And Now For Something Completely Different

After travelling around, never staying in one place for more than a few days, I’m settled into a life that’s going to last me a good three months.

I now live on an orange farm in the Fruitshack. There are currently 15 of us here, including David (from the beginning of this adventure) and Britta (who I lived with in Epping), all backpackers working for their days. To get a second year visa you have to do 88 days of regional work, so everyone who wants to stay in Australia for another year has to spend 3months+ as a farmer.

It’s great here. This place is incredibly beautiful – watching the sun set over the grape vines has to be seen to be believed. We are about 9 hours inland from Sydney, near to a small town called Leeton; only a 40 minute walk to civilisation, heading towards the outback. We are surrounded by farms, who contact Michael, the owner of Fruitshack, to claim us for jobs. There’s all sorts, mostly picking oranges, limes or lemons, and everybody’s favourite job, pruning; crawling under the tree to find the trunk and cutting back encroaching vines, getting scratched by the branches and hit in the face by oranges as you do. Some people also drive tractors or quad bikes and spray crops or fertilize the land. You might work just for a day, or a week or more until the job is done. It’s always different which is nice. I spent my first five days here clearing out 2 old farm houses that have been empty for 20 years. Then pruning, and now I’m on to orange picking.

Picking has been my favourite job so far. There are 3 ways to pick, from the ground, from the ladder, and my favourite, climbing inside like a monkey! Though when you’re inside you get scratched by the branches, hit with oranges, and impaled on thorns. We all look like we have been self harming from the state of our arms!

You have a tube of canvas which folds and hooks at the bottom to make a bag which can hold 100 oranges. These you either wear as a bag, or hook onto a branch if you are climbing inside the tree. We take the full bags to huge bins pulled behind a tractor and unclip it so the oranges fall out the bottom.

The days are long, getting up before the sun and heading home as it starts to set. And the work is hard, so you return each day aching.  But as we do live on an orange farm, there’s always plenty of oranges to make some freshly squeezed juice to revive you!

The Shack is a small courtyard of corrugated steel buildings just like a barn. There’s 4 dorm rooms, a caravan and an old double-decker bus that is currently unoccupied. We have a little kitchen, the Goon Room (named for the not-so-great cheap boxes of wine backpackers live on) with very comfy couches, a tv and ping pong table, and a bathroom that is… well… usable.

And we also have 14 cats.

But the greatest part of the Fruitshack is the people. It’s awesome to be in a community again, where everyone enjoys each others company. We get home from work to “How was your day?” and replies of “long,” “hard,” “boring,” and my personal favourite “meeeeergghhhh”. And then “do you want a beer?” or “can I get you some goon?”. And then the fun begins. We are a very social crowd and watch movies, cook, eat and go to the local town together on days off to either laze in the park, do some much needed shopping or go to the pub. Family Dinner nights are always fun. We pull out what we’ve got and create something with the bits, always interesting with 15 people roaming the very small kitchen trying to help cook so they don’t have to wash up!

It is heading towards winter now and definitely getting colder. I came here from Cairns, 2,500miles miles north, and it was 30 degrees+ every day. Here although it’s mid twenties in the days, at night it gets down to 7-8 degrees. And yes, you’re all thinking ‘that’s so warm compared to England’ but you have central heating. Better than that, you have insulated walls and double glazing. We have plywood and corrugated sheet metal walls, thin glass and mesh at the windows! And duvets aren’t a thing here, so we sleep under 5 or 6 blankets. 

Nobody warned me it would be cold in Australia!!