Barely a week into 2014 we get a call from our contractor in the town of Jerilderie and he tells us he has some extra work so can we start the following week if we so desire. It's much earlier than planned but we take at the opportunity. The tomato factory we are going to doesn't open until February and we don't know what this extra job is, but it's only a few weeks and we need the money so we decide to give it a go.
Suddenly we find in our possession a scant few days left to enjoy Sydney, and they are fast disappearing. I spend a lot of the time walking around the city, visiting places I have intended on visiting for a while. Wandering around Darling Harbour, visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art, exploring parts of town that are hitherto unexplored. Darling Harbour is home to the National Maritime Museum and the waters around it are filled with boats from all eras of Australian history. Tall sailing ships, military vessels, even a submarine. And one boat that looked suspiciously like a Viking longship, what the Vikings were doing here I will never know. The walk home leads me through what must be one of the oldest residential areas I have seen here, it felt warm and familiar. Stone houses in tree lined streets. It could almost be London.
A sculpture I encountered on the way home one evening.
A painting that caught my eye.
Summer at the Opera House
Our final weekend arrives and we go to a free concert at the Domain in the Botanic Gardens, the same as the Danni Minogue Carol Conert before Chritmas. We arrive a few hours early with enough food to feed a small herd of buffalo and have a farewell picnic with the YHA crew. The main event tonight iis Shaka Khan, who had a couple of famous songs a long time ago that I can no longer recall. We're not that excited about it, but it is free. We don't know who the support act is, and I'm not expecting much, when lo and behold on comes Hot Dub Time Machine!
For those of you who don't know, Hot Dub Time Machine is a DJ from the UK who has a show where he plays one song for every year from 1960 (I think) until the present day. And he is amazing. He sold out every night he played in the Edinburgh Festival last year, I went along with some of my friends and it was one of the best nights of my life. Unfortunately, because he is just the support act, he doesn't have time to play his whole set, but it is still superb, and the crowd loves it. Everyone is up on their feet dancing, it appeals to all ages.
After Hot Dub we sit down and wonder how Shaka can ever hope to live up to that. As it turns out, she can't. To be honest, she barely even tries. The next couple of hours descend into a shambles. The music from the stage sounds like one never ending, relatively discordant, bad soul track, with various women ululating unintelligible syllables over the top. Any of these woman may or may not be Shaka Khan, they seem to come and go from the stage at some hidden musical cue indistinguishable to the crowd from the rest of the noise.
Suffice to say, we, along with the vast majority of the crowd, do not make it to the end. In fact as I wasn't there I can't say if anyone made it that far. I'm not even sure if it had an end. For all I know Shaka Khan (all thirty seven of her) is still strutting back and forth singing an endless song to an empty field.
After the concert (I say after, I mean during) we head out to our local Irish bar (where else?) and make up for all the fun that Shaka was not. On the way home we make friends with a hilarious group of Japanese guys in McDonalds, one of our number pretends to be Spanish to avoid talking to some guy, and have an impromptu street dance with three Greeks who pass us in the other direction. In the end the night more than surpasses my expectations.
Our last, very hungover, day dawns, and we are not to be beaten. We have plans. We are up early and on the train, with questionable supplies, for a trip to Bundeena and the Royal National Park, located about thirty kilometres out of Sydney. The train takes us to a ferry and we find ourselves gliding over expansive sapphire inlets rimmed by distant slopes of green. White houses nestle between the trees displaying flags from more nations than I care to name. The Japanese military flag stands out, a dramatic burst of red amongst the green and blue. The locals are out in their boats, swimming or surfing, or relaxing in glass-sided, ocean-view, rooftop swimming pools. It feels, and looks, like some sort of haven. A world of clear water and clear skies, where there is nothing to do but relax and enjoy. Personally, I would miss the rain.
The Royal National Park itself is the second oldest in the world behind Yellowstone in the US, and the first to use the term 'National Park'. From what I saw the majority of it is much the same as a lot of the Australian countryside, or 'bush' that I have seen: sandy soil, eucalypts and tough shrubs. The coast on the other hand is a wonder.
I walk through the woodland on my own and emerge at the top of a short drop. Before me I find a bright white beach descending into an ultramarine sea, backdropped by gleaming striated cliffs and a wide expanse of blue.
