As a young man I worked at planting vegetables, in a market garden situation, on a Rohana which is a wheeled device that carries you over the ground about 4 inches above a thin trench ripped into the wet soil. Every forearm length (a standard measure in the industry, I think) you plonked a seedling into a clasping device (‘bangla word’, it means ‘to plant’) which is a ground-driven mechanism which took the tiny plant and placed it precisely where you thought it should go. A tamping mechanism came behind you, also ground driven, and went over the top of the plant, then pushed itself down to tamp the soil. Job done. Highly mechanised and purloined from the tobacco growers up river from us. They don’t grow tobacco so much, probably not the ready rubbed kind at any rate. This was then though. This was mechanically scientific, in a Victorian era sort of way.
Anyways, on the Rohana, with the ground cams working as they did, the bed where you were laying, facing backwards, rocked, shuffled left/right quickly, and in a forearm’s length, it went bump. Most satisfying.
You could, and did, get some Chuck Berry tune rhythms occurring – boop, shangalanga, shangalanga, boop boop. There was no music, not reproduced electronically, but there was noise purported to be shouting with rhythm and, strangely, Cameron could tell you the origin of that rhythm more often than not – Brahms, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky – I’ll check the spelling sometime. The top 40s of the day got an airing.
Every pass, a line of planting about 880 yards, you got to get up, get off, and change jobs. The driver steered the tractor that towed the device, the planter was on the machine and you know what s/he does, re-read above. The A worked the tine which ripped the opening (the trench) where the seedling was placed. The B worked the enobla bars – there were 4 moving across and down to tamp down the soil around the plant. The C managed the seedlings, gently pulling them apart until one, sometimes two joined, were presented to you for continued presentation to the soil below. It was slow, thorough and hot. There was a farmer, or his rep on the machine too. A and B had Thama bars, long handled levers that you pulled back on if you had to stop the mechanism quickly, just the working of it on the planter(Rohana). The forward motion of the tractor was controlled by the driver of that/it.
I believe Thama is Bangla, where this machine came from, Bangladesh. It is a little bit manpower intensive.
Now, today, they have two on the team, a driver and a watcher. I guess, everything else seems to be automated, or watched on or over on a screen. That’s good. Bet there is no Shangalanga but, nor boop, and poorer for it..
It is a requirement to bullshit whilst working on the Rohana.
So, to them, I have previously lived and worked on a platypus stud farm at Wambangalang (it is a place). It, the stud, became non-viable because of a meteorite strike. It was in the papers and on the tv.
The driver is an Inca Prince who migrated here as a stowaway in a crows nest on a ship. He has lived in Narromine for a while now.
Laura is from East Africa near London UK. She is an orphan – her father took off with somebody else and her mother was a safari camp cook until a ‘flock’ of marauding lionesses chased her up a tree, then climbed the tree to kill her. The crunching of bones is a memory still (she said nightmare). Laura did not explain how she was spared the same fate. She likes lions though. They smell. They do.
The company rep did not offer a story about his past. He read a war comic all day anyway.
Others in the team have walked backwards up and over the Himalayas. Backwards, mind you.
Another has walked backwards the length of South America.
When challenged as to the veracity of that, given that the revelation immediately prior to that was the ‘backwards over the Himalayas’ statement and was this just making it up, copying what the previous utterer had said, only changing the location, and geography.
No, definitely not, it was South America, for sure.
It was backwards.
It was backwards and she did it in the nude.
So, believable? I asked for photos.
I did comment that it seemed to be windy down southern parts there, then realised what I had said. I messed up the apology too. Then I had to explain it all again. They laughed, we all did a lot of laughing, all day at that.
On the Rohana, ordinarily, there would be a driver, a person to facilitate the passing over of the seedlings (one by one) then one, or two, planters, holding the plant until the machine accepted it and took it away and down to be planted. This was faster and more productive, given that with the A and B team doing nothing, they were removed. Working spots were found for the people there, to keep them on the place where their work was producing income, or could be afforded. Citrus pickers were cutting firewood on some days. Cleaner/packers were fencing some days, or painting, dipping sheep or sweeping up after the shearers, cleaning machinery.
