Not to give people ideas out there, but, yeah, that's hilarious.

No, it's interesting, though.

You said so.

So I decided about three months ago, I decided I had a stable sales executive job.

Things were going well.

And I just decided, you know what, if I don't do something now with this, I've been doing it part time forever.

I'm not going to I'm just not going to do it.

Thoughts, agree, disagree?

Tire fixer, pilot, and unofficial mayor of William Creek, Trevor Wright, says the outback and Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre looks the best he has ever seen it.

To go for a fly over the Simpson Desert and see these huge clay pan lakes out there with the sand dunes around them, and the bird life as well, it's just amazing.

It's just not what we're used to.

And when you live out here and you start to see green, and this is the first year I've a- actually had to use a lawnmower to cut the runway, we've never seen it before.

[laughs]

And for now, Mr. Wright says the lake is at about 80% capacity.

Well, it's taken 30-plus years [laughs] for me to see it like it is like this.

I think you'd wanna see it 25 years before you'd see this scale, and I mean that from the water point of view and also the bird life point of view and the animal point of view.

It's massive, isn't it, the whole thing? Just out of interest, because you watch all of this over all the years you've been, where do the birds go when it does dry up? I mean, they have this incredible sort of inbuilt GPS to come in following the rain, but where do they go when there's no water?

Right, yeah.

Let's start off when we get quite a few bird enthusiasts coming out here and they do some tracking and that.

What normally happens is there's one or two things that drags them out, especially the pelicans.

And that's ultrasound, where the birds go out and they can hear the thunderstorms or feel the thunderstorms.

And the other one is they'll send out an advanced party of a couple of birds, especially pelicans.

And then they'll report back to the main flocks.

But then you get this incredible high.

if it does, what happens?

All righty, yeah.

Um, that's a really good question.

One of the local pastoralists, Tony Williams, who, uh, owns Mount Barry Station, actually wrote a letter to the, uh, Roads Department in Adelaide saying, "You better be ready about August," because my calculation, given all this water that's coming into the lake, it'll increase in the North Lake, because that's where most of the water comes in from, from Q- well, all the water from Queensland and the Northern Territory.

It goes down to the bottom of the lake, and when the North Lake's to a certain level, it then goes down Gordie's Channel, which is about 10 to 12 kilometers long, and into Lake Eyre South.

When Lake Eyre South fills up, it just f- fills up and goes over the top of the Oodnadatta Track, the major road between Marree, William Creek, Oodnadatta, and then out to the Stuart Highway.

So it just blocks it off, and if you go back to '74, it just kept, um, pushing out and getting deeper because Lake Eyre/Cady Thunder is the fifth-largest silage lake in the world, which means that the water stays there and it's held there until it evaporates.

And '74 was the last time it overflowed, but how long then did it take to actually evaporate and for the roads to reopen?

if it does, what happens?

Oh, righty-o.

Um, that's a really good question.

One of the local pastoralists, Tony Williams, who, uh, owns Mount Barry Station, actually wrote a letter to the, uh, Roads Department in Adelaide saying, "You better be ready about August," because my calculation, given all this water that's coming into the lake, it'll increase in the North Lake, because that's where most of the water comes in from, from q- well, all the water from Queensland and the Northern Territory.

It goes down to the bottom of the lake, and when the North Lake's to a certain level, it then goes down Gordie's Channel, which is about 10 to 12 kilometers long, and into Lake Eyre South.

When Lake Eyre South fills up, it just f- fills up and goes over the top of the Oodnadatta Track, the major road between Marree, William Creek, Oodnadatta, and then out to the Stuart Highway.

So it just blocks it off.

But how long then did it take to actually evaporate and for the roads to reopen?

Yeah, what's her greatest achievement?

She won the Commonwealth Gold Medal in 1970 and she made the Olympic final in 72 and that was when the Eastern Blocs was taking drugs, believe it or not.

And in 1972, the time that she did was a British record for about 20-odd years, I think it was, something like that.

Now, did you hear that he almost didn't get there?

Yeah, his father had to mess around and arrange all the flights because originally they were flying from Auckland to New York on the Monday of last week, and the flights were cancelled because it was snowbound in New York, so there was no flights going.

So Ben, his father, who is his manager, if you like, did all the arranging, and they flew via San Francisco the next day and spent the night in San Francisco and then flew up to Boston...

And I think they arrived in Boston about 72 hours before his race.

So they had a bit of a job to get there.

And go on then, tell us your greatest achievement.

I've My first debut marathon was a world record for a person making his debut over the distance.

And the next marathon, I got a silver medal in the European Championships.

And I finished third in London in 1981.

I finished third in New York in 1978.

And I finished fifth in New York in 1980.

Now, did you hear that he almost didn't get there?

Yeah, his father had to mess around and arrange all the flights because originally they were flying from Auckland to New York on the Monday of last week and the flights was cancelled because it was snowbound in New York, so there was no flights going.