Feb 09: Mildura - a day on the fig farm

I arrived in Mildura at 7am on Saturday, having travelled all night on the bus. I was sleepy as I unloaded my bags at the station, eager to check into my new lodgings and immediately get some much-needed kip. I planned what to do later: go food-shopping, meet the people at the hostel, a few beers in the evening maybe.

The hostel looked great on the website. “Where excellent accommodation, good work and great wages go hand-in-hand”, it proudly proclaimed. I’d found it a few days ago by random, and was pleased that they could accommodate me at short notice. The manager, Vickey, told me they had grape-picking work available at one of the farms. She’d even collect me from the station soon after I arrived. Everything was going to plan!

There were a few other travellers sat in the cold waiting room waiting for lifts. I wondered if they were going to the same hostel as me. I wondered if there were other hostels. Mildura is certainly a decent-sized town, with a reputation within Australia as a major agricultural centre. The place should be swarming with backpackers looking for work, I thought, so I wouldn’t be short of friends.

Presently the phone rang. It was Vickey, due at the station any minute to collect me. She’d seemed friendly enough on the phone before and seemed to be running this place on her own. “Are you free to work today?” she asked out of the blue.

“Not really, I’ve just come on the bus from Melbourne and I want to rest, can I start tomorrow?” I said.

“Okay, well you’ve basically got two choices. You can do the fig-picking, which pays great money, or you can do grape-picking, which pays really bad money." She’d not bothered to mention the really bad money before. "If you want to do the grape-picking, you can start tomorrow, but I need people today to start the fig-picking and I’d really like to have you working there.”

After a long night with little sleep the last thing I wanted to do was put in a heavy shift on a farm, but I said I’d think it over while she drove here. The circumstances surrounding the job seemed a little strange. I decided yes, what the hell, I’d do it. I could rest in the evening. I didn’t want to miss out on the better-paying job and time was of the essence in getting my visa.

Vickey arrived in the minibus fresh from doing the morning drop-offs, and I met her for the first time. She was a woman in her late 30s with a conspicuous hearing aid that gave her the appearance of a Bond villain. I was still rather tired as she drove me to the supermarket to pick up provisions. We made a bit of small talk but she seemed keen to get me checked in and off to the fig-picking job ASAP.

As is normal she asked for the week’s rent up front, but there were numerous extras – a deposit, an ‘admin fee’ for collecting wages, and transport fees – which brought the sum up to a colossal $250. Being too tired to think straight I withdrew the wad of money and handed it to her like a trusting child, not even thinking to ask for a receipt. How I would come to regret that.

Alarm bells started to ring in my head when she talked a bit more on the way to the hostel. The 'great money' turned out to be $16 an hour, close to the minimum wage. She clearly didn’t hold any of the travellers in high esteem and made out she was waging a constant war against backpackers’ laziness and lack of gratitude. I asked her to clarify what she meant and she gravely confided, “I’m afraid the house you will be staying in is full of negative people.

“You seem like a positive person so I hope they don’t get to you. But yes, we’ve had some problems in that house. Recently there were some Canadian girls there, they caused a terrible fuss, it really gave me a negative impression of Canadian people. They’ve left now.”

She continued off on a tangent: “Living at this hostel is a challenge, but you have to embrace these challenges when you’re travelling – that’s why I enjoyed being overseas when I was in London. My dad always said I was more resourceful than my sister when it came to things like that.”

“I thought I was staying in the hostel, not a house?” I replied. Not only was it a very strange conversation but I had to shout all my questions, as she was deaf in one ear and had the hearing aid in the other. I suddenly felt stupid to place my trust in this odd woman.

It turned out the ‘hostel’ was just a couple of bungalows, supplemented by another house for overspill located on the town outskirts. I was driven to the overspill house, and it was clearly in the middle of f**king nowhere. I didn’t like the look of it; it supposedly housed ten or twelve people but was very small indeed. Still a lone voice piped up in my head: “you can do it, just a few weeks, you’ve survived in worse.”

I had just spent a month at the working hostel in Manjimup (Western Australia), and that was a bit of a hole, but it was magnificent compared to this. Now I thought about it I’d never appreciated how well-run that place was. I particularly missed Naomi – she was an absolute saint next to Vickey – and she had the added bonus of not being completely insane. My overwhelming concern was that I wouldn’t find another place to work in time and would miss out on my visa.

I lugged in my bags and my food shopping from the van, briefly checking out the house and my room. The people living here were either out at work or still asleep at this early hour. I was sharing a small bunk room with three French guys and a Chinese girl who’d also just arrived in Mildura. Like me they were standing around wondering what the f**k they had got themselves into.

Dirty plates littered the sink; the kitchen and the living room didn’t seem to have been done up since the house was built. There was one shower and one toilet that were shared by the dozen or so people living here. There was a strange ‘cocktail bar’ installation joining on to the lounge that was decked out in hideous 60s upholstery. It was a dump.

Worryingly Vickey was expecting us to work not five, not six, but seven days a week at the fig farm. Non-stop, ten-plus hours a day, week in, week out. How would we rest? Or find the time to organise future travel plans? I figured it might work out okay over a few weeks, and the total lack of any free time whatsoever would make it easier for me to save my wages.

I did a quick change into my work clothes then we set off for the fig farm, the French guys following in their beat-up 4x4. Vickey drove on through the countryside and I'm not sure if we crossed into New South Wales as the town sits right on the border. Questions were answered intermittently. She continued her bizarre monologue: “Is that a guitar I saw in your things? I love music. Do you know Chris Issac? He did a gig here at a winery recently. Oh, he was brilliant.”

