Tully.. It's got a boot. Erm... that's it.

Tully is small, rural town, population about 4000, situated between Innisfail and Cardwell. On the journey there you pass fields and fields, and fields and fields, and fields, of banana plantations and sugarcane. It's also one of the wettest places in Australia, and, aside from the huge and ugly sugarcane factory on the outskirts of town, it's main 'site' is giant gumboot with attached treefrog, build to represent the highest rainfall the town ever got in one year (it's something like 7 metres... i could walk the five minutes down the 'highstreet' to check, i suppose). So, Tully 'quite a wet place', and also one of the best places to whitewater raft in Australia.

Not however, a great place to find banana-related work in May, though. We arrive at the Savoy Backpackers, which is a bit dingy, but fit for purpose (sleeping, eating, not catching bedbugs or TB), and are informed by the wild-haired owner Jude, that while we are 3&4 on the workilist, apparently farmers have greatly reduced the recruitment calls they make to hostels in favour for having all would-be employees gather, Depression-era-America-like, at the Post Office in town at 5.30am. Once there, you basically have to run (yes, run) at the farmers land rovers and buses as they pull in to pick up legitimate workers, to ask plaintatively if they have any jobs that day.

The first morning we start of quite positive, but as each successive bus-driver and farmer shakes their head, we move on to depressed. Even seeing a pretty decent sunrise as the four of us unemployed from the Savoy wander forlornly the three minutes back to the hostel 7am, doesn't make up for the fact that it seems hopeless, and that we'll have to get up, put on our workboots, make our lunches and do it all again tomorrow, only to more than likely have to come back and clamber back into bed, again without work.

We stick it out for four mornings, in which time no one in the crowd of twenty or so hopefuls gets picked up. It doesnt' help that Tully is just incredibly boring. There's the library, the supermarket, the outdoor swimming pool, the park, and the 4 hour hike up the moutain. We spend a lot of time in the park, and read a lot of books. At the weekend the hostel-people with jobs invite us out, so we go for a fun BBQ at Alligator's Nest in a nearby national park ( no actual alligators were about, obviously), and to a bonfire and low-key beach party at Mission Beach. Those times are fun, but by the time the second Tuesday rolls around we've given our notice to Jude and sorted out a WWOOF place two hours south to escape to on the Friday - YES! LEAVING TULLY!

Then Jude wanders up with a jobslip to Nik: "Got you a job, finally!". Our reaction is perhaps not what she expected. We wanted to LEAVE Tully, argghhhh. Nik decides gives the job one day to sound it out, and although it's pretty awful - working on a water-filled production-line in an open sided shed, bending over for most of the 8 hour working day, splitting bunches of bananas by hand, all the while getting splashed in the face with water while frogs and cockroaches leap out of the bananas and onto your face and hair intermittently, it's pretty good hourly pay. Finally we decide that, since Nik can't really turn down the chance of money, I'll go off to the WWOOF place on the Friday and we'll meet up elsewhere in 2 weeks. Not the greatest arrangement but probably the most sensible.

So I'm off to look after bees for one week and then onto... somewhere else... for another week.
And I finally saw a (live) kangaroo!

written by  LizIsHere on May 24, 2010 from Tully, Australia
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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