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I'm glad to get a chance to contact you again. For two weeks I have been in a town of just 1000 residents, a long way from anywhere except miles andmiles of farmland. The town, Childers, consists, quite literally, of one street which is, in fact, the 1000 mile-long road from Brisbane to Cairns. But I came here in search of work and thankfully that is what I found although, to be honest, I didn't quite imagine it to be quite as arduous as it is! On the first day here I picked lemons which wasn't too bad just as a one off, but now I've got something more permanent, from 7am until Monday to Friday in fact, planting sugar cane. I think I should explain. I sit on a trailor with another bloke being pulled very slowly by a tractor for ten hours a day across goodness knows how many acres of earth, lobbing heavy two-metre-long sticks which have about a 20cm diameter (like a fat bamboo cane) into a plunger which plants it into the ground. This would be bad enough but it is also about 35 degrees with absolutely no shade all day long. And this would be bad enough but the cane has tiny little prickles on them which somehow find themselves irritating every orifice of my body. And to cap it all the man who is on the trailor with me (we take it in turns, one to throw the cane into the planter, the other to haul as much cane as humanly possible onto our knees before throwing it into the planter) is the biggest moron I have ever had the displeasure to meet. He is an Australian who has never been out of Queensland and every minute of the every day he tells me I'm not good enough, have no right to be here, that I don't wash my clothes properly, that I don't sit properly on the tractor, that I hold sugar cane as if "you're grabbing your girlfriend's tits", that I don't work hard enough, that I work too much, that I suck up to the boss too much, that I don't do enough to impress the boss, that the farm would have finished planting its 100-odd acres by now if it wasn't for me because I'm too slow, that because I'm English I am indirectly telling him that he shouldn't have barbecues (that was perhaps the most bizarre), that when I leave Childers I should shoot as many Aborigines as I can, that I wear the wrong shoes, that the water I drink is not cold enough, that the only reason he continues working there is to keep me in a job, that he gave up studying to be a brain surgeon so that he could plant sugarcane, that he got sacked from his last ob because he was the only one in the company who knew how to do the job properly, that he was planning to shoot dead everybody at the electricity board because they didn't give him a job, that I should bring two packed lunches with me, one for me, one for him, and on Friday he told me that I should perform oral sex on him. And this is just the half of it.
What keeps me there (apart from the latter, of course) is the knowledge that of the 70-odd backpackers at the hostel all of whom are picking various kinds of fruit, I am being paid twice as much. Also they lend me a car to drive to work in which is nice. On the first day I almost hit a kangeroowhich is not something that happened everyday on the way to work in Milton Keynes last year.
Yesterday some kind of lunatic booked into the hostel. The first time set eyes on me he told me "You should put on some weight, mate" then walked away. Half an hour later he told me that my girlfriend was fat and that I looked liked a heroin addict. I said "You're a bit of an idiot, aren't you", to which he grabbed me round the neck and started pulling me outside, punching me in the stomach. Luckily everybody else fought him off me he's now been chucked out.
Such is the excitement of life in this one horse town. Frankly, the scenery around here is very beautiful with swathes of sugar cane fields and orchards as far as the eye can see. There's not much to do here apart from work but at least it allows me to save money. We're going to stay here until the end of April so if anyone wants to drop me a line before then (letters about a week from Britain) the address is: c/o Palace Backpackers Hostel, 72 Churchill Street, Childers, Queensland 4660 Australia. Internet access is naturally quite difficult to come by but I will endeavour to reply to your emails as soon as poss.
So tomorrow I'm going to be up at 5.45 ready to plunge some more sticks into a hole and get shouted at. I wouldn't miss it for the world.
Hope all is well with you, please keep in touch, I rely on your messages.
Thanks,
Ian