Melbourne

Larry and I caught a ride with Rosie Timmins on the 20th from the Gold Coast to Melbourne, where she is from. Google Maps says the trip was about 1700 some kilometers or a little over 1050 miles. With three drivers we did the 22-hour drive as smoothly and easily as could be done. Rosie's parents also very graciously opened their house up to us for as long as we might need, and it has been invaluable to have yet another base from which to determine our next moves.

Our next moves, however, are still unknown, even after being in Victoria for more than a week. Most of Australia writes off the Thursday through Monday of the Easter weekend. Tuesday was also taken off this year because Easter Monday fell on Anzac Day, the Australian Memorial Day. Thus, businesses have generally been closed until a couple days ago. We've looked into more farm labor jobs such as fruit and vegetable picking or packing along with warehouse and factory labor. The biggest problem is that most require a car to get to them, which we still don't have. We have a lot of emails and resumes floating around out there at the moment though, so hopefully something will surface.

The Timmins brought us along on a day trip to an old mining town called Walhalla on Monday with several other families. The hilly area and the town itself reminded me a lot of Virginia City. We had a barbeque to finish out the day. I enjoyed seeing parts of Victoria that I probably wouldn't have seen otherwise.

The Timmins live in the suburb of Croydon, northwest of central Melbourne. Larry and I have made the 45-minute train ride a few times to explore and get a feel for the city. Our immediate impressions brought our thoughts back to Seattle and San Francisco, and later of New York. Melbourne is a very hip, multicultural city, yet to me feels more welcoming than Brisbane. It has a tram system that runs throughout the central business district. Most of the main streets have sights typical to any large city, but narrow lanes and alleys are everywhere and are much more interesting. The whole city has a lot of character, and a large part of this charm seems to be in these tiny lanes.

Enough Strawberries

Things had been a little slow among the migrant-strawberry-planter community. The Sunday before last was our last full day, and since then we've only worked three mornings. When we left, by my reckoning the crew had planted about 810,000 runners. It's apparently been raining near Melbourne where the runner plants come from, so they haven't been able to get them out of the ground and up to the farms in the north. The farmers say it'll be full on whenever the plants get to them, but they had kinda said that the entire time. Life can get a little boring without any work to do and without a car to go anywhere, but we find ways to get by, such as watching lots of movies, playing cards, reading, or in my case, writing these silly blog posts.

I'd been apprehensive about it at first, but working bare-footed had been one of my favorite parts of this job. Normally, I am outside without shoes maybe five times a year, certainly no more than ten, and thus my feet have always been a bit on the tender side, never needing to be very tough because I wear boots a lot. They're quite tough now, at least by my standards, and I've developed an appreciation for going unshod. I even found my very light New Balance shoes to be a bit cumbersome after not wearing them for a few days.

With so much free time, Larry and I have gotten to know several of the other planters pretty well, and a few of them are characters. The French take a lot of ribbing, but are good natured about it. The one Italian, Antonio, could easily pass for a mafia man, but is actually an olive and citrus farmer, and just wants to drink wine and talk to girls. The Brits are an especially fun crowd. Whether in the field or around a card table, we amiably call each other 'Allies'.

The house we lived in didn't have any internet, but our landlord's parents, Greg and Cathy, did, and they lived just up the road. Larry and I would sit on their veranda and look out over their paddock where they kept four horses and a couple bulls. They both were extremely welcoming and hospitable to us. Greg often offered us cold Coronas, and the limes he put in were from his own trees.

The woman that hired us owns a strawberry farm, but it's so small that hiring a full crew to plant it wouldn't really make sense. This is the case with a handful of farms around Caboolture, so these farmers have one person hire a team, and the planters do their thing on all the farms as each get their shipments of runners. The woman that runs the show also arranges accommodation for the planters. Because she is in charge of just about every aspect of planting, Larry and I have taken to calling her the Strawberry Pimp.

In retrospect, my previous post may seem a little severe. The trip may take a few more hours than I would've liked, but there are worse places to be than Auckland. I've made more ridiculous air travel decisions before, so I already know I can endure. I've also hammered down the details for getting all the way to Montana, which is a relief.

Larry and I are currently back at the Ihles' in Brisbane. We would have finished out the planting season in another week or so, but we jumped on the opportunity to road trip to Melbourne with Rosie Timmons. The drive should take about twenty hours. We don't have anything lined up for when we get there, as per usual, but we have a place to stay for a couple days. Hopefully we can find work that doesn't strain our backs so much. I wouldn't mind finally finding some sessions either.

World's Worst Traveler

As is currently my top priority, I have kept myself occupied lately primarily with stress, mostly from over-thinking many things, under-thinking a few very important things, and planting strawberries.

I had started thinking about when I would be coming home more or less right after my ordeal with the carnival. I knew I would need to be around at least awhile longer to see some stuff and make a little money, but felt I needed to look into tickets well ahead of time to not have to pay $13,785 (plus extra for baggage) to get across the Pacific. I held off looking seriously until a few days into planting, and wound up buying one from Brisbane to San Francisco with Air New Zealand, with whom I had found a seemingly reasonable fare. Departure was for June 1st because I would like to attend Lauren Vogl and Eugene Burke's wedding on the 10th. About two days later, in the height of the day's back pain in the strawberry fields, I realized that maybe having to find yet another job, with no guarantee that it'd be any better than planting or carnying, wasn't exactly what I wanted. Maybe it wasn't worth it to wait around until June, and I should just finish up on the Sunny Coast, see whatever I could for a few weeks, then leave in early May.