I eagerly climb down and make my way along the sand, past the naked men, and across rocks the likes of which I have rarely seen. I guess its a nudist beach, who knew? But back to the rocks. They are sculpted into great grey waves that tower augustly over me and the sea to my side; they are pockmarked and twisted with the relentlessly wearing toll of time; they are a thousand shades of orange, ochre and opal; they are vast and pale; they are swathes of clear white rolling from beneath black stained cliffs. It is the sort of place I could stay for time beyond count. Just give me a good book and enough cheese to last. Eventually, as always, it is time to leave. And the journey home takes me only to a large pile of things that should have been packed a long time ago.
Then are the inevitable goodbyes, a thing I am still not anaesthetised to. One of our replacements in the YHA comes to say her farewells (the faux Spanish girl I mentioned) and again I have that feeling that there is someone who I could be good friends with, if only I had the chance. But that is part and parcel of travelling, and I wouldn't change it.
The final sleep of Sydney starts too late and ends too soon and half past seven finds me on a train west with Laura, her friend, and her friend's friend. Here, bizarrely, when taking long distance train journeys the process is similar to boarding a plane. Your baggage is checked in and weighed and returned at journey's end. Laura and I, mainly Laura, were both overweight and had to unpack bundles of our possessions into hand luggage, which incidentally also has a weight limit, but one that they thankfully didn't enforce as we were far far over that too. The journey, six hours, passes quickly. For once the scenery changes little. The train takes us to the delightfully named Wagga Wagga, two hours by bus from Jerilderie.
From the window of the bus the land becomes gradually more rural as we head away from civilisation. People trickle off until we find ourselves alone on a coach surrounded by nothing but sun baked fields that reach into the far off heat haze that obscures the horizon. We wonder what we've let ourselves in for.
Our first week in Jerilderie is spent out in borgum fields, 'chipping'. Borgum is used as a cattle feed but we are working with the seed crop, harvested and sold to farmers as seed who will then grow it to feed their livestock. 'Chipping' is the process of walking up and down the countless rows with a hoe and taking out any unwanted borgum. Unwanted borgum consists mainly of plants that are noticeable taller than their counterparts along with males in female rows, females in male rows, and plants with oddly shaped seed heads.
I have many issues with this job.
Firstly this whole process of removing tall and oddly shaped plants is for no reason other than that when the farmers come to grow the crops in their own fields they want them to look 'neat'. As if anybody cares. So essentially we are being employed to uproot perfectly good crops lest the cows get mad that all their borgum stalks aren't the same length. What a waste of resources.
Secondly its a part of one of the least sustainable, most land intensive and most destructive industries on the planet. Now this is nothing to do with me being a vegetarian. I have no problem with meat or the eating of it, just the way the 'western' world does it. I have encountered many people who eat meat a lot of meat every day argue that it is 'natural', and that it is what we evolved for. This is wrong. Only about a third of the planet eats a heavily meat based diet, being the supposedly developed world, and this diet is an extremely modern thing. If the western diet were to spread to the rest of the world there would not be enough farmable land on the globe to produce our food. To illustrate my point, in the US the livestock used to feed the human population consumes seven times as much plant based matter as the entire human population itself. Think of the vast amount of habitat destruction, deforestation and loss of biodiversity that this results in. In fact, to quote the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations “the livestock sector emerges as one of the most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global”. There is nothing 'natural' about it.
There is plenty more I could say on this. And here I find I am helping them along. The things you have to do when your bank account looks like this.
Luckily it's only for a week and then I hurt my foot again and have to stop. But during that week I must admit I find some perks to the job. We get up at half past four each day and are all driven to work in what we dub the 'slave bus'. There is one great advantage to this.
Sunrise.
Every morning I watch from the bus as the sun lights the sky with the deep blues and brightening saffrons of false dawn, then we get into the fields and witness the sky pale to rose and powder blue as a blazing red disk slips from below the horizon. For a moment I forget the sterile environment that these fields truly are, and take in the endless beauty of standing in a sea of green and seeing the sun slowly reveal the world around me.
The day before we started work we asked our contractor when on out first day we would finish, and he replied 'that depends on how long you last'. Well, he had a point. The fourth member of our little group (who I forgot to mention are all Scottish, how did that happen?) only made it to half way though day two. The work is hard, and all the harder for heat that reaches the mid forties. Luckily she had an offer of a real job in Perth so left to do that instead. The rest of us ploughed on, and at times it was really quite enjoyable. As I mentioned, I managed to damage the soft tissue on the soles of my feet, probably my own fault for working in bare footed most of the time, and I had to stop. It wasn't a big issue as the job was just to tide us over until the tomato factory.
