22 | Orange Country

We decided to head to South Australia to attempt a second go at farm work for the visa. This encounter was nowhere near as bad as Melon farming however the pay was criminal.

We arrived late in the evening in a town called Loxton which is a 4 hour bus ride outside Adelaide. There really isn’t too much to say about the place apart from it is your typical small town. For anybody who has seen the film Hot Fuzz it has that kind of feel to it, the locals and you. The working hostel we stayed in wasn’t exactly the best however we had just arrived from one of the nicest hostels I had stayed in on the east coast so it was never going to compare.

Our pay was outlined at $24 per crate between two people who would be collecting. They said the better pickers manage 1 crate per hour, yeah good one! The best as a pair we collected was 3 crates in a day. Which worked out at $6 an hour… scandalous. When each crate holds over 1200 oranges, you can see the odds are stacked against you.

The orange trees were not the easiest to pick in Renmark. Each day my routine would start with rapping tissue paper around my wrists and applying duck tape on top to create an extra wall of protection against the thorns. The dense branches made it difficult to reach the center with the farmer passing by every so often to check the quality of your picking. One day I was up in the tree and the ladder slipped; I went tumbling into the middle of the tree which luckily broke my fall which would have been around 12 feet.

The only thing to keep our morale up was shouting quotes from the film Kez across the picking rows to each other. The environment was the same as the previous farms I had been at, no toilets on site and no water supply to keep you hydrated in the field. I have no idea how this is still allowed to happen in 2016 Australia but apparently they seem to have relaxed legislation for workers rights in the agriculture sector.

#Farming