Writing about my many jobs in Tasmania a few years on is an odd thing, but caught up in the madness and busy lifestyle that I lead, I have a few final stories from Tasmania, where I spent five amazing months back in early 2010 while on a Working Holiday Visa in Australia. Yet to date I have somehow neglected to mention my job as a cauliflower farmer, where I was based on a total of five different farms over a period of almost two months. Basically broccoli season had finished and I left behind my tent life of Poatina in early May 2010 and I was back in the north part of Tasmania. I spent my nights staying overnight in my car at Coles Beach by Devonport sea front. And I hoped to spend all my days working on farms. So, having returned from a short break on the western wilderness due to a few days waiting for the cauliflower to be ready, I arrived at a lonely farm in Port Sorell one day.
I had replaced my worn black and yellow gloves with brand new blue gardening style gloves. For broccoli cutting you use a sharp knife. The difference between broccoli cutting and cutting cauliflower is you use a sharp paint stripper for cutting the cauliflowers. Mainly because the “stem” (base) of the cauliflower is thicker, but also as I learned the paint stripped helps you hoist up the cauli once you have sliced it from its roots. Work began in earnest on a hillside farm in cold sunshine at a place called Port Sorell, not far away from Wesley Vale (where I had worked on various broccoli farms). Port Sorell in terms of location is rather cool in that it is slap bang in the middle of the north coast of Tasmania – check the link at the bottom of the post for the map. It was Thursday 13th May 2010 in fact and I had done a few shifts on Pyrethrum Planting in between the broccoli harvest actually (That time I planted pyrethrum). We met at 7.15 am at the offices at Work Direct in Devonport and by 7.40 we were in the tractor and up in the field ready to cut.
It was a tough day of cutting and the cauliflower was a lot harder than the broccoli to cut, but it filled the boxes quicker as they were bigger so it looked like we were working faster. Also with the cauliflower we had to line each blue crate with white plastic bags to avoid rotting and damaging. With broccoli, this was not an issue. I did an 8.5 hour stint that day on cauliflower and ended up working on four more different fields until I finally left Tasmania in June. The photos above are actually the only ones I took at Port Sorell. It was simply another chapter in my life, and another place to say I’d worked. Coming up soon – the rest of my cauliflower farms covered in separate posts and the closure of my time in Tasmania, which went fast but was highly enjoyable!
Where – Cauliflower Farm, Port Sorell, northern Tasmania, Australia
Who I Worked With – Connie, Terry, Gwen (Taiwan), Paul, Karl (England), Greg, Shaun, Rebecca (Tasmania) amongst others
When I Worked There – May 2010
Utensils Needed – Gloves, Paint Stripper
Rate of Pay – $19 AU Dollars per hour
Wikipedia on Port Sorell – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Sorell,_Tasmania
Key Song –
DAN TYMINSKI – ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER DOLLAR:
I didn’t actually make any videos AT ALL while working at Port Sorell, so here’s a video I found online…
A MINIATURE RAILWAY AT PORT SORELL: