This Shit is Bananas

(Written week of June 1st)
Working with bananas makes people go bananas in this town. I’ve been in Tully over three weeks and well it has been an experience and a half. First impressions were good: it wasn’t raining. The town slogan is “A pretty wet place” and the joke is that they measure the rain fall in meters, not millimeters. There is a 7.9m tall Golden Gumboot in town that you can actually climb up to get a view of the area. Another thing about this town is that the banana work attracts a lot of Asian people, so the population of my hostel is about 90% Asian and most of them don’t speak very much English at all. It’s a little bit fascinating. I’ve decided that there is a certain charm that makes me really like this town. The town is tiny but everyone is so friendly and outgoing. It’s the Australia I’ve been looking for I think. Tropical North Queensland is beautiful with its hills of rainforest and it doesn’t hurt that it has only rained a few days since I’ve been here. The weather is actually a lot like August in Kingston- warm in the day but then kind of cold once the sun has gone down.
Unfortunately, with the Australian winter just starting my timing to find banana work couldn’t have been worse. It is the depth of the slow season and so it took me just about three weeks to finally find a job- I start tomorrow.
The weekdays are pretty boring when everyone is off at work (people who have been here a month or 2 or 14 have jobs, there just aren’t any new jobs right now) but the weekends are ridiculous. They’re actually ricockandbullsulous. Since there is nothing to do in Tully but drink, the booze (mostly goon) is consumed at astonishing levels, which makes for an entertaining evening. The only bar in town that stays open late is down the street- Rafters- and is attached to the Banana Barracks Backpackers, the big one in town that gets the most work (they also charge more) and is a wild place due to all the banana workers letting off steam after a week of hard, tedious work. Good times indeed on a Friday night there. I’ve met some really cool people here though and would certainly like to stay for a couple months, despite the lack of wifi, to get my 2nd year visa and make some sweet moola.
Anyways, I could go on and on with anecdotes of the funny and crazy things that have gone on here but I won’t, although I will tell you about my bogan ‘BBQ’ experience. As I mentioned some months ago, I think, a bogan is the Australian slang word for a redneck/hick/hillbilly what have you. Andy, one of the English guys I’ve been hanging out/partying with, asked me if I wanted to go to this BBQ at one of his co-workers houses. I said sure, not like I had anything else to do, and who doesn’t like a BBQ? Now, the people he works with are the banana workers who aren’t backpackers, aka locals aka total backwood hicks, and he sort of warned me of this before we went but... It was a fucking insane experience. Going out to this woman’s house, which was in the middle sugarcane fields, in a taxi with these people who were all loaded, like retarded drunk (it was like 4:30-5pm on a Friday). The woman’s whose house it was, Chrissy, had no front teeth and the rest of her teeth were all black and rotting. But she was really nice, a good hostess. Like other bogan’s I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting I’ve found that they are always explaining themselves, like she was about 45years old and told the same story over and over- about why she was a little broke at the moment, because her daughter just turned 16 and she is trying to keep her in school but the government isn’t helping her blah blah. The house was shabby as, like run down and just redneck hillbilly dirty. This BBQ ended up just being drinking and smoking out at a picnic table in the yard. The other guests at the BBQ were fucked as well. One old man, early 50s, fell asleep at the table pretty quick. Another guy, who apparently can’t read or write, is late 40s, terrible teeth as well, just sat there starring at me the whole time. They all commented on what great teeth I had. There was a guy in his late 20s who was probably the most ’normal’ but still Aussie bogan trash, drunk and stoned as like the rest of them, with fuck being every other word. Chrissy’s 16 year daughter was there too and acted as barmaid. I asked her why she didn’t want to do school anymore and she said it was just too hard, involved too much focus. At one point some man came walking out of the sugar cane, it was a little weird, but he ended up being the guy who lived in Crhissy’s shed. He joined in on the ‘BBQ’ too. We ended up not staying for very long because it was such a retarded situation and not actually the kind of BBQ either of us expected., plus they were getting pretty mean with the dirty pom comments towards Andy. But I thought it was pretty hilarious and a really unique Aussie experience.

One more thing- the Golden Gumboot Festival ended up being a bust. We weren’t expecting such a family oriented event, especially in Australia where drinking is part of most everything, so we lasted about 15 minutes before going back to the hostel and having our own festival of sorts. Good times in Tully.

Don’t Forget: Say No to Banana Exports in Australia.