April 2006, Wongan Hills, Western Australia

By Michael A. Fagan

Australia. There are two words that a boy from Scotland working in that country is going to associate: stinking hot. Having to work in 40 degree heat when my body was used to working in minus 10 – and usually got badly burnt at 15 – was not a time for memories and laughter. Especially when it was out in the middle of nowhere with flies that covered your sweat soaked T–shirt and sang in your ear the whole day, trying desperately to get through your fly net and down into your throat.

Having a mouth full of pretty little Australian flies every time I took a drink of my luke–warm water was the overrated experience those smiling shiny kids fail to show in the adverts for harvest work. But flies were nothing compared to the other monsters that I would meet during those long summer days.

It all started when my brother Angus and pal Archie and I were over in the West Coast of Australia and had completely run out of money. Skint. We couldn’t afford our rent at the hostel any longer and were running rapidly out of two–minute noodles. We had the chance to go pick mushrooms but it fell through. One of us could go to a bottle shop three days south for a few hours work. It was getting desperate. A tree planting job came up and it seemed to be our ticket to some easy money. Fresh air, I thought, beautiful scenery. I couldn’t wait. We set off to a tiny little village called Wongan Hills in the back of a van, so full of dreams….

There were seven of us working there: Angus and Archie, a German girl Sandra (the double of the great Mad Madam Mim from Sword in the Stone), Chris ‘yes yes you can’ Campbell (one of the Australian bosses who gave us a hand, the other one Sean slept in his air conditioned Ute all day ‘supervising’), two French boys Cedric and Pierre who spoke no English and only had eyes for each other, and me.

We slept in tiny beds in a house for a long five minutes every night before getting up in the pitch black of 5 a.m. every morning and putting on yesterday’s solid and disgusting clothes. We were crammed into an old school bus with missing seats straight from 1965, where it was so cold inside from the lack of windows you couldn’t fall back asleep no matter how tired you were. The radio was blaring none the less. We drove for an hour out to the paddocks where the tree seeds were to be planted with Kenny Rodgers telling Lucille she picked a fine time to leave him, over and over again.

It was strange getting to see a beautiful new sunrise every morning but wishing it was the four walls of my dingy room where my beloved bed lay.

In some of the fields we were doing the third or fourth yearly planting. It was here we planted a sandalwood seed next to a jam tree – the tree that the sandalwood makes its host – only if the seeds that were planted the year before failed to grow.

These fields had been left alone for exactly a year and the orc spiders spent plenty of their time building their webs from tree to tree. The farmer had his paddock badly designed in that the trees did not have a big enough gap horizontally, which meant that the orc spiders could build their webs across the way. In a job like this you might be warned: Hey guys, there are spiders out here the size of small countries that will try to bite you in the heart if you go anywhere near them, and oh, their webs are the stuff used in space as they are stronger than steel, so probably best not to get caught in it. But no, off we went with a bag off seeds, a song in our hearts, a whistle on our lips, none the wiser.

You had two hours after sunrise before the sun made it impossibly hot to breathe, let alone walk, never mind plant seeds or keep a watchful eye for anything that was going to bite you in the face. And you had to go fast to make any money. Before tax you made $20 if you went really fast, $18 for being not bad, and $16 if you acted like one of the French boys. I needed the money.

Not one of us saw any spiders in the first couple hours of the morning, planting away in a rising heat of 38 degrees, carrying a full bag of seeds with a potty (a metal tube with a open–and–close contraption that the seeds were dropped down through once thrusted into the earth), and having that constant tone of flies on your back.

When I first heard my brother scream I thought it was out of rage at the flies. I let out a laugh as I saw that he had walked into a massive web and I went over to see the size of the web when I did exactly the same thing myself. I panicked and ran/danced as fast as I could in the opposite direction, not knowing where I was going trying to get the web off my face and hair. I almost ran into two more.

I can still taste that feeling of the web on my lips to this day. I never found the spider when I went back to pick up my potty. He must have got stuck in my hair, I was sure of it. I could feel this massive spider somewhere on my head or on my neck the entire day, hiding and waiting to send me off home in a black bag.

