Go Australia:Australia's much-misunderstood Working Holiday Visa is really a travel permit that lets you work now and then to feed yourself. But that work can be hard to come by. When CONOR BYRNErealised the nearest jobs might be 3,000km away, he bought a van to cross the country
MICHAEL CHESTERS, a 27-year-old electrician, and Paul Cox, a 29-year-old bricklayer, from Omagh, Co Tyrone, are shown into a dormitory at Ocean Beach Backpackers hostel, 15,000km from home in Cottesloe, Australia.
“Craic, lads. Pint?”
Cottesloe is Perth’s outlet valve. Regarded as a death trap – expensive beer, pretty girls – it is a glamorous address: the Indian Ocean is yours, beautiful Rottnest Island is over there.
The hostel has a waiting list for cleaning jobs, an hour and a half of which gives a free night’s accommodation. Hostels are built for friendships. A room with seven others, a kitchen for several dozen, beer.
Lee Hardy, a 23-year-old from Liverpool, in England, finds a job in the paper, stacking bricks, and runs to the payphone. We wait. “Yay!” he shouts after a time. “Did you get the job?” “No, it’s gone. But someone left two dollars in the phone.” You can stay in these places too long.
Most nights wind up on the beach. This night the conversation is steered towards sexuality. “No man has ever given me an orgasm,” declares a 27-year-old woman from Somerset. “I’ll try,” says one of the men. “Come on, then.” They get up and leave.
Perth is a modern city with McDonald’s and Irish bars and coffee shops. The streets are clean, the transport works, there are grassy bits. Northbridge is the place to head out.
Ireland’s 6 Nations match against England is shown at 2.30am at Burswood Casino, part of a huge money pit, with hotels, restaurants, bars and shows. Hundreds of Irish watching the match, no flags or English visible. Abuse during God Save the Queen. The same people mouth along to Amhráin na bhFiann, then roar the naughty bits of The Fields of Athenry. During a ruck a tanked-up young Irishman shouts “Kill the bastards. Kill the f***ing c***s.’
Fremantle, or Freo, has more character. Narrower streets, prettier buildings, cute shops. Its maritime museum is spectacular if you’re into that kind of thing. Worth a visit even if you’re not. Squirrel through a modern navy submarine and stand beside Australia II, winner of the 1983 America’s Cup.
Fremantle Prison, which was built by convicts in the 1850s and is now a tourist attraction, is expensive – up to 59 Australian dollars (€32) per person – but around the back is an enterprise centre that uses two floors of the cells as small-business offices. Looking at them is the poor man’s tour.
TO STAY ANOTHER year we need to do three months’ rural work. Twenty-seven-year-old Fergal McHugh and 23-year-old Fergal Troy, who are carpenters from Clontarf and Shankill, in Dublin, get five months’ work punching cows on a ranch 2,000km away.
The Job Shop, which found them the punching – or driving – work, tells Michael, Paul and me to make our way to Kununurra, 3,000km away, where in a few weeks there will be farm work. “It’s the hardest work you’ll ever do, but you’ll get a grand a week and another visa,” says Andrew Coldbeck, the company’s MD. Several other agencies laugh when we say we’re looking for agricultural work. There is none.
Michael and I spend a day looking at vans to take us to Kununurra; $2,800 (€1,500) buys us a 20-year-old Mitsubishi Express with 300,000km on the clock – and a cooker. We spend $400 (€220) on spare parts and camping gear.
Hitting the road outside Perth, the outback comes up straight away. Our first stop is Jurien Bay, where we use a public gas barbecue to cook tonight’s fry.
Vans are the worst way to travel. They seem sensible – sleep in the van to save money – but I tell you different. They heat up like tin cans, and it’s illegal to sleep in vehicles outside campsites, we are warned. We couldn’t afford air conditioning, or a diesel engine, or power steering. “Think of it as a workout,” says Michael. He doesn’t drive.
Vans seat two. We are three. A policeman stops us in Broome and hands over $2,500 (€1,350) in fines for not having a passenger seat belt and for the third man. “My advice to you is not to pay that; we’re not going to come looking for it. But if there’s a next time, we’ve got you. So where you guys heading out later?”
Kalbarri is a nice place. It’s like Sutton Creek or Baldoyle Estuary, in Dublin, with the tide in and the sun out. Today the water is blue and the swell is up.