I looked into changing or canceling the ticket however, and found this to not really be an option because of a steep cancellation surcharge and the very expected automated telephone maze that Air New Zealand makes customers go through if they haven't upgraded to their Super Flexi Gold First-Class Maxi Favorite-Customer-Ever status, which I had not, cause I'm 23 and a homeless bum. Several other discoveries made the ticket purchase into more and more of a mistake: I found a fare to Phoenix in early May for the same price as the one I had already bought, and then received an email from Qantas about even cheaper tickets. The very bitter cherry on top came when I looked at my itinerary and realized I had unwittingly bought a ticket with yet another long layover in Auckland, this time overnight. I don't really have words for how astonishingly, frighteningly angry I am with my travel agent. And somebody says I'm smart enough to be a mechanical engineer?

My only explanation for these shenanigans is that at some point in the past I had found a cheap ticket for some destination, waited on it, and missed out. Since then, I have apparently become the world's most compulsive airline customer, barely bothering to think through the situation lest I miss out on something or have to pay $45 extra to not sleep in an airport lobby. The last couple months are seeming to be defined more by my blunders than anything else.

Sore Backs and Tidbits

First off, an update on the strawberries. We've put in several “days” so far, but this does not exactly mean full eight-hour days. Planting usually starts at 6 or 6:30 am, and will go anywhere from mid-morning til late afternoon depending on how many plants are available. Each farm has a pile of “runner” plants, as the seed stock are called, when the crews of between twenty-five and thirty-five people show up; these piles are usually from 20,000 to 50,000 plants, but can be up to 80,000. The whole crew of close to forty is due to put in 120,000 tomorrow. Pay is per thousand runners planted by each group, and three people can typically plant between one and two thousand an hour, give or take. One morning about 35 people put in 23,000 in an hour.

The fields have rows covered in plastic and holes are punched in the plastic where the plants go. Groups of three or four take turns dropping plants along their row and planting. Planting requires a lot of time spent bent over, which gets old quickly. It gets warm, but nowhere near as oppressively hot as our days in Emerald. Even the fastest groups don't make a lot of money, but at least it pays the bills.

This really has turned out to be rather tough work, especially for the low pay. It isn't difficult to get it right, but bending over all day and rushing to keep up can be strenuous. Some of these kids work like they're training for the Strawberry Planting event in the Olympics.

As this sort of work is very seasonal, doesn't require much skill, and is hardly something Australians would suffer themselves to be caught doing, all the planters are backpackers. I noticed just how diverse the crews were when I listened to chatter in Japanese, French, German, I think Mandarin, Danish, Italian, and English with Irish, Northern Irish, American, Aussie (the bosses), and British accents. Quite multinational. Most everybody has at least a little bit of a sense of humor and is pretty friendly, and there's a bit of camaraderie among backpackers, something we haven't gotten to experience at our other jobs. They say that not many Americans plant strawberries, and Larry and I are the only ones in this bunch. I get a kick out of the fact that we wear our big cowboy hats to the strawberry fields, especially since we're in our shorts and bare feet. One of the bosses calls Larry “Tex”. All that should paint quite a mental picture, eh? Editor's Note: Though I forgot about it while writing this post, also add Larry and I singing 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot' to the mental imagery painted above. We felt it was a fitting song for hot afternoons spent doing menial, low-pay field work.

At this point in the trip, I thought it'd be appropriate to throw in a few scattered tidbits:

Australia is very expensive. Minimum wage may seem high, but the cost of living is roughly double what we would pay in Montana. Prices drop a bit as you get away from the big cities and anywhere near a coal mine, where money is a'plentiful. A pint could be had in Brisbane for $10. A beer out in the hinterlands is worth maybe $6, depending on happy hours. Oh how I long for thee, Molly Brown.

I've seen a few kangaroos, lots of kookaburras, bugs, and spiders, one deadly snake, a couple harmless snakes, geckos, and little lizards. I'm still looking for platypi, koalas, and echidnas. I hear there are penguins down near Melbourne in the winter, and I would like to see a Tasmanian Tiger.

Australian rules football is really just loosely contained mayhem. Cricket is without a doubt the most boring and confusing sport ever. I mean really, are the mattresses they strap to their legs necessary? Does a match need to last up to five days?

In general, grammar is terrible in Australia, and some might say that bad grammar is a pet peeve of mine. For example, nouns are often used as adjectives, and the term “drink-driving” is used instead of “drunk-driving”. That just doesn't sound right.

I've gotten back into drinking way too much tea. I'm probably up to three or four cups a day at least.

Apart from the Ihles, I met a girl from Tennessee in Newcastle and we overheard a girl in Tamworth who might have been American. Other than that, we've seen no Americans since we got here.

Despite this, neither Larry nor I have even a hint of an accent. I might use a local phrase once in a great while, but I can't even attempt an accent without sounding ridiculous.