I must start this post with an apology to my faithful followers for my lack of activity during the last 3 months. I know it must have been hard for you not reading about my incredible adventures as often as you would like to, but, fear not, the long waiting has come to an end (just kidding) :). So, on February the 4th, after having thought about it for some time, I decided that my time in Sydney was over and I needed to move on to pursue a new goal. And to that purpose, I spent 12 hours on a bus from Sydney to Melbourne, 2 hours on a train from Melbourne to Seymour and 2 more hours on a bus from Seymour to Shepparton. Final destination: Mooroopna. Goal: picking as many pears and apples as possible. Period: Farm work in Australia.
So long Sydney!
Before telling you more about my drastic change of plans and location, I wanted to talk about how I spent my last weeks in Sydney. As you might remember from previous posts, I changed workplace and went to work to Nelson Hotel. Compared to Fonda, I made less friendships, but I felt the managers were more genuine. I learnt some new skills and I felt that, overall, my time there (a couple of months) was great and worthwhile. I was lucky enough to be working there while they hosted their annual party. They were doing it basically as a way to thank their employees for the hard work during the whole year.
I showed up at the venue at 10:00 and people were already drinking. That day, we didn’t have to pay for anything. The first stop was a place in the city where we played bowling and kept on drinking. We then had lunch in a pizzeria and, afterwards, we made it to Newtown, (the cool neighbourhood I had already visited a month ago) where we checked out some breweries. We ended up back at the venue with more drinks for free and with the bar just opened for us. It was really cool and I’m really thankful to them. Thanks a lot for the last couple of months Chad, Mark, Paul, Harry and Imran 😉
At the end of January, our apartment at Bondi Road was getting empty. Cyprien had already left to Innisfail to go work picking bananas. Thomas was going to join him soon. Gorka was going to New Zealand on holidays and he didn’t know if, when back in Sydney, he would stay there or he would go to Brisbane. Hannah was staying in Sydney but moving to a different apartment. I had been thinking for a couple of weeks about leaving Sydney and going to do farm work, picking apples and/or pears. Once I realised everyone was leaving, I felt like destiny was telling me something…
Before saying goodbye to what had been my house and my first point of contact with Australia, there was something I really needed to do. I needed to make use of the voucher my friends had given me the night of my 28th birthday, back in Barcelona. I needed to take advantage of my birthday present. I needed to see the area of Wollongong from a different perspective. I needed to release all the adrenaline so I could pick apples properly. I needed… I needed to fly free!
I happened to do my second sky dive on January the 26th 2018, the Australia Day. It was amazing. The feeling was even more incredible than my first time, back in Barcelona. I told myself I needed to force my brain to be more aware so I could enjoy every single second of the freefall, and that’s what I did. I want to thank each one of you who contributed to this amazing present, thanks guys 🙂
After feeling like a bird, it was time to leave NSW and move to Victoria. We had a Wolf of Wall Street breakfast to say goodbye to Gorka and we then went to have lunch to a truly basque restaurant. A couple of days later, I was taking the bus from Sydney to Melbourne. I slept at Carlo’s place my last night in Sydney, since we had already left the apartment. I then went to have lunch with Mattia, Matteo, Eloïse and Marie and, eventually, I got onto the bus, ready for my new adventure. Thanks for all the good things we shared in Sydney, so long 😉
Off to Mooroopna!
Now, let’s start digging into this a little bit. Why did I take a bus to go from Sydney to Melbourne rather than taking a flight? Sometimes you can have flights from Sydney to Melbourne at a very good price (between 30-50 AUD one way). At that time though, prices were a little bit higher. Money aside, the biggest drawback I found when I first when to Melbourne by plane was that, if you use a cheap company like Jetstar, you are not going to be landing at Melbourne’s airport, but at Avalon airport, which is 1 hour away from Melbourne (and 22 AUD by the only bus that can take you there). Link to the “cheap” Skybus:
https://www.avalonairport.com.au/getting-to-avalon/bus-transfers
So, I decided to take a 70 AUD (one way) bus from Melbourne to Sydney, which, I must say, was in a very good condition (toilet, usb chargers, screens, etc.,). It was also driven by a very kind and funny bus driver, whose name I have unfortunately forgotten.
Thus, I arrived in Shepparton the morning of February the 5th, at around 11:30. By 13:30, and after taking a local bus, I was entering Kellys Hostel, an “Asian” hostel in Mooroopna. I couldn’t find that hostel in any website and the only reason why I got it was because of my contractor. She was friend with the person in charge of the hostel. Before continuing with my story, I want to provide some info for those interested in using their farm work as a way to extend their visa. So, let’s get started:
What’s the second year visa about?
