Australia - By Gavin Ferguson
Arrival
When I was 24 I decided I would go to live in Australia with my friend, Ronan. My brother had already been living there for a while, so he put us up when we arrived. He lived just a stone’s throw from the beach in Sydney.
When we first arrived, we were jobless and broke, and Australia is not a cheap place to live. I remember walking down the street at night with Ronan, looking into the people having fun in the bars and nightclubs, thinking ‘if only we could afford to join them’.
What were you doing when you were 24?
Do you know what it’s like to be jobless and broke in a new country?
Work
Ronan and I searched relentlessly for jobs, and were able to find them relatively quickly. Ronan got a job in a boozer and I got two jobs, one as a football coach and another as the night receptionist at a large hostel.
The job in the hostel was a memorable one. It had the downside of being nightshift work, which really took a toll on me, but there were so many wonderful things about this job. I came into contact with so many happy, young people, travelling through Australia in the prime of their lives.
Would you do nightshifts if it paid well?
Would you prefer to work in a hostel, a boozer, or as a football coach?
Friends
After Ronan and I had settled in Sydney, a load more of my school friends from London decided to join us. 7 of us moved into a 3 bedroom flat in Sydney. The flat was so cramped that sometimes myself and Ronan would have to share a double bed. The first time this happened, myself and Ronan were sitting in the living room, feeling slightly awkward about the fact that we were about to get into bed together, so we decided to have a glass of whisky to settle our nerves. In hindsight, the pre-bed whisky only made things weirder.
Have you ever lived in cramped conditions?
Is it important for you to have your own space?
Love
One night, working in the hostel, I checked in a group of 3. It was 2 nice Spanish blokes and a beautiful girl from Argentina called Melina, they had just arrived from Thailand. Over the next few days, I invited them all to my birthday party and got to know Melina. We fell in love and officially declared ourselves boyfriend and girlfriend.
Farm work
When I arrived in Australia, British people had the right to live and work there for 1 year, but if we wanted to stay for more than a year, we had to do at least 3 months of farm work. Seeking the option to stay longer, 3 of my friends and I decided to go and look for farm work. We persuaded Melina to tag along with us too.
We all found work on the same pineapple farm, and I can safely say this is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. By the end of the first day at work, two of my friends, Ronan and Jack, had quit. I will never forget the image of Ronan on his lunchbreak in the middle of this first day. Laying on his back, looking up at the hot sky, a mixture of emotions radiated from his face, exhaustion from what had gone before, terror at what lay ahead.
A few weeks later, as I was trudging through a field of 600,000 pineapples, I accidentally cut my finger on the guillotine that was supposed to be used for cutting the heads of the pineapples. Seeing the blood flowing from my finger, I asked the evil foreman to stop the tractor so that I could receive treatment and go to the hospital. My fellow pineapple pickers probably felt more jealousy than pity towards me – I didn’t have to carry on working.
With this new finger injury, I was unable to complete anymore farm work and so I decided to head back to blighty. I took Melina with me.
Would you like to work on a farm?
Would you like to move to Australia?
