It's winter in Bowen. Apparently. Wearing just two articles of clothing is one too many in the 'winter' sun. I'm sun burnt already. And I worked nights in a tomato packing shed. Did I get burnt sleeping in my dorm bed? Or in the brief trips I had just enough time to make when not working, eating or sleeping.
One thing is for sure, I am not stupid enough to hang around until the summer here. Fuck that! It would be like living in a place similar to Hell, only hotter. Satan is the mayor. Rudd's lolly drink tax would still be in effect, forcing the damned to resort to binging on goon or 750ml bottles of the strong stuff instead.
August is one of the liveable winter months in the Barnacles backpacker nut house. The inmates are a motley bunch of pleasure seekers, hitting the farms hard core to pay for whatever their next thrill might be. Could be cheap piss. Could be sex in a room full of 11 strangers. Could be saving to go on a trip to Borneo, Vietnam, India, Tibet, Nepal and wherever else the rest of their savings might take them. Or all three if you hadn't already picked up that I was referring to myself. Irrespective of the labour governments pathetic tax on all pre mixed drinks, I have high enough standards not to drink anything less than Johnnie Walker (I'm currently enjoying a mid strength actually, as work awaits me in the small hours of the morning. I did buy a Wild Turkey 4-pack last night, largely to get the uber-desirable stubbie cooler that came with it. So desirable in fact that someone stole it off me 3 hours later!) There are also 11 people sharing my dorm with me, but I am not brave enough to engage in any public displays of the human mating ritual. A friend related to me his own tale of such an act and his resulting embarrassment has convinced me that doing likewise was inadvisable. I am definitely starting to formulate plans for a trip to the aforementioned countries though.
My great friend Matty and his lovely partner Aimee are saving for an Asian examination beyond even my wildest dreams. They start in March and my trip is starting to form around meeting up with them in countries of mutual interest. Another friend is taking in South America at the same time and that could be incorporated into my thinking as well. But first, I must earn the money to get there.
And how interesting that is proving to be. Queensland farms seem to be a breeding ground for people 'missing a few kangaroos in the top paddock'. The strawberry farm in Caboolture had a hierachy of catastrophes awaiting the right conditions, and Eat????s here in Bowen has a confirmed loose canon running the show. Rumours range from him putting a backpacker in hospital, to having broken the jaws of 4 of his workers to being topped with a story that he has charges pending for stabbing someone. Unconfirmed as yet, but his even-less-capable-of-rational-thought brother definitely did take to him with a metal pipe out in the tomato fields the other day.
Sound like a lit match thrown into a firecracker factory? Its tomatoes and not firecrackers in actual fact, but combine that short fused time bomb with frazzled workers doing twelve hour shifts with only three 10 minute breaks. Other than being illegal, the work is high intensity and often requires a degree of mental dexterity. Chief Nut Case did the rounds at 3am on the night of my fifth straight twelve hour shift. He ripped into anyone and everyone for not being as good as he is at every single task performed in the packing shed. I was taking 10 kilo boxes off a spinning table and stacking them in various corners of the factory. A lot of heavy lifting and a lot of walking without more than a few seconds between the arrival of each box. (My feet are the blister capital of my world, and my ankle has forced a codeine dependency on me again.) One of my co-workers had a few shreds torn off him even though all three table workers were responsible for a pallet leaning at a 0.0007 degree angle in excess of acceptable limits. He turned his venom on me and my delirium helped to take the pressure off with a disarming degree of sycophancy. A cheerful, if somewhat manic disposition won out again and we even ended up sharing a few jokes by the end of the night. Didn't alter the fact that he is an absolute pyscho who I'll never turn my back on. (My brown nose after that butt kissing display demonstrates how happy I am for him to turn his back to me though, hahahaha!) It also fails to change that fact that I have contacted the appropriate defenders of a workers rights to see just how legal his work practices are.
We've changed to day shift now. I had the good fortune of having a day off also, extending my break to 48 full hours. Exactly what I needed as it feels like my body has just done the gym work out of its life with Arnold Schwarznegger as my training partner. Second night there I wore all three layers of skin off six of my knuckles before the production line slowed down long enough for me to figure out how to put the lids on the boxes without injurying myself. The rest of that night was fun let me tell you.
The only night there so far that hasn't cost me years of my life was the time I got to drive the forklift. I had to wash out over 200 of the 450 litre tomato bins in that time as well though, so it wasn't like the job a council worker does maintaining a shovels vertical orientation. It was go-go-go from start to finish, but at least it wasn't the physical equivalent of running marathons on successive nights. Will I be able to hack this long enough to save enough for another overseas jaunt? Oh, the suspense! The only thing I know for sure is that I'll be well over it by the time I have to start cutting off my toenails again.
