Once a Pommie Swagman

by Thomas, Nick Arden

  It was also a ‘plan’ that each tree had to be completely picked clean before moving on to the next, and to facilitate this Mr Goloambino liked the pickers to work in pairs, allotting each pair a set of trees to pick each day. This suited Glen and I well enough but for some, paired with a stranger they didn’t get on with, it was not so readily accepted. But like it or not the system worked. With just two pickers concentrating on one tree, people didn’t get in each other’s way, and more importantly it prevented the smart arses from rushing off and picking only the easier fruit reached from the ground. The whole procedure, in fact life on the orchard in general during harvesting time, was run like a military operation. It was not popular with everybody, maybe, but it meant the orchard was harvested with speed and efficiency, tree by tree, row by row.

  When you are first confronted with an orange orchard, or any orchard for that matter — hundreds of trees, literally dripping with fruit and stretching for hundreds of yards down well manicured rows — the task appears enormous. Psychologically it makes you feel you have to hurry, otherwise you will never get it done. At least that’s how it made Glen and I feel. Add to this the teenage boy’s inability to do anything without turning it into a competition, and it meant we set off at a manic pace. Virtually ripping the oranges from the trees, rushing up and down our ladders and running to empty our bags into our bins, each determined to empty more bags in an hour than the other. This caused much amusement amongst the other works and the Golambinos, not that we noticed, so intent were we on our competition. But well before breakfast on the first day Mr Golambino was hollering at us. “Santi numi, boys! Slow down! Slow down! No good rip fruit off ! Must twist, like this. Twist, put; twist, put; twist, put!” And he proceeded to pick more oranges in two minutes than we had in five, with not one twig or leaf getting into the bag. “Clean bag, good bag,” he winked. By knock-off time that afternoon we’d got the hang of things, and although we were as fast as most of the others, we had slowed down considerably, not that we had a choice. It looks so easy to pick oranges, and in many ways it was; it was certainly easier than cutting sugar cane! But climbing up and down a ladder twenty or thirty times a day with fifty pounds of fruit swinging round your neck slows down even the most manic worker.

  If the harvesting was organised like a military operation, so was the preparation and serving of meals. The two Mrs Golambinos were responsible for food, with the help of two women who lived nearby. Right along the front of the house ran a wide veranda, and at one end a serving hatch had been cut through into the kitchen like a big window. All meals were served through this hatch, with the workers queuing up back along the veranda. On the ground below the veranda was a large paved patio area, covered with an iron roof supported on posts, and under this were several rough wooden tables and benches. Most of the workers ate there, although some of the married couples took their meals back to their huts; a stack of tin plate lids were piled up on the serving hatch next to the plates specifically for this purpose. Like the stretchers we slept on, these lids, and the plates, mugs, knives and forks all had a small crest on them, and looked like they had come from a hospital as well. Beside the hatch on the veranda was a wet garbage drum, and on the other side a big tub of hot, soapy water, and we were asked — ordered, actually — to scrape all our leftovers into the drum and then leave the plates and knives and forks soaking in the tub. Not doing so, or leaving your dirty plates on the bench unscraped, elicited a fierce earful from one or other of the Mrs Golambinos, sometimes both of them at once!

  Breakfast consisted of Cornflakes and lovely fresh creamy milk, delivered to the orchard every morning in quart churns by the dairy farm up the road. Sausages, beans and scrambled eggs followed with toast and, of course, orange juice. Lunches were nearly always salads, with cold ham or chicken and freshly baked bread, and dinners were nearly always stews or spaghetti with meatballs or fried lamb chops, with lovely tomato and basil sauces. The exception was Friday, which was fish pie night. The most eagerly awaited meal, however, was Sunday lunch. For every other meal the Golambino family ate inside in their dining room, but on Sunday, after the family returned from church, the tables on the patio were festooned with colourful tablecloths and a wonderful spread was laid out. Cold meats left over from the week, salads, lovely bread and always a pudding of some sort with custard. On Sunday night cheese and biscuits and an array of little cakes were left on the serving hatch for us to help ourselves. There might have been plenty of complaints about Mr Golambino’s rules and abrupt manner, but we didn’t hear one about the food. It was fantastic! Although we did have to pay for it, a set amount being withheld from our wages each week for food and lodgings, with Mr Golambino assuring us it was only enough to cover costs.