What’s your visa number?
417 or 462?
If you have the 417
Like people from the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, etc., and everyone from Europe but Spain, (thanks M. Rajoy, I’m sure that while dealing with Australia’s government to decide what visa we were going to get you didn’t even understand what they were telling you, you piece of sh*t) then, to extend your visa, you must do farm work or construction, but in can be done in any region within Australia.
If you have the 462
Like myself and people from China, Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, etc., then, to extend your visa, you can work in farm or hospitality (not in construction), but the job must be done above the Tropic of Capricorn. Yes, you guessed well, basically they are forcing us to go work in the biggest uninhabited areas of Australia. There, if you are lucky, your best friends will be the crocs. To have a clearer image to what that would mean, please, take a look at the following picture:
- To have an even more detailed understanding on what cities are considered to be above the Tropic, please, check the following two websites:
– To check the postcodes of the cities above the Tropic of Capricorn (scroll down until the “Specified areas of northern and regional Australia” section):
– To map these postcodes with the name of the cities (like a DNS service):
http://auspost.com.au/postcode
How long do you have to work for?
To find that out, if you check the homeaffairs link I provided before and scroll down until the “How to count specified work” section, you should be able to get a pretty good understanding, but the main point is summarized here:
“‘Three months’ of specified work means a period equivalent to three ‘calendar’ months, which is taken to be a minimum period of 88 calendar days, including weekends or equivalent rest days during your period of employment. To meet the three months specified work requirement you must actually work for the same number of days that a full-time employee would normally work in a three month (88 calendar day) period.”
In a nutshell, if you find a job where you can work between 35 to 40 hours per week for 3 months in a row, then you are done. Even if you don’t work on the weekends, you don’t actually need to work 88 days. That has some fine print like normally you need to work 5-6 days per week and a minimum of 6 hours per day. Like, it is not valid if you work 2 days 12 hours per day and then 5 days 3 hours per day.
If you are not able to find such a job, but rather you have some casual jobs where you might work 2 weeks, then you stop one week, then 3 weeks, then you stop, etc., then you would actually need to work for 88 days in total, which as you might have guessed by this point, it will take way more than 3 months.
The 3 months or 88 days apply to both 417 and 462 visas.
Finally, if you want to look for these kind of jobs, you would normally use the same tools you were using to find jobs in Australia, just filtering by “Visa 462” or “Visa 417” or “Second Year Visa” or “Visa Extension” or (place your phrase here):
Facebook groups: “Work and holiday Australia Second year Visa 462”, “2nd Year Visa Jobs”, etc.
https://www.backpackerjobboard.com.au/
I would say that now we are in a good position to talk a little bit about my story 🙂
So, as I was saying before, I arrived in Mooroopna -a small town in the state of Victoria, 3.5 hours north of Melbourne- on February the 5th, ready to pick some fruit. Some questions might come to your mind, as you started to read this post. Thus, in order to ease your mind and let you read the rest of the post in joy and peace, I’ll provide you with some answers now 😉
Update Second Australian Working Holiday Visa Post-COVID, 2023
What I’ve just written above has been like that until COVID. After COVID, like in every country, some stuff have changed. The differences between the type of jobs and the areas where you can work to get your second Australian Working Holiday Visa have decreased. We could say the jobs and the areas between the 417 and the 462 have been almost unified but, since there are still some subtle differences, I’m adding here the links with the most up-to-date information.
Second Working Holiday Visa 417:
https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/what-we-do/whm-program/specified-work-conditions/specified-work-417
Second Working Holiday Visa 462:
https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/what-we-do/whm-program/specified-work-conditions/specified-work-462
Why and how?
1. Why did I leave Sydney for a forsaken village in the middle of the state of Victoria?
If I had to give a score to my 3 months in Sydney it would be a 7/10. I enjoyed my time there, got to check different stuff within the city and its surroundings, met very nice people and got to spend Christmas and New Year over there, which is not something you do everyday. These were the good points about my time in Sydney.
On the other hand, I found the city extremely expensive (specially the rent). Finding a house was kind of hard and, while I got two jobs during my time there, none of them provided me with a lot of hours and/or with a “nice” salary. I met some people who said they made a lot of money in Sydney. They worked in restaurants or bars where they would do 40+ hours per week and they would get paid penalty rates on the weekends. I didn’t find any of that during my time there (and the same can be said about most of my friends), but I believe it is just a matter of being on the right place at the right time. So, yes, I could say I left Sydney to try to save more money for my trips and to get to know a different area of Australia.
2. Why did I go to that area of Australia when I mentioned above that, being on a 462 visa, if you want to extend it, you need to work above the Tropic of Capricorn?
I did some research on farm work while I was still in Sydney and I knew that I would go either to Queensland or Victoria. In Queensland, most of the jobs were paid hourly. The minimum is 22.86 AUD per hour, which, after taxes, gives yous something like 19.43 AUD per hour. That minimum is the same throughout the whole country when it comes to farm work, or, at least, it should be. Also, most of the crops in Queensland were banana, lemon, orange, grapes, mango, strawberries, etc., crops which I had no previous experience with.
On the other hand, I did have previous experience with apples, since I had worked for 4 seasons picking apples with my dad in France when I was a kid. I found out that in Queensland there were not many apples or pears crops but, in Victoria, there were plenty.
At that time, I didn’t know if I wanted to extend my visa or not. All I wanted was to make some money to be able to travel from Melbourne to Darwin. Yes, that was my truly goal. I wanted to cover half of Australia. I wanted to do the extended version of the East Coast trip. To me, it wasn’t a problem whether I did it on my own by bus (there are a couple of companies in Australia that offer different routes to cover different parts of Australia), on my own by car or with some friends I would meet while working.
So, after considering the different options, I decided to go back on time to remember what it felt like picking apple. And, just like that, I embarked myself into an adventure that we could name as “picking apples in Mooroopna, Australia” 😉
3. How did I find the job?
On Gumtree. I would just type in stuff like “fruit picking in Australia”, “apple picking in Australia” and the ones alike. After checking different ads and making some phone calls, I ended up with the name of one person who told me that the apple/pear season was starting on February and it would last till May/June.
4. How did I find the accommodation?
Back then, while I was looking for farm jobs in the Shepparton region, it was way easier finding the job than the accommodation. There were different caravan parks where you could either pay for your private cabin, pay for a shared cabin or pay for a piece of land where you could set up your tent. Some cabins were cheap, but they were already taken. The ones left were very expensive and I didn’t feel like sleeping in a tent after working.
Link to caravan parks:
http://www.acaciagardenscaravanpark.com.au/
So, after sending several messages back and forth to the person I contacted for the job, I was able to get a room in an “Asian” hostel. I say “Asian” hostel because everyone there but me was from Asia. Also, if it hadn’t been for that person, I wouldn’t have been able to find the hostel, because it is not a hostel publicly advertised on Google.
Ah, almost forgot, there was another accommodation option which I didn’t choose after reading its terrible Google’s reviews. I thought I would rather sleep in tents. And I can tell you that, after having been there a couple of times to visit some of the friends I met working, if you can, you should avoid it. The name of the hostel is “Backpackers” and if you type in “Backpackers Mooroopna” in Google you will realise why you would rather avoid it.
5. How much money can you make?
The big question. One of the reasons why I also chose Victoria was because most of the farms there were paying per contract, rather than per hour. That means that the faster you work, the more money you can make. And, as I said before, because I already had experience picking apples, I did the math and thought I could make more money working on a piecework rather than working per hour. They were paying 34.75 AUD per bin of pears (before taxes) and 31.69 AUD per bin of (strip picking) apples. Normally you would get to work between 8 and 8.5 hours per day.
Now, to really do the proper math, I would say the money you make while working on contract depends 60% on how good you are, 30% on the farm, trees, ground, etc., and 10% on the supervisor you have. During my time there, depending on what I’ve just mentioned above, I met people who could pick 2 or 3 bins per day and people who could pick 7 or 8 bins per day.
First day of picking: welcome to the jungle
Back to my story, after meeting the hostel’s manager and unpacking my stuff, I met my contractor (the person who “hired” me) so we could go to the Madec office in Shepparton. This is a laboral office which helps workers and employers to get in touch for common purposes. We had to take a little exam (pretty straight-forward) showing some must and must-not do, security issues and some other stuff. Once we were done with it, they gave us a card that we would need to bring with us everyday at work.
After that, I bought some food and other stuff for my new job and went back to the hostel. There is just 5 km from Mooroopna to Shepparton but unfortunately the bus and/or train that takes you there does not come as often as you would like. After having dinner I went to bed to try to catch some sleep. Next day would be the beginning of my farm work in Australia!
I woke up at 04:45 to meet my contractor, who would take me to the farm where I would be having my first day of work. On the way there, I met a Japanese guy who was just in my same situation. We both were going to start working that day. Once in the farm, we went through another induction (this is one of the most tedious parts of this farm, every time you change block, or crop, you need to go through yet another induction). I met the manager and… wait a second, I need to pause here.
