"WHY”
….perched on a six foot ladder at the top of a tree….
“AM”
....I strained to reach that last….
“I”
….orange mandarin….
“DOING”
……whilst balancing the twenty kilograms I was already carrying….
“THIS?!?”
The words I was screaming inside my head came out of my mouth in a torrent with a full swear words thrown in for good measure. I lost it. I got myself off the ladder, emptied my load into the bin, threw off my pouch, sat down with a thump, lit a cigarette and tried to calm down whilst wiping away tears of frustration.
So that’s how I almost ended up in a straight jacket, but I suppose I had better start at the beginning.
Ant and I had travelled in Tasmania for a month in an almost clapped out Ute, returned to Melbourne, had it worked on and hit the road to travel and fruit pick in South Australia. We managed to get one hour out of Melbourne before we came to a sudden halt at the side of the road to now find ourselves in a clapped out Ute! Ten painful days later, a couple of excruciating thousand dollars down, a new itinerary, we finally hit the road at last.
Now fruit picking is normally abundant here in Oz, yet in our quest to acquire ourselves some work we found that it was very quiet indeed. Our original plan to head to South Australia was a no go, nothing there at all, so we were informed that Queensland (a few thousand kilometres away) would really be our only chance. We had no other options available, we wanted to do our three months fruit picking to earn us another year in Oz and earn some money yet we had left it to the last minute. With four months left on our visa this was our final chance.
After three long days in the car we arrived in a fruit picking town with hope in our hearts, little did we know that that would be squashed slowly yet surely! The towns name is Mundubbera yet to everyone that stayed there, anyone thats ever been, it’s been renamed munduBORA! It is literally in the middle of nowhere, one street of your basic shops, two grotty pubs full of down and outs, the only thing of interest in the town is the Giant Mandarin, but I can tell you that certainly loses its appeal!
We met the owners Janette and Dave, told them our car sob story and miraculously we were given a weeks free stay, things seemed to be looking up! Why we got a week free I have no idea but I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. Janette also ran the ‘Harvest Trail’ (basically a fruit picking agency) and informed us that we would have to wait about a week for jobs to come in. We waited a week and well it quietly rolled into another. If it wasn’t for the mates that we made I would have gone insane, ironically they were all British, all there to extend there visas too. Sev and Gareth, Hayley and Jamie brightened my days with travelling stories and the campsite gossip. Sevs 30th birthday went down with a bang, a big bbq, followed by lots of cheap wine…..(known as goon here, probably cos you would have to be a goon to drink it!) The main contenders of the wine guzzling were Ant and Jamie, the next day people were checking their pulses to see if there crumbled sprawled bodies lying in the shade with a bucket on standby were actually still alive!
Eventually after two weeks we were issued with our mandarin picking jobs, what a relief. We were lucky, 80% of the campsite were Korean and had been waiting a month sometimes two for a job, it was a bad system, we were favoured because we were English speakers and to be honest the farmers in that area seemed to me to be quite racist. I did feel guilty that I had jumped that queue.
The day of our induction came, we were taught how to put up a ladder (not your normal ones, on one side were the steps and on the other a spear to get it through all the branches), how to drive a tractor etc. When we started work we were given a pouch (like a baby sling), our secateurs and gloves and we were ready to go. Instructions were dolled out by our supervisor Chester, it was simple we were only to pick the mandarins with ‘orange bums’ (ok so not his exact words but you get the picture). What I must add is that looking at the Orchard it did look so peaceful, rows upon rows of mandarin trees, so Mills and Boon…The reality of it was 30oC+ heat, wearing long sleeves and trousers (protection form the spiky trees), climbing up and down a ladder, carrying a pouch of mandarin weighing up to 20kgs whilst trying to see through the stream of sweat…not idyllic in the least!
When my pouch was full I would empty it into a huge bin, of which it s capacity was half a tonne, yes HALF A TONNE! Every time I emptied my load it didn’t seem to make a dent in the space that was waiting to be filled. Ant and I were going like the clappers, yet it seemed to take forever. That first day I lost it, crying and shouting out of pure frustration, after NINE hours we had filled one bin, just one, between us. I felt exhausted and deflated.
The second day wasn’t as bad; I knew what was coming; however we got sent back to the start of our row to pick the ones we had missed. For the next couple of hours we revisited those trees in a trance searching for the orange bums….a bin and a half by the end of the day…puuffff..my bubble was bursting.
On the third day (don’t worry there aren’t many more!) Chester was on our backs telling us we had to go back down the row AGAIN…later he really put the knife in by telling us the wages we were going to get….seventy dollars per bin, that’s less than thirty five quid BETWEEN US FOR AN 8-10 hour day. Now you do the maths, does that seem fair? Where had the minimum wage gone? Chester asked if Ant was happy with that, well I will leave you to guess the answer….to which Chester told him, “Well bro there are plenty of people how would have your job”.
On the fourth day we spotted someone in our row, just a couple of days before he had told us that if you see someone in your row just tell them to *uck off. So in seeing an intruder Ant asked Chester why he was there. To which Chester replied with attitude, “I put him there, you wanna stop questioning me bro!” Ant was seething and had already started to stab the mandarins. I secretly hoped that Chester would come back and give us some more grief so Ant would let rip and we could walk but as it happened I didn’t need to wait for that to happen.
We sat down for a break and discussed our impending mandarin three-month sentence and decided to quit there and then. The decision wasn’t hard at all. I hated it, I mean HATED it. Right then and there I decided that this wasn’t worth a second years visa as every mandarin I picked wormed its way into my dream of Australia and I was in danger of hating the country. It all didn’t make sense to me, I wanted to stay, travel, spend my money here, and pay my taxes yet to do this I would have to take part in slave labour.
Not only were the wages ridiculous but also everyone at the campsite seemed to go insane and were only capable of talking about mandarins, it was like a massive brainwash had happened. I wasn’t afraid of the hard work, more the minimal wages and the fact that I felt I was really wasting three months of my life up a tree covered in mandarin juice. What was I going to get out of this?...apart from a free straight jacket. I couldn’t do it, WOULDN’T do it. I am pretty sure that prisoners get a better time of it. I find the whole thing insane, its exploitation. Deciding enough was enough we quit and what a wonderful freeing moment it was. FREE!
Two days later we left with cries of “you can’t go” and got back on the road, adventures were waiting.
So just remember when you buy your fruit and veg, who slaved away to pick that!
