Welcome to Waikerie

It wasn't just me that was broke. Matt Blood, Aristo and Hamish were also running a little low on cash, and we decided that we’d all go and fruit pick together. The only problem was that no one was looking for pickers! We’d heard that the picking season in the state of South Australia was about to begin so we started to look at flights. It was about $100 to fly on New Year’s Eve, and $300 to fly on any day the following week, so Matt, Aristo and I booked our flights and would be in Adelaide to see in the New Year.

Our next issue was trying to find something to do that night, and for that matter, somewhere to stay. Matt had a distant relative in Adelaide, so he could stay with her, and I had found a woman on Couch Surfing who could accommodate Aristo and me. After a long walk from the airport in 35 degree heat at eight in the morning, we arrived at Marion’s (the Couch Surfing host) house. On her profile, she described herself as a Buddhist hippy, which I think was a very accurate description. Her house was full of ornate Buddhist artefacts and decorations. The three of us stayed in Marion’s kitchen for a while chatting with her until Matt’s almost auntie (his mum’s cousin... but I’ll refer to her as Matt’s auntie from here on in) came to pick him up. In this time, Marion had managed to accuse Matt’s mum of abuse, tell us about her boycott on German Couch Surfers, and describe in great detail the things she’d learnt during the course of her anthropology degree.

When Matt’s auntie Jenny arrived and saw three of us there, she kindly offered to let us all stay with her. As much as it would have been an interesting experience to spend a few nights at Marion’s house, we thought it would be a good idea for the three of us to stick together, so we all went to stay with Jenny. Jenny had moved to Adelaide with her husband (Mark) and two kids (Sam and Joel) six years ago, but to my delight, she had managed to retain her wonderfully broad Lancashire accent. As well as agreeing to let us stay at her house, she also treated us like princes for the entire duration of our stay! Instead of finding a job, I kind of just wanted to stay there until my student loan came in, but I knew we couldn’t, and the searching continued, but not before we’d welcomed 2012 with open arms. Jenny and Mark had kindly let us crash their little New Year’s Eve garden party, but we’d all had so little sleep the night before that it soon became a case of “How far away is midnight, and how rude is it to go to bed straight after?” The sleepiness soon passed though once the party had kicked off and we’d had some food, and I managed to last until about 2.30 in the morning before I started dozing off mid conversation (a bad habit I seem to have when I’m tired and have been drinking...).

L to R: Joel, Jenny, Mark and Sam

     

The next day we went into the centre of Adelaide to try and find a job. It took us a while to find any hostels – since it was New Year’s Day, the streets were empty and the map we picked up wasn’t very detailed – but once we did, we found a job straight away! “Work all year around picking oranges, call John” so that is what we did. It turned out that he was just upstairs so we went to have a chat with him and essentially said that we could start whenever we wanted. We marched ourselves to the bus station and that time the following evening we found ourselves in Waikerie – Australia’s citrus capital.

Waikerie is a small town north east of Adelaide. There is a supermarket, a petrol station, a couple of banks, and not much else. We arrived at eight in the evening and after a little bit of a mix up, John came to pick us up and take us to Kathy’s house. Kathy is John’s boss, and is in charge of the orange picking operation, but we didn’t get to see her, and we were told to camp in a nearby field and come back the next day at sunrise. The three of us were all so excited to start our first day of work, and had high hopes of picking at least eight bins of oranges each per day (at $25 per bin) – but maybe not on our first day. We filled out the paper work and put down deposits on picking bags, but when we saw the bins we couldn’t believe our eyes. They were enormous. They were described as 400L bins (your run of the mill recycling bin), but they were probably three times bigger than this! Our hearts completely sank but we got on with our new job anyway.

It took two hours to fill our first bin between the three of us (it is supposed to take a maximum of one and half hours to fill a bin by yourself, and there were three of us), and there wasn’t even enough fruit on the trees to fill it properly without having to scavenge fruit that had been left over on trees that had already been picked. Eventually our supervisor came over and told us that we didn’t have to pick the half-done trees (annoyingly) and moved us to another block where the trees were much better.

A few more hours passed, and a few more bins got picked, by which point it was past lunch time and Kathy, the boss – a Filipino lady who’d taken a shine to us since I told her where my mum was born – came to check on us. Apparently we looked so exhausted that she offered to buy us lunch, and fifteen minutes later she came back with three big sandwiches that contained some form of hot meat and a huge bottle of coke for us. We would be eternally grateful. Even after this energy surge, it took us until 7pm (eleven hours of work) to fill six bins between us. The going wasn’t great, but at this stage we were still feeling positive and thinking “yeah we’ll get better, we’ll be earning hundreds anytime soon”

That night we moved into one of the supervisor’s houses. From the outside it looked quaint and possibly even nice with all sorts of different fruits growing everywhere (grapes, peaches, oranges, apples, and more), even though it looked a little bit shabby. The inside was not nice. The floors, walls, doors and windows were all dirty and broken in some way. Each room had about a thousand spider webs in it. The kitchen was crawling with ants, and God only knows what else was in there. We were living in squalor, but for $50 per week, we couldn’t really complain, and by that point, I could probably have slept anywhere.

The next two weeks were spent picking orange, after orange, after orange. Sure, we did get better (it would be hard not to get better than when we started). On some days we even picked in excess of $100 each over a relatively short period of time, but we still weren’t picking as fast as we wanted to, and this seemed to frustrate us to the point where we would wish for rain (when it rained, we didn’t have to work because the oranges bruise too easily when they’re wet) or we’d contemplate falling off a ladder on purpose and suing because they never made us sign a health and safety form.

Like I explained earlier, Waikerie is a small place, so there wasn’t much to do during our down time. We’d swim in the Murray River or go to the library to take advantage of the free Internet on the weekends (Tony didn’t use the Internet so obviously didn’t have it installed). After work every night, we’d sit in the lounge in front of one of Tony’s many DVDs, not really paying attention and falling asleep after such a long day of work.

During our time at the orange farm Hamish and Amanda both joined us and we worked as a mega-picking team, but not long after Hamish got there, he and Aristo decided that they’d had enough and were going back to Wollongong, and who can blame them? The back, neck and hand pains were mounting to the point where standing up was difficult and we had to make a load groaning noise to make any sort of movement. We just weren't earning enough to make it all worth the pain. A few days later, we’d had enough as well and were back in Adelaide before we knew it.