Pitching a tent in the dark wasn’t quite the gargantuan challenge I expected it to be, even following my late evening’s adventures after getting lost on the way there, so I was soon nodding off ahead of my first day’s work on an Australian vineyard. I had been bouncing from one city to another for months and the somewhat alien, deadly quiet countryside made for a peaceful night’s sleep. But it was brought to a shuddering halt at 6am when the sun breached the horizon, accompanied by – no messing – a blood-curdling scream.
I had just about scrambled out of my sleeping bag in the semi-darkness when a second, almost monkey-like screech split the silence. All of a sudden a full-blown cacophony of simian, yelping cries broke out all around me. Now I’m fully aware of the fact that there are no monkeys in Australia, but it sounded exactly like the trees around my tent were filled with dozens of highly agitated, bawling chimps.
I clambered out of my tent around the same time as my equally bemused soon-to-be colleagues with the screeching still in full swing. “What the f*** is that?” said a female English voice from inside one of the nearby tents.
“Sounds like blumin’ monkeys!” answered a Welsh guy in his early 20s.
As it turned out, it was kookaburras – large, nasty snake-eating birds that would wake us up in the same manner ever morning for the duration of our time in Dandaragan. They break into their ‘song’ at daybreak, sunset and whenever one of them catches a snake.
Since we were up, with no hope of further shut-eye, our group got to know each other briefly before we headed off to the vineyard itself, where we were taught how to prune a grape vine. At the conclusion of her demonstration for our 12-strong band, Katy, the boss, gave us a word of warning about the electrical cutters we would be sharing between us. They work by pulling a trigger, which causes a pair of blades at the end to snap shut. A German girl on a working holiday who worked on the same plot last year went home early minus a thumb. No further warning was necessary.
Pruning isn’t particularly difficult, but you get paid by how many vines you prune – so you have to push yourself and limit breaks if you want to make decent money. Dandara-gan, being towards the north of Western Australia, is also considerably hot, which doesn’t help matters. But the worst thing about it is the toll it takes on your hands. I was unwilling to lose a finger for the sake of a few quid, so I avoided the electrical cutters in favour of loppers until I was fully used to the process. This meant that I had to work harder to keep pace, and my hands would finish the day in a sorry state.
Repeatedly slamming the loppers closed over a nine-hour day with just the one 15-minute break I allowed myself meant that some sort of repetitive strain injury was pretty much unavoidable. After my third day, I woke up during the night to find that my hands had seized and I literally couldn’t open them. I slowly peeled my fingers back and slept the rest of the night with my palms flat under my pillow. Unfortun-ately, I had no choice but to coil them around the handles of the loppers and get going again the following morning. All rather unpleasant – but still far better than a dole queue.
There were also some enjoyable moments on the vineyard. The countryside around the area was beautiful, and when the sun wasn’t too hot it was nice to be working outdoors with parrots flying overhead and kangaroos bouncing around fields in the distance. It was, however, a smaller variety of wildlife which provided the best entertainment.
The rows of vines were infested with red, biting ants. I was nipped on occasion by one or two, but generally got away with it lightly. That wasn’t the case for a Corkonian called Dave, who seemed to have a knack for putting his foot directly into an ant mound and leaving it there while he pruned the vine that rose above it. It didn’t help that the guy had a healthy, borderline phobic dislike for insects.
Intermittently we would hear a scream and look up to see the lad frantically tearing off all his clothes and staggering around like someone had poured petrol all over him and flicked a match in his direction. Dave could strip to his boxers faster than a Chippendale by the end of the first week.
To be continued...
