← PreviousTravelling in Australia: first disillusionment in BrisbaneWe arrived in the late afternoon in the tiny town of Texas. We drove up the main street, which we found full of businesses. There was the inevitable pub, two hotels, a supermarket, the council office, a few second-hand shops and a takeaway. About ten streets radiated off this avenue to form the village of 843 inhabitants, according to the 2016 census. We found that a hot public shower was available to travellers and hurried to use it before it got too cold. It was May, after all, the end of autumn in Australia. The temperature could drop low fast.
It's something you never see in Australian travel stories. Nobody ever talks about the cold and the rain. Yes, it rained, and yes, it was sometimes very cold! We'd planned to sleep in the car, parked on a pitch at the caravan park on the border between New South Wales and Queensland. We watched a film before falling asleep, with the funny feeling of being in one of those drive-ins you see in American movies. Around four in the morning we were woken by the cold and had to run the engine to warm up the inside of the car.
After the obligatory breakfast, we ventured into the Queensland countryside. A gigantic dam, Glenlyon Dam, had been built nearby in 1976, creating spectacular landscapes. The river stretched around green hills plunging steeply into the water. The sun reflected off the surface. This scenery wouldn't have looked out of place in a film. Paradoxically, it wasn't the landscape we'd expected to see in Australia. We had in mind the very clichéd image of beaches and the red outback.
But in a continent-sized country, the diversity of terrain was bound to be impressive. As usual, we filled our memory cards with photos and videos, each prettier than the last. We spent part of the afternoon lounging on our towels by the water. After all, it was warm and sunny, and we were starting a job the next day that promised to be hard, so we needed to rest. We left at sunset, driving at a crawl. Wild animals took advantage of the drop in temperature to move about, and we were doubly careful on the road.
On the dirt tracks we passed several kangaroos, foxes and a multitude of birds of all sizes. It was almost dark when we got back to town, and we used the public shower once again. At 7 pm, the agreed time, we went to the address given by the two French girls who were handing their jobs over to us.
They were staying with Glenn, an Australian in his fifties. He had a rather battered face, a bit of a Mr Bean look, and a bad stutter. The girls explained that he was painfully shy. We looked around the house where we'd be staying and found a barely habitable hovel. Our room, at $140 a week, was empty. Completely empty. We had to get the airbed and our sleeping bags out of the car. The bathroom was extremely dirty and the hot-water tank inadequate for the six people living there. We'd barely arrived and had already decided to stay a week at most.
Glenn was very nice, but we had very little taste for exploitation and didn't accept that kind of treatment. We were due at the farm at 8 am for our "induction", the job briefing and the signing of contracts. It was the start of ten straight days of work, to be followed by four days off. The farm was 35 kilometres from Texas, and the road was very dangerous, once again because of the kangaroos teeming in the area.