Finishing up at the Fruitshack

Things are winding up for me at the Fruitshack. I’ve finished pruning my grape vines, finished the final order of valencias and I’ve finished my 88 days required to get a 2^nd year visa, woohoo!

But I’m still here. I haven’t let the farm just yet. Picking oranges is not a very lucrative job – and when I say ‘not very’ I mean ‘completely awful’. Just as my days were ending Marcello’s pickers began harvesting his mandarin crop. He has over 200acres of farmland, and around 600 mandarin trees. Which is around about 400 bins of fruit which all need to be packed by hand. So I’ve stuck around to help him do that because I like Marcello, and he is paying me by the hour.

The days are long, 7am – 6pm, so there’s no time to do anything in the evenings except shower, cook, eat and fall into bed ready to get up at 6am tomorrow. But that’s good, because long days means lots of hours which means lots of $!

The time goes quickly, running around in a kind of semi-organised chaos. I enjoy it, rushing around and keeping busy. But it’s quite frustrating with a guy who has been there for a long time always aiming to remind you of his superiority by interveining when you are in the middle of doing something, under the guise of ‘helping’. And Marcello’s father, Mick, a 65yr old Italian man, is struggling to let go of his farming life, even though Marcello and his brother Dom run the place now. He is a lovely guy with a lot of jokes and long winding stories, but he likes to boss people around and tell them they are doing things wrong.

I’ve been unofficially promoted so Mick does not like me to just work the chutes where we pack the mandarins into boxes and then stack them on the pallets, but he wants me to man the biggest chutes which pour into huge 2x2m  bins. I make sure the right sizes go into the bins, then pull the mounds of mandarins around to level them out. Some bins need to be flat so they can be stack, and some mounded to later be taken out and packed by hand in a 3x3 pattern. When that’s slow I like to help on the smaller chutes because they often get backed up, and it’s fun hopping from one to the other, a crazy dance of people weaving in and out of one another. Or I’ll carry stacks of empty boxes from the other side of the shed, or empty out buckets of split or ugly fruit – the ugly/marked fruit gets sold at ½ price, it’s not just thrown away, phew. But after a while Mick will always yell at me to come back, even if he is looking after that section himself. Or he’ll walk over and say ‘I’ll do it’ and push me out of the way. The key to dealing with him, I’ve discovered, is to say ‘ok’ and either continue what I’m doing, or walk away and start doing something else.

The good thing, or perhaps it’s a bad thing, is that there is a constant stream of tea and biscuit breaks!

In a crazy turn of events, I had my 25^th birthday. It was a beautiful warm day where I was pruning in the sunshine. And I came back to the shack to a surprise party in the shed. The girls had got me a cake and Michael had brought 3 bottles of wine. Jenny had done a postcard painting of the orange trees and everyone signed the back, and I had a gorgeous hamper of chocolates and cookies and Baileys from my wonderful poppa. Throughout the week more cards and parcels arrived, so my birthday stretched out for ages and I felt so special.

The other night Michael wanted to burn some branches so we had a fire in the fire pit Marcello made years ago from an old washing machine drum. And the weather is picking up, though it is still horrendously cold in the early mornings, in the day we’re getting up to around 15degrees now.

But I am very excited to leave. I met somebody. A German boy, Sebastian. He’s the happiest person I ever met, and he makes me very happy too. He’s traveling with Max, the boyfriend of my gay Liverpudlian friend David, and they were both at the Fruitshack for 6 weeks before heading off to Byron Bay where they already had farm work planned.

Now he has left I really miss him, and this place is changed for me. I am heading up to Byron to be with him again, and when they have finished their 88 days, we are going to travel and see what this beautiful country has to offer. I can’t wait for the next adventure.