Saturday 18 April 2009

little tomato



When I was backpacking through Australia a few years ago, my friend and I needed to earn some money fast as we were all out of funds. We naively decided the best way to do this was with a few weeks of intensive fruit picking, so I made the dangerous mistake of leaving my job working in a lovely Melbourne cafe and we jumped on a bus to a small town (not sure if you could really call it a town) in inland Victoria with no idea of what we were letting ourselves in for.

It was a rough few weeks. Picking tomatoes is backbreaking, soul destroying work and working in the tomato sorting factory was even worse due to the zombie inducing repetition and lack of natural light. After about 10 hours, you forget that they're tomatoes and they start taking on other strange identities (it doesn't help that most of them are green). The only thing that kept me going was doing ridiculous things like drawing a face on a tomato and documenting its journey around the factory:








We were so happy to get out of that place , but the worst thing of all was that I was so traumatised after the experience that I managed to blow my entire pay packet within one week after I got on a plane and arrived in Cairns!!

3 comments:

Bumpkin Hill said...

Hi Faye, I bet even the tomatoes wanted to escape from the factory!! Catherine x

Pattie said...

Oh my goodness that is crazy horrible, at least you made it through it, and the tomato thing was a good idea, and cute :)
But, I can't belive you just blew the whole check in a week lol

Jessica Marie said...

such cute photos :D

poor little traveling tomatoe.. i wonder what happened to him

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