“Plums” by Justin Hahn

Author Questions:

• How deep of an understanding do you have of your foods?
• Did you answer the United Farm Worker’s call on “The Colbert Report” when they asked America to “Take Our Jobs”?

It is 10 am on Tuesday morning in Queensland, Australia.

But this is not the Australia most tourists will see.

I’m not seeing the bare breasts of hot girls sunning on Bondi Beach. Nor the arid hellscape on the way to Ayer’s Rock. Not even Aborigines high on mentho,[1] demanding a few bucks for a beer on the steps of the Sydney opera house.

All I see, all day, are plums, plums, plums, plums. Because I’m working on a plum farm. I pick plums as a migrant laborer because most Australians shun this sort of work and, unlike my fair country, Australia has no land border to facilitate streams of illegal immigrants.

It’s hard work, and boring. No job security. A hail storm could ruin the harvest, or a poor pollination could end it entirely. But it’s well paid, and I can’t complain about being outside in Australia instead of in some office building on Bishop Street.

But it’s 10 am: time for our first break of the day. Some call it “smoko,” while others call it “morning tea.”

“Careful, fellas,” the manager reminds us as we unload the plums. They are a few days from perfect, with just a little bit of spring to them: too much jostling will send them to the jam makers in Sydney instead of the produce section of the IGA[2], where they will get as much as $19 a kilogram.

So we bend at the waist and unhook the bottoms of our canvas sacks, letting 20 kilos of fruit softly roll into the plywood trailers.

We’ve already filled four bins—about 500 kilograms each—full of plums. Our backs are already sunburnt. Our shirts are already sweat through. And only the first three hours of picking are over.

Two Britons, two Frenchmen, and an American—all working the Harvest Trail. The others are doing it to get some extra cash to keep traveling. The Brits are bound for Uluru and the clubs of Sydney; the French back to Bali for cheap cigarettes and the “best waves in the world.” But I, the only American backpacker anyone can remember working the stone fruit harvest, am just another economic migrant. Like the Koreans or the Sri Lankans or the Indians. Or, back home in America: the Mexicans, Guatemalans, and assorted other dark people from beneath the border.

See, I haven’t had a steady job since returning from teaching English in Asia two years before. It was, to be honest, the only job I could have gotten after a lackluster college career and the 2009 global financial implosion. So when a friend from my teaching days told me there was ample farm work in Australia, I spent the last of my savings on a one-way ticket to Sydney.

I’m getting $18.55 an hour. That is the best wage I’ve ever had, and with almost 20% unemployment back home, it was this or another trip to the welfare office to renew my EBT card. If I work all 12 months of my Working Holiday Visa, I could go back to economically stagnant America with $40,000.

The manager, a 49-year-old convict without a driver’s license (200 km/h through the heart of Sydney on a motorbike back in the 80s) and a fat stash of homegrown in his tucker bag, unloads his 20 kilos and joins us for a smoke and a cuppa beneath the plum trees.

“How’s the missus doing up the shed?” he asks one of the Brits—a 24-year-old surfer living out of a campervan—as he rolls a spliff with a filter.

“Bloody bored.”

His girlfriend, also from Cornwall, is in the packing shed, like the manager’s partner. It’s repetitious, dulling work usually allotted to women. They stare for hours at the shiny red orbs rolling through a sterilizing bath, then grade them according to size, skin texture, and ripeness. Its only grace, I’m later told, is the dearth of biting flies. Everything else from the sore neck to the social isolation is enough to make the woman, a nurse practitioner back in England, threaten her boyfriend she’ll quit.

We sit smoking and sipping in silence until we hear the whine of the farmer’s dirt bike coming down the granite hills from the packing shed.

“Take a drag?” the manger says to no one in particular. We all look away, and I mutter “better not.” What sort of supervisor offers drugs to the employees on the job?” the four other boys must be wondering, but in their respective languages. I imagine “bloody hell” bouncing around the Britons’ heads. Maybe something like “mon deiu” inside the French skulls. Or maybe I’m just an uptight American.

The next three hours until our one o’clock lunch drag on. The plums begin to take on other forms: backyard mangoes from my Kailua childhood; tight Bacchic bunches from Safeway; the occasional rear-view-mirror cherry. The shitty radio on the tractor cuts in and out as storm clouds roll over, but drop nothing to ruin the harvest. If the plums sit wet too long on the branch, they’ll go rotten. “Fakkin’ waste,” the manager says. Then: “Fuck off, rain.”

But when lunch comes around, the five of us perch ourselves on the rails of the plum bins as the vintage tractor smokes up the hill to the shed with 2,000 kilos of stone fruit in tow. An ancient collie trots in our diesel wake, and the French boys make encouraging onomatopoeic noises.

In the shed, the manager gets into a tin of sardines while the Brits start in on peanut butter and jam sandwiches. I munch on a chocolate bar and sip yerba mate. But the half hour goes too fast for the French boys who, to save money for their return trip to Indo, eat only pasta and ketchup for each and every meal. They boil it on a camp stove in the back of their Holden station wagon. Today the stove is slow to start, and when the English-speaking world rumbles down the hill back to work, they both come trotting up shirtless behind us with mouths still full of penne and ketchup.

“Allée!” I shout.

The next two-and-a-half hours are going just as slow as the first six, until I mention Lady Gaga. I figure it’s good music to work to.

“Fakk that,” the manager says. He’s a major fan of AC/DC.

“Is good for dance at party,” one of the French boys, a kid from Department 89, says. “You sing her? You do us Gaga?”

“Heck yeah,” I say, and launch into the first notes of “Bad Romance”—the notes that’ll brand me a “poofter” for the rest of my two week stint on the farm, even after I expound poetic on the virtues of the German girls in town, the Aussies on Bondi Beach, and even the middle-aged human resources woman who all got us hired at this farm.

(“You have to admit,” I tell them as the picking progresses. “For an old bird, she’s still got it.”)

The last few hours drag by. It’s hot: Australia hot. The flies are back and the naturopathic lemon grass and tea tree bug balm isn’t doing shit. They sit gnawing on my neck, and move from eye to ear to mouth and back to eye again.

I’m jonesing for another poorly rolled cigarette, but can’t seem to snatch the seconds alone to roll it.

The easiest plums to pick are gone, so it’s time to break out the ladders. The lingering insecticides on the plums burn my eyes when I rub them, and the fungicides on the leaves set off sneezing sprees across the orchard. And the bloody flies. The bloody, bloody flies. Three trillion in the continent, and they’ve all decided to call my face home.

“Pick quicka,” the farmer walks by, saying again and again. “Gotta pick ‘em quicka.”

But soon the day is done. Another day, another dollar. Well, another $148, plus a super-annuation pay out of 9%, and all the plums we can eat.

We five boys hang pile on to the tractor train again. We jostle back up the hill to our cars and campervans. Then, after a few words with the farmer, head back to our trailer park.

It’s on the outskirts of a small farming town high in the mountains, about three hours’ drive from Surfers’ Paradise, and tonight is a party. This Tuesday is the perfect storm for a migrant laborer pissfest: payday, the birthday of a Canadian lettuce picker, and a special on pizzas at the shop in town.

I’ll spare readers the details of the Cuban kid who threatened to beat the shite out of the birthday boy for hitting on the single unattached German girl. And the other German girl who passed out after drinking a fifth of vodka straight. And the mystery of just who coated the trailer park bathroom in red wine-scented vomit. And the lecherous, red-nosed, 60-year-old trailer park night manager who kept pointing at the Aussie flag on my socks, and shouting “I want that JACK OFF!”

Suffice it to say, a few hours and a few too many cups of goon later, I crawl into my tent, sore and sunburnt. I’m so tired I don’t even bother to check my tent for redbacks or whitetails—the deadly poisonous spiders that’ll kill or put you under mountains of medical debt. I just curl up in my REI bag; set my mobile phone to wake me at 4:30 am (although I know the chorus of kookaburras and magpies will do it sooner); think of how nice it is to finally be employed again; and pass out.