The perks of being a farmer.

I realise it has been a long time since my last entry and for that I apologise. My life has been quite different in the last few weeks compared to when I last wrote. In a way I've done very little since my last entry and in a way I guess I've done a lot. A couple of major changes at least. At times I feel I don't have that much to write about just now, but I think I owe it to you, so here goes.

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 

A couple of days before we had to leave me and Laura take a trip into town to visit Stonehenge. Well, I say Stonehenge, really a life sized inflatable replica of Stonehenge titled 'Sacrilege'. It was created by an English artist called Jeremy Deller, winner of the Turner Prize in 2004, and is here for the Sydney festival. And unlike most pieces of art, you are allowed to jump on this one. I still would have enjoyed seeing it just for its own sake, but this is infinitely more fun. We spend a while bouncing in the sun and I manage to burn the soles of my feet on the inflatable grass. Its a hard life.

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.

People are standing up, this must be Hot Dub.

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.

Oh yes, one day we got visited by a helicopter. 

Isn't this weird? 

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.

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.

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.

 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.

Singing, Sydney and a surprising amount of Scotland.

On my first night back in Australia my new room-mates make me feel right at home. I get off the train from the airport and it is already dark. Catching glimpses of the Opera House as I go I make my way to the hostel and check in. Joy of joys, I arrive to discover that my bunk mate is from Aberdeen! Oh the pleasure of hearing a Scottish accent again, it is wonderful (upon re-reading I find this all sounds sarcastic, it it most certainly not). Instantly I find myself using words that I haven't been able to use in months because no-one understands them.
I am presented with an empty box of chocolates that they all bought for my arrival then proceeded to eat before I turned up. We have a rendition of 'O Flower of Scotland' from our beds then it is time to catch up on some long overdue sleep. In the morning I am woken up to find a freshly made cup of coffee awaiting me. I feel at home already.
The hostel is amazing. It floats over an archaeological dig, the rooms are arranged in strata around wide open atriums without ceiling or floor. Above the endless sky and below the excavated remains of 1820's cottages that used to reside here. A handful of thin metal pillars keeps the whole building raised above the crumbling remains below.
There are four of us working here for accommodation. We help out in the cafe, in the kitchen and at the barbecue. The cafe is my favourite by a long way. As it turns out I just love making coffee, real coffee that is. And my mum always wanted me to be trained as a barista.
My first week or so here pass in a blur. I spend a lot of time wandering around seeing the city, applying (unsuccessfully) for jobs and getting to know my room-mates. We take an evening walk down to the Opera House one day to find Jack Johnson is playing before its steps. We sit by the fence with all the fans that were too slow or too poor to get tickets. I'm not a fan of Jack Johnson but tonight his music fits the summer evening perfectly. White peaks soar above us and across the harbour the bridge hangs in the air over star studded waters.
We stand on a bench to try and get a better view and within seconds a security guard arrives and orders us down lest we injure ourselves. If I wasn't able to stand on a bench without injuring myself I doubt I would have made it to Australia. I wouldn't be surprised if you need permit for that anyway. Australia, particularly New South Wales is ridiculous for that sort of thing. You can't do anything without having completed the appropriate course, which will inevitably cost you money.
Overall I like Sydney, although it doesn't feel as big as I was expecting. I know it is huge but the centre doesn't feel to me like it belongs to a city of this size. Perhaps if I lived a bit further out of town I would feel differently. Anyway the area that I live in is the oldest, prettiest (and probably most expensive) part of town. Thankfully I'm not paying.
I have found more old buildings around here than I did in Melbourne, and I haven't explored it nearly as much. But I think I prefer the general atmosphere when walking around the streets of Melbourne than to here. Here there are less people skateboarding to work or to the shops. People seem to care a bit more, but it could just be the part of town I'm in.

Farewell New Zealand

Hello Sydney 

Christmas time in Australia is, to say the least, odd. Firstly I don't think they go as crazy for is as we do at home. There aren't Christmas lights everywhere for a start. Walking along even some of the main streets you can hardly tell what time of yer it is. Even on Christmas day there are still some stores open in town. And don't get me started on the pathetic attempt at decoration made by our hostel.
We do manage to do a lot of appropriately Christmassy activities though. First we attend a carol concert under the Sydney Harbour Bridge, views across to the Opera House included. This particular event does not put me in the Christmas spirit. The carols have all been altered and modernised, they even make them feel summery. They change the words and they change the tunes. They switch tunes around and they invent their own songs specifically for this concert. Also, Australia seems to under the impression that Greensleeves is a Christmas song. At one point they turn it into some sort of rock power-ballad and sing to it about the baby Jesus.
We leave before the last song to avoid the rush. As we are leaving we hear them announcing the final song; “it's a tune you'll all know though the lyrics are new” they warn us before the electric guitars start blasting out Auld Lang Syne.
Our next Christmas excursion is much more of a success. A carol concert in the botanic gardens. This time it feels like Christmas. Rows of lights, thousands of people waving (fake) candles in the air, even traditional carols! We get Danni Minogue, we get Father Christmas, we get fake snow (foam) drifting through the air to the sound of “White Christmas”. We even get a live feed of Kelly Clarkson singing for us straight from Las Vegas. A bit of Michael Buble and it would have been the perfect Christmas evening.
Shortly before the end it starts to rain and everybody freaks out. The Australians panic, they're running around frantically shoving leftover food into hampers, blankets over their heads. In a matter of minutes it seems that about half of the crowd have fled. A few people are still left around us, they all appear to be British.
Our final Christmas trip is to a light show on the side of the Catherdal. It is started off with a Carol Concert (yet again) from the Cathedral's wonderful choir. Then the face of the building is lit in a myriad of colours. We get the Christmas Story and we get huge artworks of Mary and child. It's all quite beautiful and I am impressed by the quality.
In place of the traditional Christmas Market here they have what they call the 'Village Bizarre' which is a collection of stalls selling handmade jewelry or artisan cupcakes interspersed with mystics, pop-up theaters, barbers (??) and yes, a silent disco. It is different and exciting, and the silent disco is just too much fun. And besides that the whole thing is beautiful.

