Many people follow the harvest trail across Australia. To explain the Harvest trail, it is the seasonal picking of fruit and vegetables throughout Australia. This includes Apples in Tasmania, Pears in Victoria, Bananas in Tully and Mangos on Bowen. Each season has a specific time of the year they are harvested. People can look up the harvest trail and there are many job agencies that will put you through to where to go or the other way is to visit the farm. Not all places provide accommodation and it depends on the workplace. I was pretty lucky with the farm I worked for that they had accommodation available that I had booked for the next season. I was actually extremely lucky to have a room to myself as others had to share and I was actually far enough away from the noise that I actually was able to get plenty of sleep.
For two seasons I worked for Turnball’s farm in Mooroopna, Victoria picking pears and several times peaches. The work involved a bag on your front that you had to fill, and then empty into a bin that had your designated number on. The number on your bin is tallied at the end of the day and it is how you are paid. What you earn depends on how much you pick in a day as the price per bin can range from around $28 to $35. This depends on the farmer and how much he wants to charge and the quality of the fruit you are picking. The better the picker the faster they can pick and the more they can pick in an 8 hour day that starts around 7am.
This sort of work is very tough and not many people can last a whole day. I have seen people quit after the first day of work as it’s hard. From the constant climbing of ladders, the weight of the fruit in the bag on your shoulders and the heat of the day do wear a person out. For the first week of picking you are sore until you get used to it. The good thing is since you are out in the sun all day you are actually well protected as you are in the trees.
To explain the hierarchy there is you at the bottom then the ganger and probably the tractor driver and at the top is the farmer. The ganger’s job is to make sure he marks you off for when you have finished picking a bin and to tally everything at the end of the day, so you can be paid correctly at the end of the week. He also allocated you the trees you can pick. The tractor driver you had to be nice to or else he would not drop you off at the better parts of the orchard and I was always nice to the tractor driver. As long as you did the work everyone was happy and you would occasionally see the farmer who is checking on things. To keep yourself from going crazy and the fruit make you think of crazy things you have to distract yourself as it’s a long day. I found music to be a great distraction although you had to change the CD as MP3 players had really only just come on the market. I think several times people wanted to put me in a shallow grave as I was singing badly and off tune. Other distraction I made up were to freak people out and actually think I was nuts as I had seen several pears with bite marks and one had two perfect fang marks so I called them vampire pears. Another game would be to think of all the names of things with pear in them. There was a guy that the women were drooling over and when they called for them “Ganger” I would reply with “I want your love child” it was actually funny as one of the women looked at me and started saying no no, while others were laughing.
I would usually get up around 5 am even though we had to leave at 6.30am to get from the farm stay accommodation to where the orchard is that they wanted you to work. The reason I was up that early was so I could prepare my meals for the day as you don’t return to the farm until the end of the day. The other reason was I cooked a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs that made several people think I was actually English until I convinced them I wasn’t. What did annoy people was every morning they saw me and I would always greet them with “I’m Bright eyed and bushy tailed” I think several people wanted to hit me but they never. All they ever did was just laugh.
The people who pick fruit come in many varieties. There are the backpackers who are on work visas so they can work half a year and explore the country for the rest of the year or something similar. These people usually turn up with very little money on them and are enthusiastic workers. They come from all over the world, New Zealand, The UK, Europe several Asian countries like Japan or Korea. The rest, which are a select few actually are Australians. They come in two categories the gun pickers and the rest. I was amongst the rest although I earned everyone respect by never quitting and was constantly working every day. I would average around 3 bins for strip picking the pears or two bins a day for size picking. They loved me as I had the right size and my excuse was I was anal although I don’t think they would understand what aspergers is. The gun pickers would pick around 6 to 8 bins a day although there was word of one guy who picked 16 in one day. On my second season I was actually offered a position to pick apples as that was supposedly a honour but I couldn’t due to other commitments back home.
