This is a big read so I recommend you run off and grab the following:
1 x cup of tea/coffee
1 x muffin OR 2 x biscuits
1 x jazz cigarette (optional)
I’d looked forward to this a lot: my first ever Christmas away from home and my first Christmas down under. Shrimps on the barbie, beers on the beach, playing Frisbee with kangaroos, beaucoup good times. That’s not quite how it turned out.
It was Christmas Eve morning as I struggled up the hill to the bus stop with my bags and guitar. I was as heavily-laden as one of those African tribeswomen who carry the jugs of water through the desert on their heads – not just with my bags, but with a hangover.
I’d spent the previous evening in festive congruence with some Victoria Bitter and the movie Tropic Thunder on DVD. One of them had ended up devoured (the beer), one of them watched (the movie) and one of them pissed (me). Another thrilling tableau from my amazing life.
The town of Margaret River barely stirred in the morning heat. It was only about 9am but already the summer sun was making the transition from pretty golden orb to massive evil burning bastard. I resented the sun; it caused me to feel detached from all around me. Whilst everyone in the area was getting ready to put their feet up and host their loved ones I was itching to ditch the snail’s pace country lifestyle and get to work.
I pictured myself as a sci-fi hero like Buck Rogers from the 25th Century. Ready to make a big leap into the unknown. I had four months left on my visa and it was make-or-break time for finding farm work. I don’t know if Buck Rogers had any experience of applying for a second working visa in Australia, but it stood to reason that he had at some point.
My destination? Manjimup, a small town about 50 miles away, where I was promised work. The hostel reviews didn’t encourage me but they appeared to have plenty of people staying there over Christmas so a party of some sort was guaranteed. I had no plans for crimbo so I figured the sooner I got there the better.
I was joined at the bus stop by Ben, the German dude I met volunteering on Carmel’s orchard. During the couple of weeks we worked together we got along well and combined our efforts to look for work. I persuaded him to make the trip with me, though I think he was less keen to leave Margaret River than I was. In hindsight I fear I pushed him into a personal Vietnam from which he would never recover.
The bus was the last service out of town before Christmas, and was full of exciteable 60-somethings clutching tartan luggage. The driver greeted us cheerily over the mic as the bus inched its way through the backstreets out of town. There is no direct service linking the two towns so we had to make a two-legged trip via Bunbury, and that killed a good few hours.
It was mid-afternoon by the time we alighted in Manjimup, and it looked more or less just like the place we’d left, not that that was a bad thing particularly. We waited around at the bus stop for our pick-up, and eventually a pale girl in a hoodie announced herself from over in the distance.
“Are you from the hostel?” I intoned loudly, in my best ‘talking to the locals’ voice. She answered us in the affirmative and led us to a sleek minibus of Japanese origin caked in the ubiquitous country dirt.
“Hi, I’m Ella,” she announced cheerfully, “and if you’ve got weed on you, please don’t smoke it inside the hostel. We have a special place down the garden for that sort of thing.” This was a standard greeting for travellers it seemed.
Being depressingly un-rock’n’roll, neither of us had any drugs on us of course. But as opening gambits go, it was a memorable one, and a refreshing change from the usual zero tolerance attitude you get in travellers’ hostels. Man, I’ve been in places where they don’t even let you hide dead hookers in the laundry. Talk about uptight.
Ella granted us a quick stop at a local supermarket to buy provisions before taking us to the hostel. I took this as a sign that this place must be bloody miles away out in the middle of nowhere. It was. Never mind, the countryside is an awesome place to be in, right? All those fields and trees and sunshine and shit. It’s like getting back to Mother Nature.
Manjimup had the configuration of a typical Aussie country town. There was a small shopping district laid out in a grid, a couple of pubs offering rooms to stay in and copious amounts of gambling, a smattering of supermarkets and fast food joints, and if you were lucky that was topped off with some patchy mobile coverage.
Stocked up with instant noodles and other basic foodstuffs, we journeyed on. The bus hurtled down a succession of green country lanes, each one redder and dustier than the last. Trees and fields stretched as far as the eye could see. Occasional farmhouses surfed past on rolling hilltops. Eventually we arrived at the hostel, my suspicions as to its remoteness proving grimly accurate.
The photo didn’t lie – it was definitely on the functional side. A series of wooden dorm shacks surrounded a stagnant-looking lobster pond, next to a giant dusty quadrangle lined with various decrepit-looking and well-travelled motor vehicles. Across the pond, a stately-looking farmhouse housed the office and the hostel’s one and only internet PC. Apart from brief periods in the evening this was always locked up, communication with the outside world lying tantalisingly out of bounds.
