After an epic five months travelling across India and SE Asia, Luke and I arrived to our new lives in Sydney and fell in love with the city almost instantly.
Within a few weeks we'd rented a room in Maroubra and found work - Luke at the iconic Hurricane’s on Bondi Beach and me as a freelance writer at a weekly real-life magazine. Even though it was winter, we still spent time on the beach and managed to do a couple of surf lessons. After three months it felt like home.
And then came the bad news.
Because we’re in Australia on a subclass 417 visa (better known as a working holiday visa), we only had a year in Oz. However, the visa can be extended to two years if you’re willing to do 88 days rural work. We always knew it would be a possibility that we’d have to do rural work, but we thought we had at least until January 2015 to decide. That is until we realised that, as Luke turns 31 in December, we had to get the work completed and signed off before he became officially too old to apply.
So there it was, within two weeks we’d left our jobs, packed up our things are were on a plane to start our next adventure - as pruners in the Barossa wine region in South Australia.
Because many immigrants decide to do rural work in Oz, it’s very hard to find paid jobs, so we had to opt for WWOOFing (willing workers on organic farms) which means you work between four to six hours a day, five days a week and in return you get a bed and board. This goes against everything I believe in - I think you should get cold hard cash in return for work - but needing our visa signed off ASAP, we were left with little choice. You could say I was more of an unwilling worker on organic farm, or UWWOOFer.
The Barossa is about an hour’s drive from Adelaide and is one of the most prestigious wine regions in Australia. It’s a beautiful area of rolling hills, seemingly endless fields of vines and wild kangaroos. It’s home to well-known wineries such at Penfolds and Jacob’s Creek and also many boutique operations that produce bottles of wine costing thousands of dollars. I thought if we were going to have to do this damn rural work then we might as well do it somewhere pretty…with lots of wine!
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| The beautiful Barossa region in South Australia. |
We scored work via Gumtree at a small farm of 27 acres owned by a farmer and his young family. On arrival, I was shocked to find that our new house and workmate, Ed, was actually from the Lincolnshire village of Scopwick - just a few miles up the road from where Luke and I grew up. The world really is a small place. The three of us would be sharing a small one-bedroom cottage across the way from the farmhouse. As Ed was on his own, he slept in the living room but had to come through our bedroom to get the bathroom. In return we had to walk through his sleeping area to get to the kitchen. It was a cosy setup for us Yellowbellies.
Our job was to prune the vines ready for the summer so they could bear fruit. This involved hours and hours of snipping with secateurs along rows of hundreds of vines. I found the pruning really monotonous, it reminded me of a summer I spent working in a carrot factory when I was 16. However, it was made a bit more bearable by the amazing views we had across the Barossa. If I ever felt depressed (which was quite often), I would take a look around and appreciate my surroundings.
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| Luke pruning the vines. |
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| Not a bad view out of the "office" window. |
When we’d finished pruning, we did some odd jobs around the farm which meant we got to drive the Mule, which was fun. I also did some planting of young vines while poor Luke spent hours and hours strimming (hilariously called ‘whipper-snipping’ by the Aussies).
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| Luke in the Mule. |
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| Me planting some young vines. Tough work in the heat of the day. |
One thing that made the boring, unpaid days bearable was the animals. Our host family had a friendly Ridgeback called Jake who used to trot out to the fields with us every morning and loved a good scratch. One day we met a bearded dragon who was perched on the vine looking for some heat and we enjoyed feeding the chickens and collecting their eggs. We also found several venomous spiders in and around the cottage which was less comforting.
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| Jake and Luke on a very cold morning in the Barossa. |
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| Spot the dragon. |
On our days off we made the most of being in the Barossa and went wine tasting. Most wineries offer tastings for free or a small fee of $5. You basically work through a list of around ten to twelve wines and have a few sips of each. The sommeliers will tell you about each wine and, if you like it, you can buy a bottle or two - although we never felt obliged to buy. It’s a really fun way to learn a bit more about how wine’s made - and get a bit tipsy!
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| Ed and Luke sampling the goods at Penfolds. |
We also enjoyed a hike or two at nearby Kaiser Stuhl National Park and came across these guys…
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| Kangaroo with a Joey in her pouch. |
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| This one was a big chappy. |
I will never bore of seeing kangaroos hopping about in the wild!
It wasn’t all kittens and roses though. Having always lived in a city, I found it hard to live rurally and got incredibly bored. We didn’t have a TV or the internet, so would spend our evenings watching box sets on the laptop and managed to get through all of Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. It was winter so it still cold and dark at night and we didn’t have heating, so we’d put several layers on and just lay in bed trying not to freeze. Some nights I'd be in bed by 7pm!
I also found it difficult that we weren’t being paid. To me, hard work deserves money, but instead we were living in a cold cottage, eating nice but essentially cheap meals and using up our hard-earned savings on petrol and other essentials, while working for someone else - for free! The problem is, rural areas of Australia are used to having immigrants who have no choice but to work for free or cheap, I think they take it for granted.
I don’t think we were taken advantage of (our host family were really nice people, although there wasn’t as much free wine as you’d imagine!) but I heard some horror stories from other WWOOFers and workers in the Barossa who’d been taken in by scams, leaving them hundreds of dollars out of pocket. Common scams include farms offering $23 per bucket of oranges they pick, but the problem is that it takes about four hours to fill a bucket! Local hostels also get involved and charge people extortionate rates to stay there, saying they'll find people work, but then not giving them consistent hours. Stories like this made me think we were probably better off WWOOFing.
So we packed our bags (yet again) and headed to Kangaroo Island to see what it could offer a pair of poor British UWWOOFers...