I didn't like Chris Isaac but I didn’t bother questioning the wisdom of her concert-going decisions. There was already a lot happening today that bothered me. For one thing, she now had possession of my passport, as she needed a photocopy of the visa. Again, a dumb move on my part to entrust her with it, but it was the standard procedure at these places.

The farm lay on an unmarked plot of land up a dusty road, garlanded with a few rustic outbuildings and a couple of walk-in freezers. The savage early morning chill had now given way to the extreme heat of day, the sun climbing high in the sky. We could see a busy harvesting operation already in progress on the endless rows of fig plants, people swarming to and fro carrying big polystyrene boxes of fruit.

Vickey led the five of us to the farm, subjecting us to a new low in patronising ‘advice’: “As you walk on to the farm it’s very important that you lift your legs up and walk quickly. You have to demonstrate that you’re eager to work. The farmers have been through a lot of troubles and get upset very easily. And if they ask you what hostel you’re from, tell them ‘Vickey’s place’. They don’t know what Borderline Backpackers is, just say ‘Vickey’s place’.” It was all very strange.

We were left with a German girl to sign us all in. Apparently she was a supervisor but she seemed pretty new herself and didn’t know where anything was. Elsewhere in the warehouse a group of girls were busy packing the fruit into little plastic containers. They looked like they had a cushy job. We were each given a book of tickets with unique numbers in to put in our boxes, so they could check how much work we did. I was paired up with Ying, the Chinese girl.

And so the picking work began. I didn’t know much about figs, recalling them solely from the dead brown gunk you get inside fig rolls, but live in the flesh they are a difficult proposition to deal with. The apple-sized fruit bruise incredibly easily in the boxes and the trees produce a foul milky sap that burns your skin on contact. We were all kitted out with flimsy plastic gloves as protection and left to soldier on in the heat. We were expected to fill four boxes of fruit an hour.

Supervising our section was an intimidating redneck bloke called Noel with long unkempt hair and a fearsome moustache. He seemed like a proper slave-driver and was clearly used to sacking people at the drop of a hat. He looked at me like shit for turning up in rubber boots in this heat, but as far as I’d known you always needed wellies for farm work. Vickey certainly hadn't bothered to warn me to wear trainers. I complained my clippers were rusty and he simply spat on them to ease up the joint then handed them back.

I got to speak to a few other backpackers working on the farm; most of them were staying at another hostel in town. They said it was incredibly over-crowded too; there were so many travellers booked in that people had to sleep on the floor of the TV room. One guy was sharing a single bunk-bed with his girlfriend. I don’t know how the Mildura hostels can get away with squeezing people in for extra cash; whatever safety laws are in place don’t seem to be enforced.

Ying and I filled box after box with fruit as the day wore on, but it was clear we were struggling to meet the quota. She was grafting away like there was no tomorrow but I felt like I was running on empty, struggling to comprehend the day’s strange turn of events. What was I doing here? 24 hours ago I had been strolling round St. Kilda with my parents and my best mate, on holiday. Here I was, lured into the great beyond by a wildly inaccurate website, and I didn't even know what f**king state I was in!

It was early evening when they let us clock off for the day. I was relieved the hard slog was over, but I wasn’t ready for the bombshell Noel was about to drop. Turns out Ying and I had not filled enough boxes of fruit. We were sacked on the spot. It was humiliating. I felt bad for Ying too as she was blameless.

I’d heard this happened a lot to new people; these fig farmers had a reputation for being utter bastards. The staff turnover rate was very high as they simply didn’t bother re-hiring you if you weren’t fast enough on the first day. I met the owner, and he was genuinely frightening. He ran around shouting and swearing at people if they made even slight damage to his precious fig plants. They really did talk to the workers like they were stupid.

I felt frustrated and powerless. The three French guys commiserated me while we waited for the pickup. They had done okay, despite receiving a furious bollocking from the head honcho for pulling off a leaf. They couldn’t understand why I hadn’t argued the toss and demanded another chance. But I didn’t want to face this shit again tomorrow. If I quit the hostel I’d lose the week’s rent but at least I would get my day’s wages. (Though it would subsequently take Vickey five months and repeated demands to finally cough up the money.)

Vickey was surprisingly sympathetic when she arrived in the minibus. Presumably by giving it a good go I had proven myself not to be a ‘negative’ person. She said she would “sort something out” for me but I knew this would involve doing badly-paid grape-picking.

She seemed to have taken quite a shine to me; she even asked if I wanted to accompany her to a motorbike race that evening. I said I was too tired. I had horrible visions of her trapping me in some sort of dungeon and forcing me to be her 'husband'. I felt a lot better when she handed my passport back. We were dropped off at our house. Ying was making plans to leave for Adelaide and I was in half a mind to go with her.

I met some Irish backpackers who were hanging round in the living room and explained my tale of woe. Like everyone I met that day they commiserated me; I was doing excellently on the sympathy front. I guessed these were the ‘negative’ people Vickey was talking about. I soon understood why.

They’d been stuck in Mildura for weeks, waiting for occasional crumbs of work from Vickey, and they had all run out of money. Strung along on her false promises and too skint to move on. The grape-picking wages at the vineyard were criminal – just 25 cents for each full bucket of grapes. One guy I spoke to explained you’d be lucky to make $40 a day doing this; he was forced to quit after three days due to exhaustion.

I felt sorry for them but no way was I going to let this happen to me. I got a good night’s sleep and spent the next day searching the internet for decent working hostels within a day's travel. The only ones I could find had vague information or very bad reviews. I wished I’d investigated Mildura properly before I came; the reviews for Borderline Backpackers (which tallied very closely with my experiences) showed its website up to be an utter lie. I grew more and more angry as I realised I’d been had. I had a lot to learn.

Now my savings had run out and my choices were severely limited. So I did the only thing I could do. I got out the credit card. And I booked a flight.