Fruitpicking and Other Work

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Finally I left Melbourne heading north to find fruitpicking work in the country around Shepparton. With me were Ira and Isabel, two strong german girls I had met in Melbourne. Together we wanted to tackle the orchards in order to extend our travel money.
One big problem proved to be that we had no car. Most of the fruitpickers drive around in their own car and ask for work in several farms. Like that they are able to reach the remotest farm and find the place where the fruit is ready to pick. Also they can supply themselfs with food during they camp out at the farm.
Fortunatelly we came at the right time, peach picking season had started, and from some previous investigation we new where to go. I helpful farmer picked us up from the trainstation and let us live in his picker's sheds on his farm although he didn't have work for us. His pears were still hard and green.
But on the neighbouring farm we could start picking peaches the next day. The way that worked is that we got a little tractor with two trailer and alltogether five bins. A bin is a big plastic box, one sqare meter base and half a meter high, that you have to fill with peaches. When it's full it weights approximately half a ton and is worth around thirty dollars. We also got supplied with ladders and picking bags, wearable cottonbags that can contain about twenty kilos of peaches.
So we were ready to start working. The first few hour didn't go to bad, slowly but continuously our bins filled. But after some time work seemed to be more and more trying.
The blazing Australian sun with little ozon to shield off the burning rays, the heat and sweat under the cotton bag, climbing the ladder with your half-filled ten kilo for the tenth time, the scratching branches in twigs around your arms and in your face, the damn huge bin that doesn't seem to fill anymore, I tell you it can be hard work. And since you get paid by bin, you have to work fast, no false carefulness with the trees. You run up the ladder, you grap all the fruit, you tear it off, and get your bag filled. And you have to pick all the trees, also those with little fruit. That makes you climb the ladder more often.
Still we didn't do a bad job. We drank masses of water, used sunscreen, tried to start at sunrise to avoid the hottest part of the day, and to keep up picking moral every song that came to our mind we sang out loud into the orchard. Two bavarian guys in the tree row next to us really got killed by that... but the result was never less than six bins a day.
After a few days we got the chance for better work and left the peach farm. A tomato packing shed near the next town was looking for more people. After some difficult organisation of transport and a tent for the nearby campground we started working in the shed. The girls did the tomato sorting and the guys stacked the tomato boxes. It was better work than in the peach orchard, no sun, working long hours, sometimes more than twelve hours a day, and we got paid by the hour. Still it's not a pleasure to spend your days with running with a twenty kilo tomato box towards some pallet, the only things on your mind being 'medium large color, medium large color, medium large color, large slight color, large slight color, large slight color, medium bad color, medium bad color, medium bad color, please let the belt run slower,...'.
And the girls were not better off. Their sorting hands where moving so fast that you coundn't see them anymore. In the evening we all had some kind of tomato flash. And sure enough we dreamed of tomatos, sometimes we catched each other in the middle of the night in some mad dream of the 'hey, were do I have to bring those tomatos' type.
But living on the campground was nice. Lots of other workers lived there and some kind of common atmosphere (introduced by common suffering...) formed. Life was simple, the days were filled with work, we knew that every period of free time was well earned, and the sunsets over the countryside were beautiful. The different kind of jobs around provided us with some variety of different fuits and we were never short of tomatos as well.
For myself work in the tomato shed ended quite soon again as I got the sack. They had just hired to many people. So I changed to fruitpicking again, picking plums this time. After all the plums were picked I enjoyed some free days that I use to organise a flight ticket from Sydney to Santiago, Chile. It was time to look at future plans again, to travel on. Not so much planed but something I really looked forward to was a three week stopover in New Zealand that I wanted to explore together with Ira.

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Photos

Picking Peaches
Ira and me on the tractor wearing our picking bags. Isabel is still up in the trees.

Isabel and Ira
Isabel and Ira recovering from a hard day's work.

Big Sky over Eucalyptus Trees
Surrouding at the Murchison campground.

Moses' Paddock
A tiny pony named Moses lived behind the fence near our tent.

Fruitpicker's Company
All these guys were working somewhere. Picking various fruits, helping in the vineyard, or in the packing shed.