Are you familiar with all the acronyms used in the american corporations? Because farm work in Australia uses some of them. You have 5 key players: the big boss who you will never meet (like the CEO), the manager (like the manager), the supervisor (like the team leader), the contractor (like the recruiter) and finally you, the picker (the employee).
Contractors are the ones who step in between and make the money through you. They make money on commission, so, the more you pick, the more they make. 10 years ago, without contractors in the game, pickers could make way more money. But because CEOs and managers are always lazy (right?), they found in them the key player. Someone who would deal with all the paperwork and would find the workers without them having to do any effort, other than taking some money from the pickers. Sounds like a great deal, doesn’t it? 🙂
I’ve met a few managers and most of them were a little bit racist and unfair and… you get the point right? Most of them also didn’t care much about your picking. They wouldn’t come there to see how good or bad you were picking. That was the job of the supervisor, who, depending on how lucky you were, could be a pain in the ass or a great help.
…so, I met the manager and after telling him that, because I already had experience, I wanted to pick on my own (normally the job is done in pairs), he told me: “it doesn’t matter how good or fast you are, here everyone picks with someone else and it won’t be different for you”. So, as you can see, everything was starting pretty nice (irony mode ON). The thing is, and don’t take this the wrong way, when you work per hour, you don’t really care about your partner or about how fast you can go or stuff like that. But, when you are paid for what you pick, if you can choose (and you can’t pick alone), you want your partner to be faster than the speed of light.
After our first 3 bins (one and half each), the manager came back and told me: “if you want, you can pick alone, but you have to go pick the outside row”. Basically, he let me pick alone in the one place where you couldn’t even see the colour of the apple (yes, my first day was colour picking, rather than strip picking) because of the mud and dust and, also, in the one place where, normally, the fruit (if there was some) was very small.
To make the day even better, once I did my first bin on my own and once I had lunch (we were forced to stop for lunch even if we didn’t want to), while I was getting ready to start a new bin, the supervisor came and told me: “we will be finishing for today in like an hour and, as you won’t be able to fill another bin within that time, you are done for today”. So, my first day of picking I picked 2.5 bins and I made something like 75 AUD. Isn’t that great?
That evening I talked to my contractor and told her that I wasn’t happy either with the fact that I couldn’t work on my own or with the fact that we were doing colour picking. I had never done color picking before and normally you make way less money (compared to strip picking). So, next day, I went to a different farm (the CEO was always the same, but he had different farms), with a different manager, a different supervisor and the same tedious induction process. In that farm I was able to pick on my own and for the next couple of weeks or so I would be picking, for my first time, pears. At the beginning I didn’t know why they would pay more for strip pear picking than for strip apple picking. Then I found out why.
Pears are twice as heavier as apples. So, carrying them in your picking bag for 8 to 8.5 hours per day makes a difference. The trees were huge and it was difficult for me dealing with the ladder to be able to pick all the tops. But little by little, I started to get used to it and I could feel I was doing better. The only thing I couldn’t get used to was the heat.
Picking pears under the shade
My first two weeks of work were probably the hottest in Australia and in my life. While it is true than in Andalusia we have reached up to 45 degrees, I had never had the “pleasure” to work at 38 degrees. It was crazy. We were finishing at 13:00 instead of 15:00 because it was too hot. I never experienced something like that before.
I would drink 4-5 litters of water per day. While working, even if I had just drunk water like 5 minutes ago, my brain would be just thinking about water, thinking it needed to drink again. Then, once at the hostel, I wouldn’t feel like eating, just like drinking. I had to drink all the time. And (I thought it was just curious, how smart our bodies are), due to the extreme heat and all the thirstiness I was experiencing, my body was adapting itself so I would try to drink as much as possible but I would try not to release any of these liquids. Like, even after drinking 2-3 litters of water, I wouldn’t feel like peeing at all.
Little by little the insane temperatures were dropping a little bit and I started to be able to pick more bins and make more money. Things were starting to go well. My day-to-day life was a working routine along with some episodes of “Mr. Robot”. I was also having some talks about food and culture in general with the people from the hostel. I still remember like if it was yesterday how they would take photos of my dinner. Like, I would prepare a salad for dinner and they would start to awe while taking pictures. I didn’t take photos of their dishes but I was also surprised when I saw them boiling or frying lettuce lol. By the way, talking about food, here you have some photos from our Chinese New Year celebration, on February 2018:
