Letter from Thailand

Mentioning you're a journalist often prompts people to suggest a topic they reckon you should write about. They will generally play a starring role in the tale which in most cases, will be a complete non-event. Occasionally though, you meet someone who really has a story to tell. This was the case with
Scottish Iain.

I met the 25-year-old not long after his arrival in Australia. The Dundee native flew from Scotland to Australia via Dubai where his flight was delayed. He missed his onward connection and his bags were searched by customs. Officers found 0.09 grams of cannabis resin inside the pocket of a pair of his jeans which he had no idea was in his possession.

It was an amount roughly equivalent in size to about one-eight of a pea, smaller than the head of a match, and he expected to make his re-booked onward flight. The seriousness of the situation became apparent however, when he was detained over night and then moved to a prison close to the airport. The poor lad was then forced to undergo a full body search before being put through rounds of questioning. Many of the other inmates he came across were westerners detained on similar charges – casual cannabis smokers found in possession of tiny amounts they didn't know they had.

Iain was swept through Dubai's legal system and ended up spending over a month in prison on possession and smuggling charges. The guy had the presence of mind to keep a diary during his imprisonment and he gave me a copy. It was a cracking account of a genuinely grueling, terrifying experience. It detailed his bemusement as the legal process went on around him entirely in Arabic and his embassy's complete failure to assist him.

One passage in the diary read: “They haven't even given me a bed so I have to sleep in the corridor with a bunch of other guys. There is a room which has mostly western prisoners staying in it so I'm hoping to get in there soon.” Iain spent four days sleeping in the corridor before eventually being given a bed by the prison authorities. He continued, “The toilets are a hole in the ground and absolutely stink. There is no toilet paper and all the prisoners are expected to use their hand.”

Inmates organised soccer matches when permitted to use the prison yard and Iain regularly joined in. On one occasion he found himself playing with a member of the Taliban caught attempting to smuggle 14 kilos of heroin through Dubai by strapping it to his body and concealing it under his clothes. Things went well for that particular smuggler until his contact failed to collect him at the airport and authorities became wary of his suspicious, aimless wanderings. Once he caught their attention the bulkiness of his clothing lead them to conclude that he was a suicide bomber of some sort and a massive security alert was sparked. He narrowly escaped being shot before the nature of his payload became apparent.

Although Iain was not physically harmed by the prison guards, other inmates did suffer abuse. He recalled, “They sent one Arab guy to solitary where they handcuffed him with his hands above his head for hours because he sat down during the counting in the yard.” He continued, “There were one or two nice guards but the rest looked on us as dirt and didn't want to be close to us.”

The diary also gave an account of Iain and his family's frantic attempts to secure help from the British authorities. He told me, “They couldn't do anything. The embassy came to visit me on the second day and told me I had to just sit and wait it out for whatever the Dubai authorities wanted to do. They told me I would probably either be deported or else given a four-year mandatory penalty.”

Iain was finally released after serving 36 days in prison. He somehow managed to avoid deportation back to the UK and was permitted to continue on his trip to Australia. This lad had a real story to tell but because he and his family were reluctant to have his full name or photo published in a newspaper it's one that won't be read about by anyone. With the exception of you lucky people of course.

Just over a week into my new career as a vineyard pruner, things were looking grim. We had been promised several months of continuous work on a number of vineyards but we were close to finishing our first plot and details beyond that were sketchy. We were told we would have to head south to a place called Margaret River and wait a few days before work was again available. To make matters worse, accommodation facilities were medieval and wages were looking like they would be far short of what was promised. With no real alternative available, I headed to Margaret River and waited for the call to say work was beginning again. It didn't come.

I worked on quite a few articles about the exploitation of foreign labour during my time with Metro Eireann but never thought I would experience it myself. I wasn't a happy camper and just couldn't take it on the chin. I decided to fill a few people in on the way the company I was working for had treated me and my colleagues, all of whom were foreigners. In the interest of fairness, I emailed XXXX, the co-owner of the company and the person who had given me the job, to let her know about why I was angry and what I intended to do about it. The following is an excerpt from my correspondence with her:

“Dear XXXX,

It's been a number of weeks since anyone from XXXXXXX XXXXXX has been in contact and I can only assume that my employment has been terminated. However, I do not feel I can let things rest until I outline some grievances I have and more importantly from your point of view, detail what I intend to do about them.

Your company placed an add on Gumtree promising $1,000-plus per week for experienced pruners and up to $1,000 for inexperienced workers. Emails I have received from you said that I would be working for two weeks in Dandaragon before transferring immediately to Margaret River. Despite the best efforts of the team it became immediately clear that nobody would be making the sort of money promised. In fact, practically everyone made less than the minimum wage.

Although we were promised two week's work in Dandaragon, this was reduced at short notice to just nine days. We were given guarantees of steady employment with free accommodation but instead were cut adrift with no wages just over a week in. Sadly, this apparently unforeseen break in our work schedule stretched on and the lines of communication broke down – mainly because your company completely ignored my numerous phone calls and emails. Eventually, I called your phone on one occasion only to be told by an operator that my number had been blocked.

It was around this time that our pay day arrived. Unfortunately, it went without any sign of payment. When my wages finally did arrive over a week late it was a paltry $580.

Another relevant point is the accommodation you provided; it was semi-derelict. I have travelled to some of the poorest countries in the world and I can safely say that I have never had to contend with such squalor. Like some of your other staff I opted to stay in a tent rather than the 'house' but I was forced to use the filthy, antiquated toilets and shower facilities. The place actually defies description but luckily, I had the presence of mind to take some photos.

I didn't expect to make my fortune when I signed up to work as a pruner. What I did expect was to be treated fairly and to receive a decent day's pay for a decent day's work. Instead, I was paid below the national minimum wage, endured a litany of broken promises and was treated like I was disposable, ignorable and not worth the time it takes to reply to an email or return a phone call.

Anyway, as you know, I am a Masters in Journalism graduate and spent much of the past three years working in the media industry for a variety of publications. At present, I am working on an article about the exploitation of foreign workers on Australia's farms and in particular, on vineyards. I will be pitching this article to a number of local, regional and national papers. My pitch will include the details of my time with your company and quotes from other persons who have had the misfortune to have dealings with XXXXXXXX XXXXXX. To add some colour, I'll also include some photos of the house you put us up in.

I have also taken it upon myself to inform as many vineyards as I can of the treatment your company metes out to its immigrant labourers. I will be drawing up a detailed account and circulating it by email and by post directly to vineyards with a suggestion that they think carefully before rewarding any contracts to companies with dubious track-records with regard to the treatment of workers. I will also send copies to other contractors – your competitors – of which I already have an exhaustive list.

Best Regards,

Robert Carry.”

I contacted newspapers and vineyards as promised and afterwards felt much better about the situation. One local paper even put a story on the subject on its front page. I also quickly found work with another vineyard contractor once in Margaret River and they proved to have fair employment practices. Exploitation is rampant in the sector but at least I wasn't a victim for too long.

Pitching a tent in the dark wasn't quite the gargantuan challenge I expected it to be so I was soon nodding off ahead of my first day's work on an Australian vineyard. I had been bouncing from one city to another for months and the somewhat alien, deadeningly quiet countryside made for a peaceful night's sleep. It was brought to a shuddering end at 6am when the sun breached the horizon by – no messing – a blood-curdling scream.

I had just about scrambled out of my sleeping bag in the semi-darkness when a second almost monkey-like screech split the silence. Suddenly, a full blown cacophony of simian, yelping cries broke out all around me. Now, I am fully aware of the fact that there are no monkeys in Australia but it sounded exactly like the trees around my tent were filled with dozens of highly agitated, bawling chimps.

I clambered out of my tent around the same time as my equally bemused soon-to-be colleagues with the screeching still in full swing. “What the f**k is that?” said a female English voice from still inside one of the tents.

“Sounds like blumin' monkeys!” answered a Welsh guy in his early 20s.

As it turned out, it was Kookaburras – large, nasty snake-eating birds that would wake us up in the same manner every morning for the duration of our time in Dandaragon. They break into their touching song at day-break, sunset and whenever one of them catches a snake.