In the office we paid up for a week’s rent and each received one plate, one bowl, one mug, one spoon (small), one spoon (large), one fork, one knife, one container (plastic) and bedding. These would be our only comforts on the inside. We would have a day off to relax (Christmas day as it happened) then, we were assured, there would be work waiting for us. The local agriculture industry was working at full tilt, messiah or no messiah. Boxing Day couldn’t come soon enough for me.
Just then a wild-haired Irish backpacker called Mikey appeared and led us to our rooms, showing off the various bits of the building to us and chattering excitedly in his semi-comprehensible brogue. He had a walkie-talkie so seemed to be in a position of command. I took a liking to the guy – anyone who wears a mullet with a baseball cap is alright with me.
Walking through the hostel it seemed deserted, but Ella had told us most of the travellers staying there were still out at work on farms. As the afternoon wore on droves of people returned in the same minibus and soon the place was crammed to capacity. Ben and I had taken the last two beds, shoehorned into dorm rooms filled exclusively with meek-looking Asian girls.
That in itself was a bit weird, and the rooms were extremely cramped. Everyone lived in each other’s pockets. My room was right next to the communal kitchens and teemed with smells, sounds and people well into the night. I slept on half of the top bunk with my clothes and books strewn on the other half. There was no space to put them on the floor.
The kitchens themselves were even more cramped, the shelves and fridges overflowing with people’s bags of food. Every inch of kitchen space was more highly prized and fiercely contested than prime Tokyo real estate. A bizarre irony that in the middle of the vast wilderness, here we were squeezed in like sardines. Too many people and too few cookers made cooking dinner like playing a game of Twister around the stove.
Over time I became the master of fixing myself a sandwich with the minimum number of chess moves around the kitchen. Hanging on to your plates and cutlery was a challenge – if you didn’t hand back the same number of items to the office when you left you’d lose your deposit, and stuff was always going missing.
Having said that the hostel was also a friendly and welcoming place – the cramped conditions bred a strangely tolerant and convivial atmosphere amongst all the nationalities. What’s more, you could regularly leave valuables like iPods and laptops lying around in your room without fear of them being nicked. I’d been backpacking in India and south-east Asia by that point and was used to slumming it. Ben however disliked the place intensely and returned to Margaret River a few days later.
Go to the east coast and you can’t move for British backpackers. But here in the untamed west I was the only Brit in the entire hostel. A novel situation. The dominant nationalities were Taiwanese and Irish. I think we had roughly half the population of Taiwan staying at our hostel. Taiwan’s only a small country, a bit like Wales or Belgium or something, stuck out in the Pacific Ocean. How does it produce so many people, and how do they all end up in Manjimup?
These, and many other questions, were vexing me, so I turned to drink. The hostel handily sold wine, a distressingly obnoxious brew called (appropriately) Foul Bay. Frankly, it was that bad that tramps would turn their nose up at it. But at $5 a bottle it would do for the first night, in the absence of other intoxicants. So Ben and I sat up long into the night, hanging out with a bunch of Taiwanese travellers and drinking this awful, awful wine. That is how I spent Christmas Eve night.
Christmas Day was yet another hot December day, a typical antipodean scorcher marked with neither sleighbells nor windfalls of snow. The owner Naomi – who was in fact Ella’s partner – threw a massive party for everyone, with roast chicken, trimmings and free booze for all. An impressive feat of generosity that took a lot of effort to execute.
Then there was the Secret Santa, where people exchanged random gifts like watermelons and umbrellas. Being new arrivals Ben and I missed out on this. I’d already had two presents to unwrap on Christmas morning: a Simpsons Christmas t-shirt from my relatives and some sort of plum pudding in a box from Carmel. So just like being in the Secret Santa then really.
I was introduced to a throng of travellers from all over the world, and an atmosphere of merry debauchery ensued. Many of the Taiwanese got shit-flying drunk off a surprisingly small amount of Emu Bitter. Other people went swimming in the rancid lobster pond. A half-crazed French guy called Jeremy rampaged around chasing the girls and getting his cock out in the background of group photos. It was funny to watch, to say the least, but I was glad it wasn’t me being all nude and drunk and French. I limited myself to several beers and a bottle and a half of Foul Bay – I had work in the morning.
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