David Gustafsson

Time is passing and the first half year of mine and Sofia’s Sydney stay are over for a little while. It has been a tough period with many things to adapt to. Looking back, however, it is not a big deal. Studying is simple (Can’t believe I am writing this?). Here is a picture of my very successful and wonderful applied marketing research group from the last semester. From the left we have Nita, Paris, Imelda and Joey!

My marketing team

Tomorrow we are moving out from our room in Randwick. Sofia as at her exam at the moment and I spend my time in the room calling for jobs. It seems like the luck has abandoned us. For a few weeks ago we called a couple of farms that all said (quote):

“Don’t worry; we’ll have work for you.” or: “We have work for you.” or: “Buy a car and it will sort out.”

It turned out to be wrong. Somehow they where fooling us to believe that getting a job were nothing to worry about. I just spoke to the employment plus hotline that coordinates fruit picking over Australia which gave me a number to a winery along the cost. A dream job for a fruit picker! After calling and receiving no answer I called back to the national service and asked for more numbers. Unfortunately this was the only number they could give me; the fruit market is currently dead in NSW (Sydney) and VIC (Melbourne)!

Left are two wonderful options and we are going for one of them tomorrow when we move out:

1)     Pick onion 365 km west of Sydney. The ad is visible at the national fruit picking web and has probably dragged 200 other fruit pickers or something. When calling today it was still available places but we have no idea how it will be tomorrow. As with all fruit picking jobs you could only register once you have got to the area.

2)     Outside Melbourne we have been in contact with a labor assistance that is confident to find jobs for us. However he stated that there has been a bad crop so that all strawberry pickers basically compete with other picking jobs. Some wineries and cherry farms might still require workers (although we have called many of these farms directly with no result).

The options are not very good and we have hard to put a risk factor on them for the likelihood of a positive outcome! The current action plan is to head for Melbourne a bit inland and pass by some farms that seems to be in need for help from four strong hands. If we don’t find any jobs this way we will anyway have a great journey and hopefully find something when we get closer to Melbourne.