Kangaruined

The kangaroo may be the internationally recognised symbol for Australia, adorning everything from Qantas airlines to the country’s coinage, but people will still tell you that these giant marsupials can be an absolute menace. You may be shocked to learn that you can legally shoot wild kangaroos here, both for commercial and non-commercial purposes (if not being used for their meat and skins, there are strict documents to support killings for “damage mitigation”, “the provision of meat for pest animal control programs” and “recreational hunting”), but the real danger is during their rampant mating seasons (that’s springtime and early summer), when kangaroos can often get a little too close for comfort.

Like in 2003, when New South Wales resident John Crouch, while holidaying in Queensland, was forced to kill a wild kangaroo with an axe when, for no apparent reasons, the creature attacked his wife. They can grow to an incredible size: Crouch’s encounter was with a kangaroo two metres tall. In the wild, away from the close proximity of humans and the security afforded by captivity, kangaroos are known to gather in packs, becoming scarily muscular and really quite fierce. In more built up areas, they are notorious for feeding on marshland near the roadside and can cause untold havoc on the dimly lit highways. Earlier this year, a female driver in the outback of the Northern Territory hit a kangaroo so severely that not only was her car promptly disqualified, but she also found herself in the grossly unfortunate situation of being stranded in some of the most inhospitable terrain with limited means of rescue. It is small wonder that Rolf Harris sang about tying them down.

We travelled to Woodgate, some 20km south of Bundaberg, with the intention of catching a glimpse of these unique creatures in their natural habitat, and sure enough we managed to see this one, and many more besides, merely a few metres from our car. There is something so rewarding about spontaneously catching sight of creatures in the wild, particularly an animal so alien to any other culture. Just remember to keep your seatbelt on.


I wanted to start this week by talking about the Hypervision Optical Measuring System, which is a fantastic machine but, granted, is hardly the sort of conversation starter that will get you noticed at parties. If indeed you have already raised your eyebrows at the mere mention of this, then clearly you are someone well versed in the world of laser optics, but for the rest of us, this expensive machine is single-handedly responsible for why farmhands may be finding it hard to get work in the Bundaberg area. And here’s why.

An OMS can not only distinguish between various types of freshly picked produce, but can also utilise this information to separate vast quantities into different sizes, colour and quality. At the farm where I am currently employed, hundreds of thousands of locally picked grape tomatoes are fed into one of these machines on a continuing daily basis, where each tomato is individually scanned and differentiated in increments of mere microns. It is the centrepiece of a large refrigerated warehouse, permanently set at a chilly temperature between 10 and 12 degrees. Using laser optics, it takes the OMS a thousand to a million points per second to detect the correct grade of a single tomato, a job that could take a team of manual labourers weeks to perform, and at some considerable expense to the farmer. But despite this astonishingly efficient technology, the kangaroo item took the lead, but that’s mainly because it had a better pun.

But still, this doesn’t fully disengage those workers who are willing to manually separate fruit for a living, something which - unless there is some form of devious sexual thrill to be derived from frisking through small red tomatoes that I’m not yet aware of - is ultimately a thankless and monotonous task. I work with six graders whose job it is to pick out inadequate tomatoes prior to being placed into small punnets, which are then weighed, labelled and stacked for shipment to supermarkets across the country and beyond, to locations as far flung as Darwin, Sydney, Tasmania and New Zealand. They work in what is deridingly called the ‘dog box’. On a busy day, we are personally responsible for the shipment of somewhere in the region of 22,000 punnets, and each item of fruit has had to meet the regimentally high standards of each individual grader. That’s just a little something to think about when you next find yourself in the fruit aisle at Tesco’s.

The staff are kept in check by Crystal, the farmhouse matron who appears to have trained at the Heinrich Himmler school for workplace motivation. When she is not berating the workers or threatening them with the sack, she is offering remarkably confounding advice. For example, I was once told to hurry up while grading, but take my time in doing so. Her passive aggression is the schoolroom equivalent of asking to borrow a pencil, and then punching you in the arm for taking too long.

Much more amiable is the 17 year old Joel, who I have talked about before. For someone so cheerful, he is strangely bemused by Owen, one of the older workers who looks a bit like Richard Dreyfus and has the sensible, compassionate demeanour of a TV handyman. “I don’t understand people who are happy all the time,” he says, which is agreeable, especially when your job is to look at fruit all day.

He also possesses a remarkable turn of phrase. I once asked Joel if he feels lucky. “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.” On skydiving, he asks simply, “Why would I jump out of a plane if there was nothing wrong with it?” Baring in mind that he dropped out of school two years ago, it is still sometimes difficult to see how there is nearly a ten year age gap between us.

Our good friend Julie sums up the job like this: “It is the only prison camp where they let you out at night.” There is certainly an almost military edge to proceedings, with all staffers required to wear a uniform of white lab coats, latex gloves and, for an extra swipe at any last remaining dignity, a hairnet. A friend once asked me whether I also had to wear a beard net. These do exist, by the way, and would essentially mean that I would be spending a typical shift of 10 to 12 hours with a bag covering my entire head.

As a final note, I would like to add that it is a sobering thought to know that if you were to die tomorrow, it would be to absolutely no consequence to the synchronised procedure of working life down at the farm, other than it might cause a slight upset to their rota system. And, even more tragically, when it comes to identifying the body, you will almost certainly be wearing a hairnet.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Miracles’ (ABC1)

Occasionally you catch a show that just boggles your brain, and this new ‘extraordinary stories’ series does just that. The format reminds me of the BBC’s ‘999’ which featured the dramatic tones of Michael Buerk and a roster of amateur reconstructions which, by comparison to this, now look like quite trivial if undoubtedly horrific stories of misfortune. ‘999’ was a terrifying show which made a kid stuck down a well look like some kind of hostage takeover situation, and never failed to give me nightmares. ‘Miracles’ focuses instead on such unfathomable acts of human survival that, despite its title of biblical proportions, couldn’t really be called anything else.

Tonight focuses on Polish-born paraglider Ewa Wisnierska, who in 2007 was practicing in New South Wales for an upcoming competition when the weather down south took an unexpected turn for the worst. Recorded footage on the day shows fellow paragliders observing large, ominous looking clouds appearing before them and promptly gliding to the ground. But the incoming storm would prove too quick for some, and before Wisnierska could find time to react, she would find herself caught up in fierce winds and, in a freakish incident appropriately called ‘cloud suck’, lifted between two cumulonimbus clouds. Wisnierska was now, quite literally, in the eye of the storm, climbing upwards at a rate 20 metres per second to an altitude of (get this) 32,600 feet. That’s nearly 10km off the ground.

While up there, she passes out from hypoxia (caused by a lack of oxygen) and drifts, high above the storm, just below the earth’s stratosphere where the temperate reaches a startling -50 degrees. It is here where she hovers for somewhere within the region of 30 to 45 minutes, before her glider collapses and she falls unconsciously to the ground at a speed of 200km an hour.

Now for the miracle. Not only does the wing of her glider spontaneously reopen, but she summarily regains consciousness due to the increase in oxygen. Despite being covered in ice, she then manages to somehow muster enough energy to navigate herself away from the plight of the storm and land safely, some three and a half hours after taking off. Her superhuman survival is made all the more poignant when we learn of Chinese pilot He Zhongpin, who was only 500 metres away from Wisnierska when he was also sucked into the cloud, only to be struck by lightening and killed instantly.