On Christmas eve we inevitably end up in the pub. Or should I say in pubs. At one point we are in an Irish bar watching a man in drag coerce people into singing karaoke and two men in kilts approach me and burst into a rendition of 'O Flower of Scotland' (they had been informed of my nationality by a friend). I joyously join in and by the end of the first verse we have attracted all the Scottish people in the vicinity.

Having suitably prepared ourselves, we end up having a wonderful Christmas. In the morning all four of us are running the hostel's Christmas brunch of ham, spinach and egg rolls (champagne included). One of the receptionists has some sort of extreme problem with Christmas music and refuses to play any, eventually though we get the Love Actually soundtrack so I guess that'll do. The guests are all in a great mood and we have a few too many mimosas. It turns out to be really good fun.
Afterwards we open out presents in our room. We have all bought each other gifts. It doesn't matter that they're small or cheap or that any other year would probably fade into insignificance beside everything else. This year they make me feel luckier than I could have possibly imagined. None of us were really expecting anything. I know I wasn't. I also received cards from my Mum and a couple of wonderful friends back home so now I have a little Christmas display by my bed. Sometimes less really is more.
It rains all day. The only complete day of rain I have had in Australia in four months and it's Christmas Day. I secretly don't mind at all. It feels like home. That afternoon I try read my book on a sofa in the social area and promptly fall asleep. I really couldn't have wished for anything more.

The period between Christmas and New Year vanishes as it always does and I have no idea what happens. What does happen to all that time? Every year it just disappears. I think this year it mainly went on The Hobbit.
For New Year we are helping out at our hostel's roof party. It costs one hundred and eighty dollars and has been sold out since April. We get it for the price of helping to set up and take down. During the party we get the hostel's iPad to take photo's of ourselves and the guests and ourselves some more. We get the perfect view of the Harbour, boats adorned with lights float over the dark water, their glistening masts stretching both up and down. Between the odd free drink offered at the bar and whatever I have stashed in my room it manages to be quite the evening.
Apparently this is the first time in ten years that Sydney has had a fireworks display from the Opera House as well as the bridge. This is great for us as as our view stretches perfectly between the two. We get fireworks at ten past eight, half past eight, nine, half past ten and midnight. It's all about the midnight ones. And they are of course amazing. Seeing the Opera House lit from above by the deepest red or the brightest blue and then seeing the same display repeated into the distance down the harbour is an amazing sight. And the golden finale is simply spectacular.

I am glad I have seen it. It is one of the main things I wanted to see in Australia, Though I will say that to me the display was made by the location. If you were to simply take the fireworks themselves I wouldn't say they were the best I've ever seen (apart from perhaps the final minute). I may be prejudiced but as an overall display I would choose Edinburgh's festival fireworks for beauty, variety and artistry though certainly not for volume. As I said, I think these are made by the location though I don't say that as a bad thing, I don't think it would be possible for any display to outshine this location. Apart from in this photo:

Now it is 2014. A lot has happened to me in the last year, and I can only hope the same for the next one. The first day of the year bodes well. I have a picnic on a pier with good food and good friends then get an early night with more good Friends. The television show that is. Ross and Rachel kiss for the first time, it's all very nice.
In a couple of weeks me and Laura (the Aberdonian) are going to go farming for a few months. I'm quite excited about it although no doubt it will be hard work. But I am certainly looking forward to earning some money as currently I am beyond the end of mine.
It can be quite demoralising applying for jobs and not even hearing anything back for weeks on end. And it has made me miss home quite a lot, especially due to the time of year. Sometimes I just want to wake up and be in my bed in Linlithgow. But then I think about it and I know that that's not what I really want. There are still places that I want to see, that I have to see, before I could ever go home. I just need to wait till I can go farming and earn the money to do it. All in all I have had an amazing time over the last few weeks, and I know there are amazing times still to come.
I hope you all had as good a New Year as I did. To all my friends in Inversnaid, I know you will have. I cannot express how gutted I am to miss it, though obviously not gutted enough to miss the New Year that I did have. I will be there next year. And to everyone else, whatever you did, I hope you enjoyed it. I will no doubt see you at some point before the next one. In the meantime I will keep you updated. When you next hear from me I will probably be on a farm...

Happy New Year!