By the end of the day you were tired and the only place you could find your clothes would be hanging around my socks until I threw them into a washing machine. I used my picking bag as a basket and would hang my clothes up in my room as the lines would be taken. For a shower there was a shower block but as you don’t know what the others have on their feet you would wash wearing thongs on your feet. The shower water and your laundry water wasn’t the fresh stuff out of the tap but boar water so everything had a reddish tinge to it.
People would get together in their own groups at the end of the day out on the lawn with a couple of drinks or in the kitchen where everyone cooked their meals and ate them. Everyone got along especially when the nationalities mixed and it was common and very funny when a Japanese guy would ask another Japanese person where they come from and the answer as well. There were plenty of women there as well and everyone mixed and had a good time even if you couldn’t quite understand the language. I got along with all the people who were working on the farm although there were some characters.
On our arrival we were given a milk crate with our number on them and that goes in the fridge, which is for our food. When I cooked my meals I had several people ask what beetroot is and I would let them try it. The crates does not stop people from eating your food although one method that was used by one person actually caught the person as they had laced their own milk with Epson salts and the culprit ended up with the runs and could not work although he was later fired as he did the wrong thing.
As soon as a day off would come which was a Saturday as you picked for five and a half days. Work would go from Sunday to Friday being a half day. People would go into town to get supplies like food and alcohol. I had actually gotten a pushbike from a pawn shop and used that to get into Mooroopna and Shepparton. There was a bulk shop in Mooroopna called Ardmona, where you could buy food and other supplies in bulk although that was the same place where the cannery is, where all the fruit went to be processed. The other supply was alcohol; nearly everyone drank when it was Friday as that was also payday. Some people stayed at the pub after work and bought back the booze. I did drink although there were times I count remember what I had done that night although we all had good times. Some people all they lived on when they were picking was actually alcohol although they never lasted long as they could not work for too long. There was a little bit of pot being smoked as well although it was impossible not to be exposed to second hand smoke, it was just life on the farm.
The bane of every farmer would be the poacher. There were people who would turn up at someone else’s farm and recruit the people to come work for then while staying at the accommodation. The people targeted would usually be the asian backpackers for some reason. They seemed to know when the farmer didn’t know when they were on the farm although you could see them pull up in their utes.
The other bit of Picking I did was to pick coffee beans out back of the Tweed shire in Carool, which was in the hills with a view of the Gold Coast and the ocean. It was always a nice ride in the morning up the road although it took me around 40 mins to ride my scooter there. They paid you $2 a kilo and these were for the ripe beans as they didn’t want you to pick the green ones. At the end of the day I ended up picking around 30 kilos of beans which would be processed at a later date. I would turn up around 6.30am so I can start picking for two reasons, it was easier at that time of day and the sun was not in my eyes on the way up the hill. You could not usually see the school bus or in my case on several occasions a truck going down the hilly narrow road. The people that were picking with me usually had kids and were locals although the money only really covered them for their fuel although I made my money with around the first 5 kilos. Lunch breaks were usually nice as the coffee farm would let you sit at their place and they would make you a coffee from their beans. I ended up doing two picking seasons for them also although by the second season I was actually already working where I am currently.
Picking the coffee wasn’t always easy as you would be spiked by the tree branches and then there were the ants that lived in the trees that would bite you although they supposedly has a smell about them and when you disturbed them you would leave the tree alone. Our picking implements were actually the plastic wastepaper baskets you filled then would empty into your bin which was a crate. This would later be weighed and your tally would be totaled where it would be cashed in at the end of the week.
Picking anything is always governed by the weather. If it is wet you are not allowed to climb ladders as they are wet and slippery and that is against health and safety and that was the same with picking coffee. We were told not to turn up although I would call the coffee plantation as it could be bone dry there. For a week once while picking pears we couldn’t work although I went for an hour or so in the morning and the farmer or ganger would send you home. Seasonal work can be good but it doesn’t last for long periods and only for when the farmer has met his quota. It just depends on what happens.
Below are several links that can be used in planning a job in picking on the harvest trail
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