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.