The beach is across the road from our campsite. Pelicans come for breakfast on the beach at 8.30am. The girl at the shop says that tonight is a full moon and that this is the night to go fishing. She is lying. At a boat-hire place on the beach we take a kayaking tour down the Murchison river – $30 (€16.50), including breakfast and a bush ride to the start of the trip. We see a snake.
Katie McAnena, a 21-year-old from Galway, has a Holden Commodore estate; travelling in it with her are her 25-year-old sister, Lisa, who is a doctor, and her 24-year-old friend Marese, also a doctor, from Parteen, Co Clare. The car has room for Marese’s surfboard and Katie’s windsurfing kit.
We find them cowering in the air-conditioned shop, reading magazines they aren’t planning to buy. Katie is taking a year out of medicine at NUI Galway to up her windsurfing game on the shores of Western Australia. She is competing, training and working, spending five months instructing windsurfing on the island of Maui, in Hawaii.
Marese, who is on an around-the-world trip, caught up with Katie there. “I’m totally broke. I’ve to head home in two weeks, and I’ve told no one.” “We’ve had extremely good luck,” says Katie. “The Australians are so nice they’ll put us up on their couch. In 10 weeks here I haven’t paid for accommodation.” Lisa is intent on seeing the most of Western Australia. She and Marese had arranged jobs in Perth, but the paperwork turned them off, and they preferred to travel while they had the chance. They are confident of work back home.
PETROL IS EXPENSIVE in the outback. You can buy it in roadhouses – miserable, dilapidated fly-attracting dirt boxes that extort and make no apologies for it. They serve food, but it’s of the type that puts your heart at risk of clogging. There isn’t a lot of traffic. You might see a dozen other vehicles each day.
Geraldton is the last big town before the open road – a final chance to stock up before the real journey on anything we’ve missed. A fishing rod is the main thing.
Farther up the road flies begin their assault. They arrive on an easterly wind and stay for five or six weeks. They land on your lips, and you might be under attack from half a dozen at a time. We bought nets to wear over our heads – looks stupid, but looks stupider smacking yourself.
Sarah Foley, a 21-year-old from Drogheda, was down to her last $50 in Sydney. “I didn’t even want to spend the money for the internet to look for work.” She had been working in a cafe in Sydney and was partying away all her money. She came to Monkey Mia, a tourist resort about 800km north of Perth, to work on a pearl boat. “I loved it. It was nice and dirty work, but they weren’t paying us. I was just doing it to get my second-year visa. I left for the east coast but loved it here, so I came back.”
Monkey Mia is on Shark Bay, a World Heritage site whose Aboriginal name is Gutharragudu, where the red-sand country meets the white sand. Darren Capewell has us around a campfire in the bush one night. He cooks mullet from the bay and tells us stories passed down through generations. Many Australians join us. It’s surprising how little they know of their countrymen.
We invite an Australian girl to watch Manchester United play Liverpool. It turns out she is running from the police. She sold everything in Perth, bought a luxury camper, then broke into her boyfriends apartment, trashed it, stole everything, burned it and threatened to shoot him and his lover, who was her best friend. She is good company.
Emer Phelan, a 22-year-old holistic therapist on a year-long around-the-world trip that started in Borris-in-Ossory, Co Laois, last June, has been in Australia for seven months. In the morning she’s off to Asia. She is travelling alone, “but you’re here a day and no longer on your own”. She worked in a health clinic in Port Douglas for two months and picked fruit in Stanthorpe, Queensland, for three weeks before “escaping from the apples”. She is now working and living in the Port Hotel in Carnarvon. “It’s so laid back, so friendly; the people are so quirky – exactly the same as Rosie’s in Borris.”
In Broome we go all out and take an air-conditioned room. Dave McGahon, a 26-year-old from Oranmore, in Galway, has been working behind the bar and at reception at Kimberley Klub, a backpackers’ hostel in the town, for six months and loves the place. Before that he worked for seven weeks on a wheat farm, then tiled for three weeks in Monkey Mia. He also spent some time pearling but didn’t have Sarah Foley’s grá for it. “Hard work, hard money, doing 12- and sometimes 13- or 14-hour days.”
IN FITZROY CROSSING, Australians wander about. They look drunk, or as if they’ve nothing better to do. Wayne Cox has a clouded eye and a strong odour. His ancestors are from the area, and he says Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, of England, once visited the family farm. As a kid he saw his grandfather shoot himself. He can list off most 1970s rock bands. Is he asking us to buy him a drink or is he offering? His accent is very strong.