  On Friday and Saturday nights the men of the family would bring out chairs and sit on the veranda, filling a large ice chest with beer, and all the workers were invited to join them if they wished, Mr Golambino selling the beer for what he had paid for it. There was no limit to how many bottles a worker could have, but it was made abundantly plain that any more than three was excessive and at nine o’clock sharp the ‘bar’ was shut. A few of the workers had vehicles and at the weekends they would go into town, some coming back the worse for wear, but anyone who turned up for work still drunk, or late because of a hangover, only did so once.

  Of all the ‘plans’, though, the one that caused the most friction was Mr Golambino’s insistence that all pickers had to work in the sheds one day each week. Workers in the sheds were paid by the hour, which was considerably less than you could earn picking; if you worked hard, that was. But the main thing people objected too was Giorgina Golambino, who was in total control of the packing shed, along with her sister Sonia.

  Like everything else, the sorting and packing process was done with great efficiency, freshly picked fruit going in one end and coming out the other in labelled boxes, ready to be loaded onto trucks. Having weighed each bin on arrival from the orchard, the oranges were tipped out onto a large wooden platform where they were roughly sorted, green or damaged fruit being taken out, along with any leaves or twigs. They were then sent down a wooden encased conveyor of rollers into a rectangular tank of water where they were washed, waxed and moved along the tank by two workers with large wooden hoe-like tools. It was their job to make sure all the oranges were completely submerged, and then to coax them onto another conveyor belt at the end of the tank which took them down to the final sorting platform. From this platform there were two conveyors leading to the packing area about thirty feet away; one for ‘premium’ fruit, the other for ‘standard’. These two belts fanned out in a V shape and it was there, in the middle of the V, deftly and quickly deciding which oranges went down which belt, that Giorgina Golambino stood for most of the day, shouting instructions over the noise of the clattering rollers and abusing the entire shed if any leaves or bad fruit ended up on her table.

  At the end of these two belts were small bays with eight-inch high wooden sides where the oranges finally came to rest. Next to each bay was a table, and beside it a stack of wooden boxes made of four-inch wide thin wooden slats with separate lids. Beside these was a large banding tool, which crimped flat steel bands around the boxes when filled. It was at the end of the ‘standard’ fruit belt that Glen and I worked whenever we were in the shed. We swapped jobs about, either packing the oranges — always forty-eight to a box, three layers of twelve in three rows of four, separated by two layers of six in two rows of three — or putting the lids on the boxes, banding them and sticking on a label. This done, the boxes were sent down yet another roller belt to the truck loading bay at the end of the shed where Dario Golambino was in charge of organising orders and dispatches, loading and doing local deliveries in the brothers’ one ton truck. Sydney, Melbourne and other interstate orders were picked up during the week by trucks sent from the respective shops or markets.

  The standard fruit was fairly easy to pack as it was done without any wrapping. The premium fruit,
however, was individually wrapped in a small piece of wax paper with the Golambino logo on it. Although there were far fewer of these, they took much longer to pack as it had to be done with great care; a box of Golambino ‘premium’ oranges retailed for much more than a standard box, no doubt the reason why Sonia Golambino was in charge of this area. Fortunately she was much easier to work with than her sister.