For our first week in Jerilderie we stay in a caravan park on the edge of the village, which I should point out is about three minutes walk from the centre of the village. The couple that own it are very nice, but that sort of nice that can be interfering if not overbearing. And I don't think they knew how to walk either, a problem I encounter a lot in Australia. If they ever saw us leaving they would insist on driving us wherever we were going whether we wanted it or not, despite the fact that we never wanted to go anywhere more than four minutes walk away. Once the three girls were on their way to the gym, which is next door to the caravan park, and the guy insisted that they didn't need to go that so drove them into town and dropped them off at the shop instead. Even worse, once I had locked our key in the cabin so I went to reception to get the spare. Instead of either giving it to me so I could unlock my door then return it, or walking the twenty meters to my door and unlocking it herself, the lady phoned her husband who was out, made him drive back to the caravan park, pick me up at reception and drive me to my cabin door where I got out, unlocked it and threw the key back into the car from where I stood. Minimal movement. Maximal decadence.
Jerilderie itself is, in a word, small. In a few words; small, remote, small. It was however held up by Ned Kelly on Sunday the 8th of February, 1879. They could not be more proud. You can't go anywhere without seeing some sort of reference to Ned Kelly Town. And they have all the related souvenirs. It's a but much.
All this said, I am having a great time here. A week in we move into the centre of town to a group of 'units' located behind the 'supermarket'. These are single rooms containing a couple of bunkbeds and a rudimentary kitchen and with a communal toilet / shower area, and they are inhabited by us and all our fellow farm workers. With the departure of our fourth member we need someone to fill the final space so we recruit a guy who has been living in the aircondition-less hotel across the road. He is from, wait for it, Dundee. Scots only in this unit. The rest of the population appears to be Irish so we couldn't branch too far away from home even if we want to.
The Irish, as could be expected, are mental. And fun. A couple of weekends in we get to celebrate Burn's Night, Laura's birthday and Australia day all at once. Rarely have I met a group of people so up for a party. The Australia Day fireworks of this tiny village impress me even more than the Sydney fireworks did at New Year. Expectation really does make such a huge difference. And being this close they truly fill the sky, which is a thing you will never get in Sydney, unless you watch from a boat before the bridge itself, but I'm not sure if that's allowed.
One day we attempt to leave to pick up a friend, Lauren, from Wagga Wagga. Bad, bad, bad idea. We get about forty kilometers then the can breaks down and goes on fire. We have no reception and manage to borrow a local's phone to call in for help. We spend a very odd hour around a tiny village while awaiting our rescue. He arrives with a truck and a rather flimsy chain. I then have a rather terrifying tow journey home and we decide never to try and leave Jerilderie again. We send some other friends with a car to Wagga Wagga to collect our stranded Lauren. Their tyre melts on the road.
Now I am in the tomato factory, working nights, and its really not that bad. Night shifts are perfect for saving money, not only do the pay the most but you least opportunity to spend it. And the pretty much the entire night shift team consists of my unit and the once next door, so I am in good company. The factory makes various things, tomato sauce, pizza sauce, pasta sauce, you get the idea. My role is to mix the non-tomato ingredients (powders) into the vats and oversee the bottling / canning machines that inevitably fail every few minutes. It's dull and repetitive but its the nightshift so none of the owners are in and the supervisor is one of us so we can chat and listen to music while we work. And when I'm allowed to listen to my music I will happily work away and never get bored, the nights pass quickly. It does mean that there will be no musical accompaniment to my writing today, I listen to too much for anything to stick out and have any meaning.
We work seven days a week here and only get time off when it rains (they have to stop the harvesters as they get bogged down easily). Apparently we get St Patrick's Day off as well but I think that's just be a rumour created by the Irish in the hope that if enough people believe it it will become true. I thought that this endless working day would leave me exhausted and craving some time off, but it hasn't. I think I'm quite good at adapting to situations. That or I really want the money. From a weeks work here I can save almost a thousand dollars. It's not that hard when there's nothing to spend it on.
So that is my life just now. Eat, sleep, work, repeat. The plan to is to save enough to fund my final month or two down the west coast (and hopefully to Uluru) and have some left for my return to the UK in July. There I will have a couple of months in Scotland before moving to London to undertake a PhD at Imperial College London. My subject is 'Large scale marine renewable systems; optimising the trade off between environmental impacts and power generation'. It's right up my street.
I know I will be exceedingly sad to leave Australia, but I am more excited than I can express at not only seeing my friends and family again but also at this next stage of my life. It is a thing I have long wanted to do, and I would never have expected to get the opportunity to do it somewhere such as Imperial, let alone with full funding.
