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Mark: There is this big lake in the middle of Australia: Lake Eyre…and it is below sea level..
Craig: Right…
Mark: And normally the rivers in Australia…they are dry…but about once every…twice every hundred years it rains in that area…
Craig: Right…
Mark: And the rivers run…
Craig: Right…
Mark: And suddenly they are full of fish because the fish eggs are in the mud.
Craig: Right…
Mark: And after fifty or a hundred years they hatch and all the rivers are full of fish.
Craig: Right…
Mark: And all the rivers are running and these three guys – an artist, a biologist and a photographer – and they got a dinghy and they just went down this river, like…you know…like a thousand miles or one thousand five hundred miles…all the way down to Lake Eyre, and of course they had a film crew and they made a ABC documentary…
Craig: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark: But it was just showing how there are long cycles…you know, like it is a desert…and then every two hundred years the water comes and then there are all these flowers and all these fish…and then it all goes down to Lake Eyre which is below sea level and it is like the Dead Sea and it is salty and everything dies…
Craig: Aah…
Mark: ..And you walk on the beach and it is just dead fish…
Craig: Aaw!
Mark: The beach is made of dead fish.
Craig: Aaw…That is too bad…
Mark: It is kind of a strange cycle. Some people would say life has no meaning because you know everything is born and then it dies…just like that, but I think it is more complicated than that.
Craig: Sad story. (laughs)

Tags: cycle-of-life, Dead-Sea, fish, Lake-Eyre, nature, passive-present-tense, passive-voice, present-simple-tense, Real Conversations, river, would-conditional