  I don’t know how old Giorgina Golambino was; thirty, thirty-five maybe, but unlike her two younger sisters she was not particularly attractive, being plump and square-faced. She looked a bit like her father, perhaps the reason she was so short tempered! Once the process in the shed started it was relentless, like an orange sea, and at each stage you had to work fast and constantly. Stop even for a few moments to have a cigarette, and oranges would begin to pile up, spilling over the sides of the belts or sorting areas, one of Giorgina Golambino’s many pet hates. Having had a run-in with her about something, two men flatly refused to work in the packing shed again after their first day, saying they were losing money and that they’d signed on to “Pick, not bloody pack and get abused!” They were sacked on the spot, accompanied by much anger and shouting from both sides. Mr Golambino’s control over every aspect of his workers’ lives was total, and in public at least, he backed his family member in every dispute. “Dis my house! My orchard! You want work here, you do like I say!” The turnover of staff was fairly frequent.

  No departure was more dramatic than that of Jack, who arrived at the orchard a week or ten days after us. He was about thirty, I suppose, and kept himself very much to himself. We never even knew his last name, much less where he came from, but he seemed likeable enough. Good-looking, he was fit and strong and worked hard, but from the outset it was obvious Mr Golambino didn’t like him. Initially we thought it was because Jack had insisted on working on his own. “I don’t work with nobody,” he stated flatly. “I’ll pull me weight, pick one tree at a time, you’ll see the results, I just do it on me own.” Being short two or three pickers at the time, Mr Golambino reluctantly agreed, and by the end of the first day when Jack had picked half a bin more than everybody else with not a leaf or twig in sight, he couldn’t really argue. Even so, after a few days it became obvious both the brothers were watching the newcomer’s every move with suspicion.

  Then one evening Glen and I were returning to our hut from the showers, taking a short-cut around the back of the hut next to ours, which happened to be Jack’s. As we came around the corner there he was, locked in a passionate embrace with Carlotta Golambino, pressing her hard up against the wall, her dress riding high up one thigh. We tried to pull back but she spotted us and desperately broke away, gasping with shock and pulling her dress down as she ran off. At eighteen, Carlotta was the youngest of the family and suddenly Jack didn’t look so friendly. “You two keep your mouths shut, you hear.”

  We never saw them together again, although over the next few days we noticed the little smiles Carlotta gave whenever the two were in sight of each other. The Golambinos obviously noticed this too, and if it looked like Jack and Carlotta might be left alone together one or other of the brothers would suddenly appear. One Friday evening, after Jack had been there about a week, several of us pickers were sitting on the veranda after dinner drinking beer with Pietro, Dario and Giovanni; Roberto Golambino and Jack not amongst us. Suddenly from the direction of the packing shed came a great roar of anger, and Roberto came around the corner pushing his daughter Carlotta in front of him. He yelled at her in Italian and pointed to the house and instantly Carlotta wheeled round, stamping her foot in fury and shouting back at him in Italian, obviously incensed at what her father had said. Then Jack appeared around the corner behind them.

  “Leave her alone for Christ’s sake! She is bloody eighteen!”

  “Don’t you talk me bloody!” Roberto Golambino shouted, advancing towards him. “You finish here! Go! Now! Five minutes I no want see you here no more!”

  “We just had a kiss!” Jack exclaimed, holding out his hands as if pleading with all of us witnesses up on the veranda “She kissed me t…”

  “I no hear this!” shouted Roberto. “Fuck you! You go now!” and Jack turned, shaking his head.

  “Ah, fuck you too! Stupid dago!” This last he grunted, more or less to himself as he turned to go, but Roberto Golambino heard it and almost had an epileptic fit.

  “What you say!” he screamed and immediately he turned on his heel, went storming past a now sobbing Carlotta and ran up the veranda steps two at a time, shouting over and over again, “You no call me that! You no call me that! Nobody call Golambino that!” and he disappeared into the house.

  By now Giovanni had come down from the veranda and was standing in front of Jack. “You hear him,” he said. “You finish here now.”

  “But he didn’t do anything, Zio!” cried Carlotta and her uncle turned, put his arm around her and spoke gently in Italian for a moment, causing her to turn and run up the steps, clearly distressed; just as she was about to go inside her father came bursting out onto the veranda brandishing a shotgun and pointing it at Jack.

