Hi everyone,

Well I can hardly believe I've been in Childers for 2 weeks already! I had a bit of a bumpy start to my harvesting up here in Queensland, but I have finally got a steady job so things are looking up. I am staying in a working caravan park in a little one-road town called Childers. It is about 250km north of Brisbane and near the more famous tourist destination of Fraser Island. There are around 100 other backpackers staying in the park, most of them in bunkhouses. I spent the forst 2 weeks in a cabin with 3 other girls, but when one of them left we had to move down to the bunkhouses too. It's a fun place to be with people from all around the world. Everyone is there to work and a huge range of fruit is picked and packed in the area.

My first job was, strangely enough, wworking for a crazy Turkish man called Max (!) who supervised the picking of tomatoes on a nearby farm. There are 2 large picking machines which drive up and down the rows of tomatoes, pulling behind it little platforms with seats attached that the pickers sit on. The pickers then pick (at high speed) the tomatoes and throw them onto conveyor belts whilst the machine moves. The conveyor belts move the tomatoes to the top of the machine where 2 sorters pull all the stems off (also at high speed) and throw out any rotten ones. It was pretty tough work, made considerably harder by Max constantly yelling, "FASTER FASTER" and "OPEN THE BUSH OPEN THE BUSH DON'T MISS ANY FASTER FASTER" every minute of the day. Phew! I worked for him for a week and that was about all I could manage. And I was one of the lucky ones who got to sort on some of the days.

Thankfully I now have a new job picking avocadoes at one of the large farms called Simpsons. It is quite easy work and the hours are regluar Monday to Friday. Hopefully I can get some pictures of the farm up soon. Outside of work, there isn't too much to do in Childers. We mostly hang out in the bunkhouses, playing cards, watching tv and swimming. We did manage to catch a local rugby match last Saturday night, our town against nearby Bundaberg. Childers won! Now that my hours are fixed, I can start planning to do a few things on the weekends, although public transport doesn't really exist around here so getting to places will be a challenge!