Lessons

I'm not going to go into extensive detail about myself in this blog. It was never the intention, being somewhat of an impersonal attempt at examining things I had been looking at in detail and then maybe discussing it further with members of the site. This post won't subscribe to this completely but I am curious to hear your opinions on the matter I suppose. This will be more journalistic than educational but I hope it might teach a few things and might even be interesting!

I arrived in Australia on the 3rd of March 2012, at Brisbane International. The time was 8.15 at night, and I'd been travelling on/off for the previous 28 hours. I don't sleep on flights so I really struggled with the 10 different time zones I'd passed, and was thoroughly exhausted by the end of it. Also, when I left Manchester it was in negative temperatures: my first stopover in Munich was double figures, Singapore was a warm 25 with 100% humidity and Brisbane as I recall was a sticky 30 with the same.. so all in all I couldn't really take much of it in. I remember that flying in, we took about half an hour and made a very slow approach so I did get to see the skyline at night which I enjoyed. It's a modern city for a rapidly modernising urban population, and the architecture shows. But by the time we'd taxied and I'd got my luggage, I needed to crash out before I burned out. I needed to shower, and to sleep. Now I believe it's true what they say about jet-lag only really affecting you when you fly the other way around the world but I defy anyone to travel that length of time, with very little body movement and not feel the same.

I didn't take long to settle in. If I have one aspect of my character that I am proud of, it's my ability to adapt to vastly different situations relatively easy. I have many many flaws as I'm sure we all do, but that is something I really like about myself. The main reason is, I just don't take whatever is happening all that seriously. I just tell myself it's a bit surreal, it'll take some getting used to and then it'll be fine and almost every time it is. And that's pretty much exactly how it happened, I took it in one day at a time. I went from living in an English terraced suburb to an detached eight acres of Australian bushland. I went from having a corner shop at the end of my street, to the nearest petrol station being close to 10 kilometres away. I adjusted in a couple of weeks.

But I have to say that it's been only recently that I've really explored my local surroundings in any great depth. I've been to the city (Brisbane), throughout Ipswich (where I and Nikki live) and even took a sojourn to Melbourne in June, and yet I've only been further into Queensland in the last couple of months and not often. Today was one of those days, and I wanted to write about it. To start with, I need to tell you about the weather - it sounds weird but it's partly the reason why I felt I had to jot all this down. Over the last few months, South-East Queensland has had a varying weather pattern - following the normal for the differing times in year and season but only vaguely. The weather was following a pattern they call El Nino up until a couple of years ago and it seems the conditions we've had this year show a re-emergence. Recently, coming out from Winter to Spring we had one of the driest periods on record. June-July were uncommonly wet, but from July 19th onwards until about mid September Brisbane CBD and Airport received less than 0.2mm of rainfall for the entire period. Today was completely different. Today we stormed, and we rained. It fitted in quite well with the sobriety of how I felt when I drove around today.

I've been looking for rural work to extend my stay here, without the necessity of a partner visa. Myself and Cilla are happy and we want to be married soon enough but to do it for visa reasons seem.. to devalue it somewhat. It's not why we want to marry - we love each other and marriage should be about love. So an easy route is to extend to a second year working holiday visa, and as I'm already living at her address I can commute with a second car. It's just I've been struggling to find work locally - and when I say locally I mean within 75km. The work I need is very specific and I can't afford to make mistakes with the work I get as I don't get second chances. Therefore I've been driving around, checking farms, stables and fruit picking opportunities. The search has been and forgive the pun - fruitless. Either the jobs are far too far away, or they're not able to hire me temporarily which is a visa condition. Nevertheless I remain chipper and I'll keep looking, moving if I have to. Today was something else though. I had a real experience, one I can't really put into too much detail - other than I really felt that I learnt what it felt like to be in the rural heartland. I set out from Ipswich to Boonah, which is about 40km away. Luckily it's all one straight road and not a slow one so you can pretty much look all around as you drive. The view is farmland and mountains as far as the eye can see and as the landscape is fairly flat you can see for miles. Spring is coming in so there's plenty of vegetation and fresh grass, despite the adverse conditions. Lightning and thunder were an unexpected accompaniment on this journey, instead of the baking sun I'm used to.

Often I've just driven the road, and not really looked at the farms much there. They're mostly privately owned, small family businesses that can't really afford much of anything, even less another man to feed and pay. But as I've said, today was different. I paid a visit to a couple of them, not for work but more for information - passing down the community grapevine. I spoke to a elderly farmer who had a couple of acres and a lettuce plantation. He was gruff but friendly, and told me that while work was scarce, to keep my chin up as this was prime season for backpackers and pickers. There was a sadness about him though, and something told me that I had to press the issue a bit further though which was strange now I think about it, because I never intended to ask this guy for a job in the first place. What transpired next is the trigger.

We sat down, and looked out across the farm. His house was at the back of it, and at the top of his acreage was the Ipswich-Boonah road and we watched the traffic go past. He asked me where I'd come from, what I was planning. He could tell I only wanted to work rurally to stay, and I was worried that a lifetime farmer might be offended by this but he simply laughed. Then I asked him the same. He gave me the impression that he really needed to talk and I had nothing better to do so I listened. He offered me a drink and we watched the storm over the farm to the east of the road. He told me he used to own that farm. 16 acres. He had downsized only within the last 18 months or so. The rational reasoning would be age, and with only his son to help him he needed the smaller area.. But having been here for a while and knowing the recent history of Brisbane I knew otherwise. In January 2011, SE QLD had some of the worst flooding in memory. I'm sure Nikki could go into better detail than I ever could but the damage was incredible, and cost $billions. Houses, streets, even whole suburbs were basically underwater. Those that had no property insurance petitioned the government and got a smaller payout with it being a natural disaster (from what I've been told anyway) and those that had insurance claimed on it. But financial damage aside, sentimental damages hurt just as deep if not deeper. I asked the farmer if that was the reason he had to cut back, and he seemed surprised but nodded. He had lost tens of thousands of dollars - he couldn't afford insurance to cover the entirety of the property so they'd gave him what he could claim for and he sold the land. Fertile, it fetched a few dollars. But even with that, and the small money he made from the land he still had, he was living on a modest sum. The house was rusted to the roof without looking dilapidated, but you could tell that this meant little. Sentimentality is everything.

I asked him whether it was just the flooding, but again I figured I knew the answer to that one too - Australia is in the midst of a mining boom (albeit one that is steadily slowing) and most of the able-bodied young single men, those that would normally be farmhands have moved out to Western Australia to work in the mines. They pay handsomely for the ones that find work, and there's a labour shortfall in some areas as a result. You would think that would play into my hands, but with less interest in agriculture for GDP there's little investment and most farms just cut back - those that aren't private that is. One side expands, while the other side shrinks. He told me the people he hired would work on the other land, so he had no need as he didn't cultivate it anymore. A wry smile crept across his face then, unsure of the reason I asked what was up. He told me that he'd lost a lot of his business, a lot of his possessions and a lot of his personal income - and he told me that he still had his house, his son, and something to hand over to him when he retired. I thanked him for his time and got back on the road. I left him feeling sad on one side, but oddly happy. This fellow has had a horrible year or two and yet still manages to see positives. He was a archetypal Aussie.

I got to Boonah and decided to head to Beaudesert, about another 35 kms outside to the south. Same views, same rust covered houses, same stories. I put my details on noticeboards, and ask around the towns. From there I went to Laravale, and through to Rathdowney. From there, I drove back through Boonah and back home to Ebenezer. All in all a total of 225km in three hours or so. I rode out the storm, and as darkness set in the storm passed. And the storm in my head passed too. I'd been feeling down about how I was struggling to find work but then good honest people have lost millions, but they don't complain. They carry on, and they continue to get up at the crack of dawn to plough their fields and reap their crops. They just get on with it. I should too. Sorry for the long windedness.