Gympie Pickers and life in the outback.

Gympie Pickers.

 

January marked the arrival of the Gympie pickers, an Australian equivalent of the itinerant agricultural labour of Europe. They started  their travels in Queensland with the harvesting of the early vegetable  crops, slowly moving south picking a variety of fruit and vegetable  crops on the way. At the time, and this was some forty or more years ago, my wife and I used to grow various cash crops such as carrots, onions, and so on. These crops in those days were harvested by hand, and if your farm was isolated you depended on these itinerant workers.

 

Gympie, a southern Queensland vegetable growing area  supported a year round industry, resulting in a large pool of unskilled labour. Many of these families were basically marginal, existing on unemployment benefits and what  ever they could earn on their yearly migration south. Generally they had large families, six children or more not being unusual, not that the children ever seemed to go to school. They spent a large portion of the year on the road, living in caravans, tents,  some hitch hiked and slept under trees or bushes not unlike the swaggie of old.

 

Most years we would grow some forty or fifty acres of onions that required hand harvesting after drying off. This involved lifting the crop by tractor, then the pickers would pull the onions out of the ground, top and tail the roots and stems with sharp shears. It was not unusual to have up to sixty pickers on the block during harvest time. The control of such unruly numbers often proved to be an art form in itself. Mum, Dad, and the kids would arrive in an assortment of transport. Dad would hand out the sharpened shears ,then they would  set to work  pulling at the onions. Often I would become quite alarmed at the age of some of the “workers”,   fearing they would seriously hurt themselves. They all worked as piece labour, meaning they were paid according to the quantity of crop harvested. In a sense they were independent contract workers agreeing to a price per ton harves

Each family worked as a team, although Dad often took a few breaks to refresh himself with a beer. Often the temperature at the time of the year was in the forties. They would get up to all sorts of tricks. Half filling an empty bin with the onion tops, then placing a thick layer of onions on top. Unless you dug down fairly deep into the bin you would never know. They were full of ideas as to how to extract money without working. Another problem was their name, they always wanted a different name every other days so as not to interfere with their unemployed benefit.

Another major problem was communication, they had a language all of their own, and had great difficulty stringing more than a few words together without several explicit profanities in between. One year we heard on the radio, that the police were looking for a man who had love tattooed on the fingers of his right hand. Apparently he had just murdered a woman in Sydney. Sure enough there he was out in the paddock, happily harvesting onions. My wife noticed him first, and after making eye contact both knew that the other knew who was who. My wife quickly returned to the house to phone the local police, but needless to say he disappeared in a matter of minutes. 

On another occasion a picker demanded payment in advance, and followed my wife back to the house where he tried to bar her entry by placing his arm across the stairway. At the time we owned a retired Doberman police dog who was quietly sleeping in the shade of a nearby tree. On noticing what was happening he leaped at the man's throat, and in no time had him on the ground. On release our offended picker quickly took to the highway never to be seen again.

Such were the joys of cash cropping in  outback  Australia, and the labour you needed to harvest it. This  property was many miles to the nearest town, so you just had to put up with who ever you could get. Eventually the pickers finished, packed up and headed further south following the seasonal  cropping patterns, not to be seen again for another year. We just sigh in relief, another harvest  completed.