As towns get rougher, the scenery follows suit. We’re in the tropics, and the landscape looks as if it has been through some geographical trauma. Think of the drumlin belt in Co Down, but pointier and bigger.
It rains on the way. It’s great rain. The spats on the ground and taps on the roof and smell of water. The air cools, the sky darkens and the $8 for wiper blades was not spent in vain. They laughed at me when I bought wiper blades.
After 3,000km Kununurra is a breath of fresh air. Not a bad town, but not safe at night, we are told. Teenagers roam after dark, drinking and shouting. On a Saturday night, several generations of a family are on the pavement outside the petrol station. The elders lie down; the younger wander around in nappies; the traffic passes. The Kimberley Echo gets a great many letters. But the town has everything: airport, shops, a country bar and a video shop that stocks The Wind that Shakes the Barley and Veronica Guerin.
Dave Petersen, a 29-year-old from Bishopstown, in Cork, and Linda Beehan, a 23-year-old from Blanchardstown, worked in a call centre in Perth. “The work was bad – ringing people, looking for money – and we were only given two or three days per week. I want to get started on applying for my second-year visa,” says Dave. He is cleaning cars in Kununurra.
They lived in the Billabong hostel in Perth, where Linda cleaned in return for accomodation. She is running out of time to complete her three months of rural work to get another year here. Told to come to Kununnurra by a job agency, she starts as a cook this Tuesday, on a farm two hours into the outback.
Paul and I get farm jobs – 90 kinds of fruit and vegetables, and flowers. It’s family run, and we are doing anything from planting to picking to plumbing. It’s tough work but varied. We’re pretty lucky to have it. We start at farm o’clock, six days a week. Pay is above minimal, but I’m broke and need to save to get back on the road. The road will wait for nobody.
Go there
Qantas (www.qantas.com), Singapore Airlines (www. singaporeair.com), Cathay Pacific (www.cathaypacific. com) and British Airways (www.ba.com) fly to Perth with their partners from Dublin, and in some cases Cork, with stops in London, Amsterdam, Singapore or Hong Kong. Sites such as www.ebookers.ie let you compare prices.
How to plan a working holiday
How to get a visa
Australia's Working Holiday Visa is for people aged between 18 and 30 from one of 19 specified countries. They may work in any job to fund travel; they may also enter or leave the country within that year. A holder may work for one employer for no more than six months. Working in a specified industry – farming, fishing, forestry, mining or construction – in a rural area qualifies the holder for a second Working Holiday Visa. To apply, see www.immi.gov.au/ visitors/working-holiday and www.ireland.embassy.gov.au.
Working holiday tips
Spend time in the cities, but remember that there's more to Australia.
Arrange a tax number, bank account and superannuation as soon as you arrive.
If you must buy wheels, go for an estate car. Don't rule out bus tours: the travelling groups look like fun, and there are plenty of them.
Drink lots of water, and bring tools and spares; 20 litres of spare fuel was the most we needed.
Relax, enjoy the ride and don't plan too much. Bring a few books. Watch the pennies.
Don't be shy with strangers.
If you plan to stay another year, get the rural work out of the way early.
Who to contact
Ocean Beach Backpackers. 1-3 Eric Street, Cottesloe, Perth, 00-61-8-93841111, www. oceanbeachbackpackers.com.
Burswood Entertainment Complex, Great Eastern Highway, Burswood, Perth, 00-61-8-93627777, www.burswood.com.au.
Western Australian Museum – Maritime. Victoria Quay, Fremantle, 00-61-8-94318334, www.museum.wa.gov.au/ maritime.
Fremantle Prison. The Terrace, Fremantle, 00-61-8-93369200, www. fremantleprison.com.au.
The Job Shop. 236 Williams Street, Northbridge, Perth, 00-61-8-92281457, www.thejob shop.com.au.
Murchison Caravan Park. Kalbarri, 00-61-8-99371005, www.murcp.com.
Kalbarri Boat Hire Canoe Safaris. Kalbarri Beach, 00-61-8-99371245, www. kalbarriboathire.com.
Darren Capewell. Monkey Mia, Shark Bay, 00-61-4-29708847.
Port Hotel. 35 Robinson Street, Carnarvon, 00-61-8-99411704.
Kimberley Klub Backpackers. 62 Frederick Street, Broome, 00-61-8-91923233,
www.kimberleyklub.com.
Billabong Backpackers Resort. 381 Beaufort Street, Perth, 00-61-8-93287720,
www.billabongresort.com.au.