← PreviousDiscovering Rottnest Island, and a bike injuryAt nine we set off for the little village of New Norcia, arriving just under two hours later. We went to the plant's reception and Paul Mart introduced himself. He was a slightly paunchy man in his fifties who walked with a slow, rolling gait. He showed us around the facilities: first the big plant with the hay press, then the grain silo and finally the "dongas", a sort of small prefab with five separate rooms. After this tour, he told us the wage would be $23 an hour "flat", meaning paid the same for days, nights or overtime.
Cassandre and I exchanged a surprised look, as we knew this was illegal, but we weren't in a position to be choosy, and when he asked if we were still keen, we said yes. He gave us the address for our medical check in Perth and told us to come back on Sunday to start straight away on night shifts. As Cassandre had driven on the way there, I took the wheel on the way back, but I'd taken a painkiller shortly before because the pain in my hands was too strong, and I had to stop halfway. I was starting to lose sight of the white lines and see the trees dancing by the roadside. It was safer to swap drivers.
Our job at the plant was relatively simple, and it wasn't the hardest job of our lives. We drove a huge machine with two long pointed forks on the end. With it, we had to pick up bales of hay and put them on a conveyor belt. We worked in pairs: if Cassandre drove the machine, I'd cut the strings holding the hay together. We were in a team of five. Working with us were Skinny, Tyrone and Clayton. Skinny was the lead operator; he looked about fifty-five and had a very strange appearance. He was half bald, but long, very fine hair fell to his shoulders.
His teeth were clearly incomplete as well as greyish, and we liked to picture him as a pirate, he looked so much like one of Jack Sparrow's crew. Tyrone was a young man of barely twenty who proudly sported fairly short blond hair. Despite his youth, he was already slightly paunchy, probably because of the cans of soda he regularly knocked back and his dubious diet. Our last colleague, Clayton, shortened to Clay, must have weighed in at around a hundred and thirty kilos for six foot three. He moved with a slight side-to-side rocking like a roly-poly toy and laughed in thunderous bursts.
Working twelve hours a day or night and seventy-two hours in each six-day block was exhausting both mentally and physically. Our feet and backs hurt constantly and we awaited our four days off like the Holy Grail every time. We used these long breaks to visit Margaret River, Cape Naturaliste and Denmark, all five hundred kilometres away. We went so far despite the tiredness because it got us out of the routine and let us unwind completely, as well as ticking off places to visit before we left Western Australia for good. Every day of travel was a feast for the eyes, and coming back to the plant and our tiny little room hurt every time.
Strangely, we preferred working nights: the atmosphere was more peaceful. When the machine sometimes jammed, we could take a breather and sit doing nothing or watch the many cats swarming in the hay bales, hunting the mice hiding inside. Every two hours the skips had to be emptied, full of what the machine rejected during grinding: bits of wood, stones and lots of dust. I had to do it because in the pitch dark Cassandre wasn't sure she could see her surroundings properly. I drove very slowly across the property because I was sure to come across kangaroos. They came to feed in the hay sheds, and it was always a marvellous sight to see them bounding in all directions when I arrived with the machine.
After a month and four blocks of six days or nights, weariness was starting to set in. My fall on Rottnest Island had led to an ingrown nail that became infected, earning me a mini-stay in hospital. Seeing it wasn't getting better, I'd resorted to the hard way, cutting my toe open to get the bit of nail out of my skin for good. We were sometimes both working on painkillers, me for my foot and Cassandre for her back. The machine wasn't designed for prolonged work, and after a few hours driving it your back hurt terribly.
Being good French people, we'd sometimes point out to the managers that certain working conditions could be improved, but we quickly understood we were the least of their worries. Just as we quickly understood that the hardest tasks went to backpackers and it was best not to complain unless you wanted to be shown the door. That's how Australia was, although the observation applies to the whole world. Being a precarious worker meant being disposable and replaceable.
Our weariness was also multiplied by the illegality of our pay. When we arrived at the plant, the boss had announced twenty-three dollars an hour "flat", meaning no distinction for weekends, nights, Sundays, public holidays and so on. We knew this practice was completely illegal and reserved the right to file a complaint with Fair Work, the government body somewhere between a labour inspectorate and an employment tribunal. We kept a daily Excel file, first to know how much we were earning day by day, which was a great source of motivation, but also to know how much we should have been earning. The amount was starting to add up when the manager, for some reason we didn't know, decided to make us his scapegoats.
Comments in the morning about the supposed lack of cleanliness of an area (which was covered in dust all day anyway), about bits of hay lying around and so on. We suspected one of the Estonians who worked after us of complaining as soon as we left. He loved everything to be perfect, whereas we felt that after twelve hours of work without a single break, it wasn't really our job to make sure a place destined to get dirty again was spotless. On a trip to Perth on our days off, we went to the Fair Work offices to have confirmed what we already knew. Yes, this company was acting illegally, and we now had in hand the procedure to follow for when we left the plant.