearly defined. So,

Ben Lees: No, never, never. And, uh, I used to have actually the, the CEO of that council that I worked for always had a saying. She said, “If you’re in a crisis, get an EHO in the room because if you don’t have a clue how to deal with something, they, they always know. They’re, they’re adaptable. They always figure it out,” you know?

She’d, she’d… or any, any EHO who was walking past would get dragged into the CEO’s room if there was some crisis going down. Yeah

Shane: Yeah, there you go. Uh, and in fact, there’s been a couple episodes which are, exactly along those lines. So, um, Cameron Smith, yeah, uh, your entire city is underwater. You can run the emergency evacuation center, uh, because yeah, that’s a second-year subject for EHOs. Um, and so you just go, “Yep, you’re adaptable.[00:31:00]

Ben Lees: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yeah

Shane: yeah. So there you go. Uh, thank you, Ben

Ben Lees: Thanks, Shane