AUSTRALIA:IT IS THE longest stretch of straight rail track in the world but undaunted by the 4,500km trek, Miriam Kerley from Co Monaghan and Lorraine Tracey from Co Donegal embraced their friends at Perth and headed on a once-in-a-lifetime trip this week to celebrate Christmas in Sydney.
The pair, both in their 20s, were among 200 passengers on board the Indian Pacific train, which takes three days and three nights to travel coast to coast.
Irish emigrants were well represented, among them brothers John and Michael Collins from Bodane, Tuam, Co Galway. They were wearing different county colours, supporting the football rivals Galway and Mayo, even though they were almost 22,500km from home.
The two young men have been working on organic farms in Australia in order to qualify for second-year working visas. The train trip and the holiday in Sydney for Christmas would be a welcome respite from their work, which has been mostly in vineyards.
Kerley from Carrickmacross tells of her experience a week earlier at an organic olive farm where she watched in horror as a venomous snake was shot and dissected by the farmer. “It was scary to watch as the farmer shot the snake and then cut him in two with a shovel,” she says.
She captured the drama on video via her mobile phone but neither she nor her colleagues were impressed when the farmer deducted half an hour’s pay from their wages for the time it took him to find and kill the snake.
Kerley and Tracey, from Inver, met while working with a financial services company in Dublin. Last May they moved to Perth. Before embarking on the Christmas week train journey, Tracey finished six months of part-time work with Perth’s department of commerce.
In the new year, Kerley hopes to continue working on organic farms to achieve the 88 days of work in rural areas that is required to qualify for a second- year working visa in Australia.
“After that it will be back to Monaghan, where I will be bridesmaid for the wedding of a cousin next summer. I hope to get a good tan for that from working on the organic farms,” she says.
Among the four stops along the train route was one for 20 minutes at the isolated village of Cook, which now has a population of only two people.
The train got vital supplies of water, while it also dropped off essential food and other provisions to the remaining inhabitants of the village, which had a population of 60 to 70 people more than 50 years ago.
Two emigrant couples from Leixlip, Co Kildare – Alan Fitzpatrick and Laura McKinney, and Alan Harrington and Meabh Foley – plan to return to Perth to work there again next month.
“But we will have a slightly shorter train journey back as we will fly first to Adelaide before taking the train for the rest of the trip,” says Fitzpatrick, who works as a carpenter.
First, however, there is Christmas and the new year.
“We hope to be at a Christmas Day Mass in a church near Bondi Beach,” Foley says, “where all the young Irish wear their county colours during the service.”