Now I must head to work, and it is raining as I type this so perhaps tomorrow I'll get the day off. What an exciting prospect.
After Hot Dub we sit down and wonder how Shaka can ever hope to live up to that. As it turns out, she can't. To be honest, she barely even tries. The next couple of hours descend into a shambles. The music from the stage sounds like one never ending, relatively discordant, bad soul track, with various women ululating unintelligible syllables over the top. Any of these woman may or may not be Shaka Khan, they seem to come and go from the stage at some hidden musical cue indistinguishable to the crowd from the rest of the noise.
Suffice to say, we, along with the vast majority of the crowd, do not make it to the end. In fact as I wasn't there I can't say if anyone made it that far. I'm not even sure if it had an end. For all I know Shaka Khan (all thirty seven of her) is still strutting back and forth singing an endless song to an empty field.
After the concert (I say after, I mean during) we head out to our local Irish bar (where else?) and make up for all the fun that Shaka was not. On the way home we make friends with a hilarious group of Japanese guys in McDonalds, one of our number pretends to be Spanish to avoid talking to some guy, and have an impromptu street dance with three Greeks who pass us in the other direction. In the end the night more than surpasses my expectations.
People are standing up, this must be Hot Dub.
The Royal National Park itself is the second oldest in the world behind Yellowstone in the US, and the first to use the term 'National Park'. From what I saw the majority of it is much the same as a lot of the Australian countryside, or 'bush' that I have seen: sandy soil, eucalypts and tough shrubs. The coast on the other hand is a wonder.
I walk through the woodland on my own and emerge at the top of a short drop. Before me I find a bright white beach descending into an ultramarine sea, backdropped by gleaming striated cliffs and a wide expanse of blue.
I eagerly climb down and make my way along the sand, past the naked men, and across rocks the likes of which I have rarely seen. I guess its a nudist beach, who knew? But back to the rocks. They are sculpted into great grey waves that tower augustly over me and the sea to my side; they are pockmarked and twisted with the relentlessly wearing toll of time; they are a thousand shades of orange, ochre and opal; they are vast and pale; they are swathes of clear white rolling from beneath black stained cliffs. It is the sort of place I could stay for time beyond count. Just give me a good book and enough cheese to last. Eventually, as always, it is time to leave. And the journey home takes me only to a large pile of things that should have been packed a long time ago.
Then are the inevitable goodbyes, a thing I am still not anaesthetised to. One of our replacements in the YHA comes to say her farewells (the faux Spanish girl I mentioned) and again I have that feeling that there is someone who I could be good friends with, if only I had the chance. But that is part and parcel of travelling, and I wouldn't change it.
From the window of the bus the land becomes gradually more rural as we head away from civilisation. People trickle off until we find ourselves alone on a coach surrounded by nothing but sun baked fields that reach into the far off heat haze that obscures the horizon. We wonder what we've let ourselves in for.
I have many issues with this job.
Firstly this whole process of removing tall and oddly shaped plants is for no reason other than that when the farmers come to grow the crops in their own fields they want them to look 'neat'. As if anybody cares. So essentially we are being employed to uproot perfectly good crops lest the cows get mad that all their borgum stalks aren't the same length. What a waste of resources.
Secondly its a part of one of the least sustainable, most land intensive and most destructive industries on the planet. Now this is nothing to do with me being a vegetarian. I have no problem with meat or the eating of it, just the way the 'western' world does it. I have encountered many people who eat meat a lot of meat every day argue that it is 'natural', and that it is what we evolved for. This is wrong. Only about a third of the planet eats a heavily meat based diet, being the supposedly developed world, and this diet is an extremely modern thing. If the western diet were to spread to the rest of the world there would not be enough farmable land on the globe to produce our food. To illustrate my point, in the US the livestock used to feed the human population consumes seven times as much plant based matter as the entire human population itself. Think of the vast amount of habitat destruction, deforestation and loss of biodiversity that this results in. In fact, to quote the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations “the livestock sector emerges as one of the most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global”. There is nothing 'natural' about it.
There is plenty more I could say on this. And here I find I am helping them along. The things you have to do when your bank account looks like this.
Luckily it's only for a week and then I hurt my foot again and have to stop. But during that week I must admit I find some perks to the job. We get up at half past four each day and are all driven to work in what we dub the 'slave bus'. There is one great advantage to this.
Sunrise.
Every morning I watch from the bus as the sun lights the sky with the deep blues and brightening saffrons of false dawn, then we get into the fields and witness the sky pale to rose and powder blue as a blazing red disk slips from below the horizon. For a moment I forget the sterile environment that these fields truly are, and take in the endless beauty of standing in a sea of green and seeing the sun slowly reveal the world around me.
The day before we started work we asked our contractor when on out first day we would finish, and he replied 'that depends on how long you last'. Well, he had a point. The fourth member of our little group (who I forgot to mention are all Scottish, how did that happen?) only made it to half way though day two. The work is hard, and all the harder for heat that reaches the mid forties. Luckily she had an offer of a real job in Perth so left to do that instead. The rest of us ploughed on, and at times it was really quite enjoyable. As I mentioned, I managed to damage the soft tissue on the soles of my feet, probably my own fault for working in bare footed most of the time, and I had to stop. It wasn't a big issue as the job was just to tide us over until the tomato factory.
Oh yes, one day we got visited by a helicopter.
Isn't this weird?
Jerilderie itself is, in a word, small. In a few words; small, remote, small. It was however held up by Ned Kelly on Sunday the 8th of February, 1879. They could not be more proud. You can't go anywhere without seeing some sort of reference to Ned Kelly Town. And they have all the related souvenirs. It's a but much.
All this said, I am having a great time here. A week in we move into the centre of town to a group of 'units' located behind the 'supermarket'. These are single rooms containing a couple of bunkbeds and a rudimentary kitchen and with a communal toilet / shower area, and they are inhabited by us and all our fellow farm workers. With the departure of our fourth member we need someone to fill the final space so we recruit a guy who has been living in the aircondition-less hotel across the road. He is from, wait for it, Dundee. Scots only in this unit. The rest of the population appears to be Irish so we couldn't branch too far away from home even if we want to.
The Irish, as could be expected, are mental. And fun. A couple of weekends in we get to celebrate Burn's Night, Laura's birthday and Australia day all at once. Rarely have I met a group of people so up for a party. The Australia Day fireworks of this tiny village impress me even more than the Sydney fireworks did at New Year. Expectation really does make such a huge difference. And being this close they truly fill the sky, which is a thing you will never get in Sydney, unless you watch from a boat before the bridge itself, but I'm not sure if that's allowed.
The lake is mad made and contains nothing that is alive.
The B&B...
Of course they have a tank.
Just as many ways to die here as the rest of Australia.
First large spider.
Second large spider. Pint glass!
The lake can at least look nice.
The roaring town centre.
At least we found a pub.
Now I am in the tomato factory, working nights, and its really not that bad. Night shifts are perfect for saving money, not only do the pay the most but you least opportunity to spend it. And the pretty much the entire night shift team consists of my unit and the once next door, so I am in good company. The factory makes various things, tomato sauce, pizza sauce, pasta sauce, you get the idea. My role is to mix the non-tomato ingredients (powders) into the vats and oversee the bottling / canning machines that inevitably fail every few minutes. It's dull and repetitive but its the nightshift so none of the owners are in and the supervisor is one of us so we can chat and listen to music while we work. And when I'm allowed to listen to my music I will happily work away and never get bored, the nights pass quickly. It does mean that there will be no musical accompaniment to my writing today, I listen to too much for anything to stick out and have any meaning.
We work seven days a week here and only get time off when it rains (they have to stop the harvesters as they get bogged down easily). Apparently we get St Patrick's Day off as well but I think that's just be a rumour created by the Irish in the hope that if enough people believe it it will become true. I thought that this endless working day would leave me exhausted and craving some time off, but it hasn't. I think I'm quite good at adapting to situations. That or I really want the money. From a weeks work here I can save almost a thousand dollars. It's not that hard when there's nothing to spend it on.
Considering we're in Australia, and all the employees are Irish or Scottish, I wonder at the necessity of this.
So that is my life just now. Eat, sleep, work, repeat. The plan to is to save enough to fund my final month or two down the west coast (and hopefully to Uluru) and have some left for my return to the UK in July. There I will have a couple of months in Scotland before moving to London to undertake a PhD at Imperial College London. My subject is 'Large scale marine renewable systems; optimising the trade off between environmental impacts and power generation'. It's right up my street.
I know I will be exceedingly sad to leave Australia, but I am more excited than I can express at not only seeing my friends and family again but also at this next stage of my life. It is a thing I have long wanted to do, and I would never have expected to get the opportunity to do it somewhere such as Imperial, let alone with full funding.
Now I must head to work, and it is raining as I type this so perhaps tomorrow I'll get the day off. What an exciting prospect.
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