Farm Life

Drunken Weekend Antics 

It’s crazy to think we’ve been on the farm for a month now - that’s four whole weeks of bananas, dirty fingernails, bananas, huge spiders, bananas, drunken weekends and…oh yeah, BANANAS! It’s safe to say that our time here has definitely been an experience to remember, with such a great group of people making a pretty mundane place bearable and fun to be. With not a lot to do, we do a pretty great job of entertaining ourselves, be it scaring Jack as he comes out of the outside toliet, or jumping through his window at night wearing what can only be described as a murdering cowboys hat. We toast marshmallows on campfires under the stars, drive out to lakes and creeks nearby to explore and have had many a drunken time at the weekend - some of which include squeezing ten people into the shower at once, and then all heading up to the roof to dry off (but that’s enough about last Friday…)

The actual work part itself is pretty boring. Boring, tiring, repetitive, monotonous and dirty, to be more specific. On Mondays and Tuesdays the bananas get picked from the paddock and brought over to the shed, where they’re washed, cut off the bunches, de-clustered, measured, packed, and sent off. My job is to stand at the end of the huge conveyor-belt and pack all of the premium bananas (that’s ‘small’ to me and you) in four rows making the weight up to 14.1 kgs. Then I tie up the plastic liner, place the box on the next conveyer-belt and start all over again. TEN HOURS A DAY I DO THIS! By the time 5pm rolls around my knees ache, my shoulder throbs and I’m covered in a ridiculous amount of banana sap, or bogeys as I prefer to call them. I also have the pleasure of wearing an oversized men’s hoody ($15 from Big W, what a snip) and some pretty jazzy trainers… who said farm work couldn’t be glamorous?! 


There’s ten of us backpackers here in total, with four French and six from the UK, which is great as I can now ask for Eric’s famous hot chocolate and lava cake in French, two very essential and common questions here. Everyone’s lovely, and does their fair share of cleaning duties, which is more than I can say for when I lived in my student accommodation back at university… Where we live itself is pretty basic, and has a few items such as the ovens which look like they’ve come straight from the 1960’s, but it has everything we need to get by comfortably. We have free use of a car, which easily squeezes six people in when one of us hides in the boot under a towel (don’t worry family, it’s never me!) so getting the group around is never a problem. We’ve also had our fair share of uninvited ‘houseguests’ such as Bob the giant rhino beetle which landed on Abbie’s shoulder and sent us all into a meltdown, followed by Jiminey the cricket (original) and the mahoosive spider that didn’t hang around long enough to get a name, thank god! 

Atherton

I never imagined myself enjoying living on a farm, but it’s actually a pretty great place to be. Yes you have to walk outside when you need the toliet, and yes you have to sometimes stand in the rain whilst brushing your teeth if someone is in the bathroom, but when the stars are out and you actually stop to look around at how beautiful it is here, you realise you may never get to have these kind of random experiences again. 

One month down - two to go!