  “No, Papa, no!” Carlotta cried.

  “You call me dago now! You call me dago now!” yelled Roberto, charging down the stairs.

  “Jesus!” Jack exclaimed, backing away. “You’re fucking mad!”

  “I no fucking … ! I give you fucking … !” and he lifted the shotgun to his shoulder. By now all the women had come out onto the veranda, their hands over their mouths in horror, Roberto’s wife shouting hysterically. Then Pietro ran down the stairs and grabbed the shotgun barrel, lifting it in the air. “Not like this, Zio, not like this!” After a brief struggle and cursing in Italian, his uncle let him take the gun.

  “You go now,” Giovanni turned to Jack. “Gina!” he called over his shoulder. “Get his money ready. He go front gate! I pay him there!” And still shaking his head, Jack went off in the darkness to get his gear. By the time Giovanni went to pay him tempers had calmed a bit; Roberto Golambino was even sitting quietly sipping a beer. Pietro broke the shotgun to unload it, then he looked at his uncle with surprise. “It isn’t loaded!” Roberto Giovanni shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “Si. But he don’t know dis.”

  Amazing how time flicks by when you are fully occupied and worn out each day. On Magnetic Island the days had taken weeks to pass. Now, they took hours. At night during the week there wasn’t much to do after dinner, but most of us were in bed well before nine o’clock anyway. The four others in our hut were not exactly riveting personalities, and although we played draughts and cards with them occasionally we never really got to know them very well. The two men from Melbourne kept themselves very much to themselves and the two Italians, although slightly more lively and amusing, spoke very little English. I suppose the best thing that happened was that for the first time in my life I began to read things other than Blinky Bill and The Famous Five. Sonia Golambino had a fairly extensive library and was always reading, and she began lending us books. It was she who introduced me to Jane Austin and A. J. Cronin, Daphne du Maurier and Hemingway. It was a revelation, and some days I couldn’t wait for night to come so I could get back to those books. Glen also read avidly, although he always had done so, and we both tried to come to grips with Walden. Glen at least finished it, but I couldn’t understand half of it. Thoreau sounded like a bit of a weirdo to me. But I would go back to him years later, as William Fellows had suggested.

  Of course the best thing about the orchard was that we were paid each week, our first regular income! After food and lodgings had been taken out and some income tax withheld — we were assured we would get this back but we never did. Nobody ever told us how, but even if they had we would probably not have understood the procedure; makes you wonder just how much tax departments have made out of the ignorant or uneducated over the years. We ended up earning a little under seven pounds a week; not quite as much as we had hoped, but still not bad, and as we weren’t buying anything except cigarett
es it soon mounted up. We were paid on Fridays and knocked off an hour early for the event, queuing up along the veranda to receive our little brown envelopes through the serving hatch. Before Gina Golambino handed the money over we had to sign for it in a large ledger, and for some this was the hardest, or at least the most stressful part of the job.

  On our travels — notably at Butts sugar plantation and the Proserpine Show — we had come across a few people who had difficulty reading and writing, but we hadn’t really taken much notice. Now it was the sheer number of illiterate workers on the orchard that brought home to us not just how common this problem was, but how difficult, even traumatic life can be for those who can’t read or write. Of the thirty or so pickers working on Golambino’s orchard while we were there, at least seven could not sign their names or read. I suppose it was because I had just discovered the magic of reading myself that it made me more aware of this, but if the pickers on Golambino’s Orchard were a cross-section of the seasonal workers’ population, how many other illiterate people were there! One man, receiving his first pay envelope, had not realised he would have to sign for it, and when he arrived at the hatch and Gina placed the ledger in front of him he was so humiliated and embarrassed it was equally humiliating and embarrassing to watch. He left the veranda more distressed than Carlotta Golambino, and we never saw him again. We didn’t see much of Carlotta for several days after her little incident, either. Pietro told us she wouldn’t come out of her room.