The best thing was somebody disassembled the machine, ‘Rohana’, to oil it or grease it, a first; and it seems the long towbar shafts and some ground driven parts got put in the metal collection bin; and, a first for this place, the metal collecting compartment from some nectarine-farming rice grower nearby came that evening with an almost full load and put our stuff, the Rohana bits and the bin, on to what was already projecting up and sideways in places, and secured with baling twine, then drove off to the railway station and put that on an 8-wheel carriage. Ours, the steel, was last on the collecting truck, and first on the carriage, when unloaded by hand next day. The discrepancy was not noticed for a while, a few days, as the repairer was busy, reading a comic. When it was noticed and checked on in the following days, then phone calls made, it was announced that the poor machine bits were now liquid/molten steel in Port Kembla probably. Time to modernise about time when the replacement, second hand, refused to go, there was an argument, a shot was fired (as reported) so they went and ordered a shiny one, new, which required a tractor, a new one, with hydraulics.
The client, a long term resident who spoke in a dialect to his kid who spoke to us, wanted staff to remain on his place for an extended period. After planting this crop the citrus picking would start, or something else depending on the season, so that labour requirements were tantamount to getting the crop in, in time, or sadly, at all. No locals worked the place while I was there, we were all ‘blowins’.
Unemployed in country towns are long term unemployed; the adults are used to it, the young are learning it. Mostly you have to leave to start a career. Me, generalising again!
The money was the same, planting down low, or picking on a ladder, and okay – just. 6 days a week, 10 hours a day, was a good wage. Doing further work in the evening helped you make really good money. That’s what I did, me and others. I can’t do it for more than a month, the tiredness accumulates until on the morning after the last morning, I announce I’m skiving and I move out and away for a while. The beach calls. Sea water is the only thing known to get the ingrained grime to move, and after a morning in the surf I possess feet, elbows, knees, fingers I recognise. Time for a haircut and a shave. All of my working clothes get binned, back at work though, and in the incinerator.
My Mum was exasperated somewhat, a lot actually. Here was the apple of her eye, the fruit of her loins, just being me, mostly. I would want you to be a boss, be known for good work, be a Captain of Industry (my emphasis), be like Dad (who is very much all of those first mentioned and definitely this next bit), be a good Dad when that happens. Do you have a girl? Well, I did, I used to.
Dad was non-plussed. At my age he was in the War.
If required, a lecture from Dad was prefaced with ‘Oi, Gaylord’ so it was pretty much listened to but not acted upon, no matter, he told ‘Champ’ not to be a turd and that will do. When with friends, at home, I was called Anthony. I was Tone mostly.
In a week or so I was in Adelaide working for a vehicle importer (Hoskings?) who was waiting on VW beetle cars to be unloaded at the wharf nearby. Everything was on a pallet, double strapped in four locations underneath, industrial, and everything was boxed in cardboard, like 4 inch thick cardboard, tough, and the complete car, without tyres, locally sourced, as were the 12 volt batteries, and with city sized petrol tanks which got changed to Australian requirements, meaning bigger. The keys were in the ignition too.
A Brazilian man supervised us. The box walls and top were taken off and cut free from the pallet, and this discarded cardboard stored further in the shed. It was in demand, that cardboard, and there was an industry disposing of it to be used as wall partitions elsewhere. This was a problem to the importer who had been required to return most of it.
But we opened boxes in turn, checked records to ensure we had what was recorded, and moved the pallet with vehicle on top to a specific area in the warehouse. In total there were 84 boxes, 84 cars.
We had 40 or so cars unboxed when technicians, German, associated with VW, came for final assembly which was tightening screws and nuts and bolts, checking for leaking window and door seals and installing new, bigger, fuel tanks. These were 1600cc motors. The delay was tyres, lack of supply, and a better quality European made tyre (Pirelli) were decided upon and these came from Melbourne overnight. You paid extra for that, and for the fuel tank. All vehicles had been paid FOB but our assembly and modifications had to be paid before delivery. The vehicles were registered before taking possession. Every car was white, but some had different coloured interiors.
Perhaps 60 got unpacked, assembled, checked and passed on in my time. The remainder were in their boxes when I left. These were unsold, so far, but there was interest in them, all of them too.
Two small aeroplanes also arrived, packed in that cardboard on a pallet. The fuselage, engine and wings in one box and the tailpiece, not boxed, but wrapped in plastic over cloth wrapping. These were unboxed by me but moved over the road to the airport and into a hangar. Good money.
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