After some brief introductions we headed off to the vineyard itself where we were taught how to prune a grape vine. At the conclusion of her demonstration for our 12-strong group Katy, the boss, gave us a word of warning about the electrical cutters we would be sharing between us. You pull a trigger and a pair of blades snap shut. A German girl in Australia on a working holiday visa worked on the same plot last year. She went home early minus a thumb.

Pruning isn't particularly difficult, but you get paid by how many vines you prune so you have to push yourself and limit breaks if you want to make decent money. Dandaragon, being towards the North of W.A., is also considerably hot, which doesn't help matters. The worst thing about it is the toll it takes on your hands. I was unwilling to loose a finger for the sake of a few quid so I avoided the electrical cutters in favour of a loppers until I was fully used to the process.

This meant that I had to work harder to keep pace and that my hands would finish the day in a sorry state. Repeatedly slamming a loppers closed over a nine-hour day with just the one 15-minute break I allowed myself means some sort of repetitive strain injury is pretty much unavoidable. I woke up during the night after my third day to find that my hands had seized and I literally couldn't open them. I slowly peeled my fingers back and slept the rest of the night with my palms flat under my pillow. Unfortunately, I had no choice but to coil them around the handles of the loppers and get going again the following morning. All rather unpleasant, but still far better than a dole queue.

There were also some enjoyable moments on the vineyard. The countryside around the area was beautiful and when the sun wasn't too hot it was nice to be working outdoors with parrots flying over head and kangaroos bouncing around fields in the distance. It was however a smaller variety of wildlife which provided the best entertainment. The rows of vines were infested with red, biting ants. I was nipped on occasion by one or two, but generally got away with it lightly.

That wasn't the case for a Cork guy named Dave who seemed to have a nack for putting his foot directly into an ant mound and leaving it there while he pruned the vine it sat at the base of. It didn't help that the guy had a healthy, borderline phobic dislike for insects. We would hear a scream and look up to see the lad frantically tearing off all his clothes and staggering around like someone had poured petrol all over him and flicked a match in his direction. The guy could strip to his boxers faster than a Chipendale by the end of the first week.

My job search led me to discover that I was living in a parallel universe in which casual farm labourers earned more than journalists. A career change was in order. I secured a position working on a vineyard without too much hassle and once I had bought a car, some camping equipment and enough food to last me two weeks I set off towards a place called Dandaragon.

Dandaragon doesn't appear on most maps because for the most part it isn't accessible by sealed roads. It isn't a town – it more of a small, ill-defined region. New fangled inventions such as mobile phone signal and Internet are decades away. If you're travelling there you better have good directions.

I had good directions. They came from Google Earth and were emailed to me by Katy, the woman I would work for. The four-hour journey from Perth to Dandaragon was a complicated one so the print-off of the directions was four pages long.

I'm not too proud to admit that there were a number of wrong turns made on the way but with the help of random strangers and petrol station staff I managed to keep going in the correct general direction. I was quite pleased right up until I made my scheduled turn off a main road onto a dirt track called 'Scenic Drive' sometime approaching mid-night. I consulted my directions to see where I should go next and found that there weren't any more directions. They were cut short either by Katy's email or by the printer I used. Whatever the reason, I was stranded. I had Katy's number but I had lost signal hours ago. To top things off, I was running low on petrol and had passed the last station around the same time as my phone died. I knew I had to be close to the farmhouse I was due at a few hours previously so I continued up the five kilometre length of Scenic Drive looking for a signpost or a vineyard or anything that might get me out my predicament. The only thing that indicated that there might be life on Scenic Drive was a light in what looked like a barn or large shed.

I may not be from the country but I've seen The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, Wolf Creek and God help me, Deliverance so I know that wandering into a random farmyard in the dead of night invariably means torture, rape and murder. Besides nurturing a racking fear stemming from horror film-induced trauma I was reluctant to saunter onto someone's property in the middle of the night out of a sense of common decency. Unfortunately, I was out of options.

I pulled up at the edge of the property and, like someone having a near-death out-of-body experience, walked towards the light. It was a garage for tractors and other farm-related paraphernalia but was empty of people, be they hill billy serial killers or otherwise. I walked back outside and spotted a fairly swanky-looking farm house further into the property and a light was just barely visible through the curtained front window. I felt like an idiot, but just bit the bullet and knocked on the front door.

