Fruitpicking in Red Cliffs!

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Fruit Picking in Australia..

So a lot of people will tell you there best time in Australia was fruit picking in the outback. Well I guess everyone’s experience is different! When Josie Claire and I arrived in “the outback” our little village called Redcliffs freaked us out completely...Coming from the HUGE city of Sydney and living in the famous Kings Cross the suburb that never sleeps everything open 24 hours a day...we were let’s say definitely shell shocked. Our new home for the next 3 months was two streets in total. One of which had more than 5-6 shops that were shut down. “Red cliffs” named after the red cliffs that line the murray river which borders the two states of Victoria & New South Wales. For those of you who know me this village reminds me size wise of my hometown Headford but worse! We are 20miles from the nearest “City” Which is smaller than Galway city centre buses run about 5 times a day and the last one out from Mildura to Red Cliffs is 5:30pm. :(

Our hostel wasn’t the most upmarket but sure you don’t really have a choice when it comes to the outback this hostel offers work and the other one in this town is apparently shit for finding work and after all this is why we are here to get our second year visa’s. Our hostel has 1 TV channel on a very shit TV in the common room, our couches are all ripped and falling to bits, we have no internet, our “TV room” has a Dvd player but no TV channels it also has a hole in the roof where it leaks toilet water into a large bucket...NICE!!!

So we arrived on Tuesday 23rd of February, the next day we went to the outdoor swimming pool which is nice and will kind of keep us sane because there is literally NOTHING else to do here. The manager at the hostel called us to say he’s found us a job for the 3 of us starting tomorrow so we are really happy to begin work. It’s grape picking, so we are all excited to begin our first days work.

Arrive on Bob Vales farm @ 7:30am he brings us down to the vines and tells us what needs to be done gives us knives and we set off to work..Josie chooses to work alone and Claire and I pair up. We are getting $1.20 per bucket and the buckets are fairly big, maybe 35kgs? First few hours fly by and we talk about how this isn’t so bad after all. At lunch time we sit on the ground in one of the vines and eat our noodle sandwiches... hmmm... What a glamorous job! So we counted up that we had picked 52 buckets between Claire and I in 4 hours, and made $21.84 after tax, our hearts are broken... we now have figured out to make any money we’d have to pick 100 buckets each a day...Impossible!!!! 

We head back to work and crawling along the ground on our knees looking up at the vine cutting the grapes, we are wrecked our knees are red and our necks are killing from looking up.
We finish the row and Bob brings us down the other side of the farm and tells us to start picking the sun muskets (look like blueberries) It’s called crowning. We have to pick out only the fruit with a green stem, some are burnt and have a brown stem. We get paid $25 per row and the rows are about 300 meters long u have to go down one side and up the other. So it takes us 3 hours to do our first row. It involves beating through bushes/trees to see if there’s any green stem on the fruit. By the end of the day we look like friggin suicide victim’s scratches all over our arms backs and faces... Definitely looking our sexiest!!!

Arrive back at the hostel at 5pm and say well we think we did ok on our first day. Retire to bed. Wrecked!!


Next day 7.30am arrive back at Bob’s farm. Hop off the bus and Bob says hang on a second to our manager
Bob: “Girls, do ye think ye did a good job yesterday?”
Me: “Yeah, I think we did ok for our first day.”
Josie: “I think we did alright.”
Bob: “No, I’ve just had a look at the vines ye did in the evening and ye have missed half the fruit I told ye to pick. If ye think thats a good job and ye can’t do any better ye may aswel get back on the bus cause I will have to pay someone to go back over what ye done so ye can either fix it or go back to the hostel.”
Josie: Whispers to Claire “Back on the bus, back on the bus.”
Me: “Really, we thought we did good. We can go back over it and fix it for you.”
Bob: “Ok thanks girls, I’ll come down and show you.
Bob pulls about 6 bunches off one vine and we look at each other and think OOOPSS.
Bob: “I’m not trying to be mean but this would cost me a fortune with the machine if all the fruit isn’t picked.

Josie and Claire are distraught. 15minutes into work and the girls come over to my row and tell me they are going walking back to the hostel that they couldn’t be bothered with this shit, they are going paying off a farmer and moving to Melbourne next week. I’m thinking great now I’m gonna be stuck in the middle of nowhere on my own for 3 months... So I tell the girls ok if that’s what ye want but I’m going home for Christmas so I have to stay here and do the fruit picking I don’t want to be stopped coming in to the country with immigration and get deported back to Ireland. Fuck that! I told them that I’m staying till I finish my row and getting paid for it. I convince them to at least finish their rows. At lunch Claire says she is going ringin Dale and going back to the hostel, we convince her that it’ll get better everyone has shit jobs to begin with. We get another row done for 2day so that means we make $25 for 8 hours work, because we had to go back over our row from yesterday...  Heart breaking!!

It definitely got easier after day 1 & 2. We were flying it by day 3...still making shit money though.
Next we got a job on Don Reed’s grape farm, we were getting 90c a bucket now (upgraded) ha ha. We were picking sultanas, gordo’s and sun muskets.
The high light of our weeks here was every friday everyone would rush home from work have a shower and head down to our bar dowstairs to get ready for Joker Poker. All the cards in a pack are pinned up in a glass case on the wall (locked) and on a friday when u buy some drinks u get raffle tickets...If u get the one he picks out u get to choose a card to turn over, u can choose to take 1 out of 3 deals or play the joker- if u win and its the joker card u get $1500. Generally the backpackers will take the deal because its like 2/3 weeks free rent, $70 bar tab, 5 free meals or ipods and stuff.
At the weekends we would all get together and play card games or rent dvds from the dvd store up the road.


We had been complaining amongst others in our hostel... who were also complaining about how shit our lives are and why do we have to do such a shit job to extend our visa. One of the guys we met here-Will, asked me did I want a new job working in a cool room packing grapes and then making lids for boxes of grapes, getting $13 an hour. As u can imagine I jumped for the job, I was actually excited about my new farm job... Started working for him the next day. He was a really nice farmer in his early 50’s... We got picked up at 9:30am which was great compared to the usual jobs which are generally between 5,6,7am. After work everyday Carlo gave us a few beers, which I have learnt to like alot. 

We met some really cool people while we were on the farm, made some great friends and will definitely not forget this experience in a hurry.

We lasted 10 weeks in Red Cliffs, I think we deserve a gold medal & a pat on the back!

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