I’d watched Arachnophobia as a wee boy and they really went after the good doctor Jeff Bridges, crawling up his leg, tormenting him. I knew spiders were cunning little gits. They would eat me, no doubt about it; kill me, jump in my coffin on the flight home for a long dinner – there would be no open coffin at my funeral – then breed all over my home town until a million orc spiders appear all over my house until….

I passed at least 10 of the webs that day. I couldn’t believe how big these things were; they were bigger than my hand. The massive white orc spiders sat in the corner of the web where a tiny spider brought its “food” and left it in the web as a swapsy for being allowed to mate.

I decided to see how strong the web actually was – seeing as some of it was still on my face. I carefully pulled back a strand to the length of my arm and it was just like elastic. I saw the orc spider come darting from its quiet little corner and I let go, pinging it back perfectly into place, and moved quickly on. Little did I know that dinosaur–sized spiders weren’t the only trouble, and I was going to be bitten by something later that week, turning me into a one armed man.

When we planted the seeds into the ground – some soft as sand, most hard as concrete – everyone got horrendous blisters as you had to hammer the potty deep down into the earth so the seed would be covered and not die. There were millions of tiny little ant holes all along the ground beside the trees, as it was perfect for building nests. The ants came pouring out in their thousands when you planted a seed near or in their home. The only thing you can do is keep planting at a steady pace and don’t stop or they will get you, as young Archie found out. He stopped for a drink at the end of a row and they ran up all over his legs and he had to strip off his jeans – dancing and screaming – until he beat them all off. He got little nips up and down his legs, which came out in tiny red spots.

Dreams: I found I was not alone in waking myself up most nights, beating away imaginary ants as they crawled all over my body. Most nights I found myself moving down my bed to get away from a trail of ants. I had scratched myself senseless thinking they were all over me.

Every now and again we would come across a massive nest where the red soldier ants lived. The entrance to their nests was about a meter wide at the top. They were the size of my index finger and had stingers on them like scorpions. We were warned to stay well away from them – our boss did joke that if anyone let one of those ants bite them then he’ll give him $10 – but sometimes curiosity is a terrible thing. And that wasn’t the only thing that wanted to bite you.

We usually parked the bus for lunch in the place where it was mostly shaded, and on this occasion we happened to be next to one of these red ant nests. Lying near it was a snake, a yellow something or other too small to kill you – it was about half a meter in length – but you were going to the hospital if it bit you. The following year, the snake would double in size and have enough venom to kill.

We made sure everyone stayed away from the snake, but it kept moving toward the bus. While doing this it proceeded to slide down into the ants’ nest, thinking it was a nice little hole to hide. Five minutes later it flew out covered in these big ants. It got free of them but was going to die if it went near there again. Unfortunately it went back down the ant hole by mistake.

I thought I would do him a favor and try and help him out, so I grabbed a fork–ended stick and, like a true genius, tried to dig him out. I never saw one of the red ants run up the stick and lock in his two pinchers and sting my thumb several times. Pain coursed through my arm like I had never felt in all my life. My thumb went instantly numb, as did my arm. I ran around in a circle screaming, not knowing how to stop the pain.

An hour later it was just my thumb that was throbbing as I continued to plant seeds for the rest of the day. The rows were getting shorter and the sun was setting. On the jam trees, there were little stink bugs that spat at you when you passed so you didn’t eat them. Ants had climbed to the top of the small jam trees and were now climbing all over my arms when I passed them. Enough was enough.

I got my $10 by default from the boss for that big ant taking half my finger, and climbed back in the bus for the last time, knowing that no other job in the world was going to be as bad, as physically hard, have spiders, snakes and ants all taking turns trying to send you to the hospital, be covered all day in fat flies, spat upon by stink bugs, have to avoid a spider’s lair when nature called for a twosie, have a farmer’s tan – the white glove marks were the best – or have Kenny Rodgers sing Lucille each and every single morning.

Michael A. Fagan lives in his hometown of Muirhead, Scotland, just outside Glasgow. He is an English Literature graduate from the University of Glasgow.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, February 13th, 2007 | Email This Post

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