A farmer answered and he instantly struck me as a kindly sort. I apologised for disturbing him at such a late hour and explained my predicament. He was unconcerned by my arrival on his doorstep; probably because the lad was quite clearly hammered. Nonetheless, he had a plan to resolve my crisis and the wheels were immediately set in motion. Only two vineyards in the area employed contractors to prune them and he knew both. He threw on his wellies and with trusty dog bounding along behind him he headed towards his ute (that's Ozzy talk for a open-back 4x4). He tore off down the dirt track in the direction I had come from while my 1985 semi-vintage motor struggled to keep pace.

After 10 minutes of desperately trying not to let the bloke get away he pulled up to a gate that opened towards a small, borderline derelict house that looked to be in total darkness. We both jumped out and peered over. There were tents pitched outside the house – it was definitely the place I was after. I thanked the bloke profusely as he jumped smiling back into his ute. He waved away my appreciation and seemed happy to have done a good deed, if in a slight rush to get back to the crate of beer he had been working his way through.

I didn't feel like ruining anyone else's peace and tranquility so I quietly pitched my tent among the others and climbed in. The introductions would wait until morning.

Perth's backpacker land is flooded with Irish people and although personal experience is not always a representative sample that reflects exactly the larger picture, I was forming the belief that the Irish/non-Irish ratio was greener in Perth's Northbridge than on Dublin's O'Connell Street. Matters however, were to get still more surreal.

Myself and a motley crew of various hostel hounds decided to go along to a Latin night being hosted by a bar up the road. Bog-standard chart music played, cheap Australian beer drained and the clientèle was at least 80 per cent Irish – so all-in-all it was about as Latin as a mashed potato sandwich. However, the night suddenly became notable when I recognised someone – a guy who grew up in the same Ballybrack housing estate as me but whom I had no idea was even in Australia, never mind Perth.

For a good 20 years we lived so close that I could have stood on my back wall and spat into his front garden, were I so inclined. Now here we were on the other side of the planet still somehow living in the same neighbourhood. He wasn't quite as shocked to meet me as I was him, and I realised why when I saw who he was drinking with. He had randomly bumped into and was now travelling with two other Ballybrack natives we both knew since childhood. It's a small world – but the list of places to which people tend to travel is very, very much smaller.

I was getting nervous at the start of my second week of job-hunting. What I thought was an interview with the editor of a mining magazine turned into something of an anti-climax when he informed me as soon as we sat down in a coffee shop that there wasn't actually any job available. He mouthed off about how great his magazine was and all the great places he gets to visit before bidding me the best of luck and heading off. He even stung me to pay for his coffee. I would have to cast my net wider if I was to land anything so I started applying for every position I came across in the hope of getting something to tide me over while I found my feet.

These ideas seem like a great way of increasing your chances of getting a job on paper except for the fact that you're only going to get a response from the ones you're either qualified for or which don't require any qualifications or experience. My applications yielded two job offers – one as admin support for an oil and gas industry magazine and another as a pruner in some god-forsaken vineyard a few hundred miles north of Perth. Both arrived on the same day and oddly, so too did a third unsolicited job offer from Thailand – a property magazine I worked for about a year ago wanted me to re-enlist.

“Global economic crisis my arse,” I informed my mother, who is doing a spot of travelling herself of late and was in New Zealand at the time. “Three job offers in one day!”

“Good stuff!”, she exclaimed. “So which one are you going to take?”

“The one with the best pay.”

“Which one is that?”

“Strangely enough, the one on the vineyard.”

There was a perk involved with working in agriculture – farm labouring positions were rough going by all accounts so Ozzies with options avoided them. Foreigners are needed to fill the gap so the Australian government offers entitlement to a second year working visa as an extra incentive. Working in the middle of nowhere means there is little to spend your money on so saving is easy.

My boss-to-be told me I would need a car, camping equipment and food for about two weeks which along with a few other bits and pieces meant a substantial outlay, but the work was due to last for four months if I needed it. So that was that. I had a week to get everything together and make my way to a place called Dandaragon where I would join up with an international contingent of fellow farm labourers. We would toil long hours in the fields, live in a house with no TV in a region with no Internet or phone signal in order to provide wine to the people left in the world with the money to drink the stuff.