City Girl, Country Girl

by Liz Harfull

It’s unlikely that Paul Sanghera’s father, Piara, knew of these historic connections when he arrived in the Riverland to pick oranges sometime around 1960. At the suggestion of some Australian friends, he was looking for seasonal work in between cutting sugar cane in Queensland. His own father had cut cane, too, returning to India after earning enough money to keep his family for a year or two, and then coming back again when it had run out.

  Piara preferred working in the orchards and he liked the area so he bought a fruit block at Waikerie and brought out his family. Daljit is not sure of the details, but she thinks they may well have been among the first Indians to settle in the Riverland in modern times. He mentioned the place to friends and soon other Indians, many of them Sikhs from the Punjab, came too. Today there are more than 200 Sikh families in the region which even has its own gurdwara at Glossop.

  Like his father before him, Paul decided to buy a fruit block. He settled on about sixteen hectares established around 1960 when five fruit growers had pooled their resources to create their own mini-irrigation scheme. They bought eighty hectares of farmland that had once been part of Bookpurnong station, subdivided it, and set up a shared central pumping system. Later on, Paul expanded his holdings with another twelve hectares of grapevines about sixteen kilometres away.

  Daljit was quite happy to move from the city to the country. As she points out, it made little difference because she spent most of her life at home. ‘I stay home there, I stay home here—it’s all the same,’ she says. At least the block had a spacious modern house, with plenty of room for a growing family and Paul’s parents to live there, too. But she found the heat very trying, especially during the first summer when she was out in the orchard picking oranges while her mother-in-law cared for the children.

  In those first years, Paul did not employ any labour. He and Daljit picked all the fruit by hand, even the grapes, and pruned all the trees and vines, working long days so they could pay off the money they borrowed to buy the property. In the beginning, Daljit had no idea what to do but Paul taught her the basics of picking and pruning. ‘When we moved here, I didn’t know anything, and all the varieties looked the same to me. Picking oranges is nothing hard, but at the start I didn’t know what to prune,’ she says.

  Encouraging her efforts was Daphne, a neighbour who became a cherished friend. Not long after the Sangheras moved in, she showed up at the back door with flowers and her phone number, encouraging Daljit to call if she ever needed anything. ‘That was a really nice feeling. It made a difference,’ Daljit says. ‘She was a bit older but I feel like I could talk to her about anything. With her there was no need to do the formalities. She was by herself and she come sometimes to my place when she feel lonely.’ Daphne passed away some years ago. ‘I miss her,’ Daljit finishes simply.

  Daljit also made friends among the local Sikh community. She doesn’t remember there being that many Indian families in the area when they arrived, but Paul’s family had friends on fruit blocks nearby. They also gave Paul some tips on the more complex aspects of managing the block, like controlling the myriad pest and diseases that attacked their fruit trees and vines. Daljit wasn’t part of this exchange. Normally when the families got together, the men would sit in one place and ‘talk their own things’, and the women were in another room. It just wasn’t usual for Punjabi women to play any sort of role in running a farm. Daljit was pushing boundaries enough by helping outside in the orchard. She even learnt to drive the tractor, and she gained a truck licence so she could deliver fruit to the wholesaler at Loxton during the busy picking season.

  Meanwhile, her more traditional role as a wife and mother expanded. ‘We thought one girl, one boy, we will have one more,’ Daljit says. Karamjoyt, known as KJ, was born in 1996, ten years after Monica and eight after Tim. With the benefit of hindsight, Daljit looks at the gap as a blessing. It meant KJ was by her mother’s side every day through the years of grief, depression and intense struggle coming her way. ‘We didn’t know that at the time, but I think the gap was a good thing. I didn’t know, but God know,’ Daljit reflects.

  18

  WHEN GIVING UP IS NOT AN OPTION

  Daljit was only forty when her husband died from an illness in December 2002. She does not like to talk about this painful part of her life, but his death changed everything. Except the rows and rows of grapes and fruit trees waiting outside the back door that needed irrigating, and the three children who required her love and attention.

  News of Paul’s death spread quickly, and her house was soon full of relatives, friends from the Riverland’s Sikh community and concerned neighbours dropping in to see if there was anything they could do. Her mother and sisters flew from Canada, her mother staying for six months to help however she could. As the days passed Daljit came to a decision that surprised many. It certainly went against the traditions of her culture and upbringing. After considering the options available to her, she resolved to keep the fruit block and run it herself.

  Her parents were not convinced it was the right choice. They wanted her to sell up and move to Canada, where her mother and sisters would be on hand. Even though she had visited the block several times and spent six months there supporting her daughter after Paul’s death, Mohinder looked on Bookpurnong as an isolated wilderness on the other side of the world, where Daljit would be facing unknown dangers and taking on a responsibility tackled only by men. ‘My grandma is very Indian, very traditional, and she still says to this day, “Paul left my daughter in the jungles of Australia!”,’ Monica explains wryly.

  While moving to Canada may have seemed the easiest option, for Daljit the choice was not that simple. For a start, her children had all been born in Australia and grown up in the Riverland. Monica was sixteen when her father died, Tim was fourteen and KJ was only six. The Riverland was their home.

  Then there were the fifteen years Daljit and her husband had put into the block to improve it and pay off the mortgage. After all that hard work, she could not just walk away. There was also the very practical realisation that, given it was debt free, the enterprise was her best hope of earning a living to support herself and her children, especially if she could manage most of the work herself. ‘If I didn’t do the block work, what else I can do? To look after my kids I have to do something,’ she says.

  The first twelve months on her own made it very clear to Daljit that there was a great deal she did not know. ‘My goodness me, I had no idea,’ she admits. Compared with other challenges that lay ahead, organising the grape harvest not many weeks after Paul died was not too complicated—the Sangheras had been using contractors for a few years. They come in with mechanical harvesters for a day or two at a time between late January and early April, as different varieties of grapes ripen.

  However, monitoring the crops and learning when and how to apply fertiliser and chemical sprays was a completely different story. It is potentially one of the most complex aspects of managing any horticultural enterprise. The plants are not going to thrive and produce healthy fruit if they don’t have access to the right nutrition, especially on the red sands of the Riverland, and crops can easily be wiped out if problems with pest and disease are not diagnosed quickly and the right action taken to control them. ‘Things like which chemical to use, when to use, how much chemical to put in the tank, and what time of year to do. I think, how I do that?’ Daljit says, listing only a few of the things she didn’t know.

  Just as big a challenge was learning how to manage the irrigation system on which her trees and vines rely for survival. The property shares a pump with four others, and each grower takes a turn operating it. There are no open irrigation channels in this part of the world; the water is delivered to the blocks through large pipelines. On Daljit’s property the pump feeds into a drip irrigation system which trickles water into the root zone of each vine and tree, making sure every drop is used as efficiently as possible. It is a critical step forward from the old days of flood irrigation, given the precious and limite
d nature of the resource, especially in years when drought affects the entire complex and fragile River Murray system. Daljit had no idea how much water the orchard needed, or what to do if the system broke down.

  Most of the machinery kept in the property’s big green shed was a mystery to her, too. ‘I have no idea. You would say I’m lying but it’s true. The chainsaw, anything, even the spray plant. I didn’t know how to open the jets and how to clean them.’ She laughs at the idea now, but even in the house, simple tasks like changing the tubes in fluorescent lights challenged her at first because she had never done it before. Paul always took care of any maintenance.

  Determined to become self-reliant, Daljit applied her commonsense and quick mind to learning how to do most things by herself. More than happy to ask for advice and take it on board, she turned to a combination of willing neighbours and professional expertise. Paul had already engaged a Loxton-based consulting service to check the orchard every month and provide agronomic advice. She kept them on to guide her through fertilising and spraying. ‘They show me, so I start slowly, slowly learning,’ she says.

  She also approached Ken, a worker employed by a neighbour, and offered to pay him to help her. ‘He said if something go wrong just leave a note on the car and he’ll come over after work. I’m not good learning by reading, I’m just good by seeing, so when he was working I was watching. I think I am a quick learner if I watch how to do things.’ Over the next three years, Ken taught her many practical skills, including how to graft trees and fix common problems with the irrigation system.

  Later on, Daljit joined the Loxton branch of the Agricultural Bureau of South Australia, an organisation established almost 130 years ago to help farmers share experiences and access the latest scientific information. She started going to their regular gatherings so she could talk to other growers. When she joined she was the only woman in the area running a fruit block on her own, and often she was the only woman attending. She found the men friendly and welcoming, and the talk about what was going on with the season and the other properties extremely helpful. ‘It’s really good for me,’ she says.

  Her immediate neighbours proved towers of strength, too. Among them are David and Judy Jaeschke, whose family has been growing fruit at Lock Four since the 1940s. Taking over from his father, David was a large-scale dried apricot producer for many years. His four or so hectares is down to less than half a hectare now, but he has refused to give up the enterprise altogether despite rising production costs and having to compete against cheap imports.

  David and Judy have enormous respect for Daljit. ‘I met her soon after she moved here and we got on well right from the start. She was just very friendly and welcoming,’ Judy says. ‘I suppose we got to know each other more after Paul died. I would just come over and say hello, and ask her how she was going, and she would say, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” but it probably wasn’t. It was only afterwards that she told us things . . . She is very independent and resourceful. She didn’t push herself on us.’

  Reluctant to describe himself as her mentor, David says Daljit only asked for help when absolutely necessary. Often it would amount to casual conversations about particular issues or problems. Local growers thought she had guts and were very willing to share their experience. ‘I don’t think she has taken undue liberties or anything like that at all. She is a very hard worker and she understands things quickly,’ he says. ‘And it’s been a two-way thing, too. There have been times when I’ve been short of labour during the harvest in the apricot season, and she’ll come and help.’

  Daljit was very conscious about not becoming a nuisance to her neighbours. ‘You can’t ask everybody all the time. Even the people that said when you need us ring us, I just do only if I can’t work it out. Otherwise people get sick and tired of you, even if they don’t say.’

  Her challenges were often harder in the early years because of her limited English. Even though she has come a long way, Daljit is reminded regularly how difficult this can make life because in her spare time she acts as an interpreter in Punjabi for the federal government’s Centrelink department, helping Indians in the Riverland to access social and welfare services. She knows from personal experience that many Indian women have limited opportunities to practise English because their life is focused in the home. If they do go out or socialise with people outside their family, it tends to be with other people from their community.

  As her own English improved, Daljit enrolled in courses to boost her business and farming skills. She went to the local adult education facility for lessons so she could use a computer and accounting software to keep the farm books, rather than doing it all by hand, and she gained the accreditation required in South Australia to handle farm chemicals. In recent years she has also tackled marketing and management subjects, and she is training to join a sustainable farming initiative known as Eco-Citrus. To be part of the initiative, she is learning how to reduce spraying to a minimum and rely more on natural insects, as well as other basic management practices that help care for the environment. For any part of her orchard to become accredited with Eco-Citrus, she has to keep a close record of everything she does.

  Daljit enjoys being a student and has gained great satisfaction from every step towards independence. ‘When I learn even the small things so I can do myself next time, I feel very good,’ she says. Throughout the first few years, she kept a record of everything she did and learnt in the orchard so she could refer to it in future seasons. Along the way, she made many mistakes. Often they were little things, but sometimes the mistakes were big and had serious implications.

  There was the season she decided not to spend money buying extra irrigation water for her citrus trees. At the time, water restrictions were in place because of drought, and she was very focused on monitoring the block’s financial performance. She was trying to limit her risks and not spend more money than was coming in. But she learnt to her cost that without water at key times, citrus trees don’t produce fruit so there was only a small harvest of oranges that year.

  Daljit may have been dismayed at what she saw as a costly error in judgement, but it was a testing time for all the Riverland’s fruit growers. They were experiencing one of the most difficult periods in the region’s history. Environmental experts and industry leaders had been warning for years that the river on which they relied for survival, the very reason their communities existed at all, was in diabolical trouble. Too much water was being taken out for irrigation, and the whole system was in danger of collapse. With a prolonged drought biting hard across most of the vast basin that feeds the River Murray and its tributaries, their dire predictions seemed to be coming true.

  Political arguments raged across four states about who was responsible and what might be done as the health of the river became a major national issue, affecting not just the environment, but the social and economic well-being of thousands of people. With the drought at its peak, in 2007 sweeping water restrictions were introduced which resulted in many growers having to make do with just half their annual water allocation. For some, it was the final straw. They gave up irrigation altogether, leaving thousands of trees and vines to die. By 2008, a thousand hectares of mostly orange trees had been pulled up in the Riverland and 200 citrus growers, a full twenty per cent, had left the industry.

  The worst of the drought conditions were over by 2010, but by then another major threat to Daljit’s survival was looming. That season the average price of grapes grown in Australia’s warm climate areas dropped to less than $300 per tonne, compared with more than $470 a few years before. Experts pointed the finger at over-supply, falling export demand and the global financial crisis. The price was so low that growers across the Murray–Darling Basin left 13,000 hectares of grapes rotting on their vines that year. Quite simply, it would cost more to harvest than they would earn.

  By 2015, the plight of the industry was making national headlines. Grape prices in the Riverland slumped to as low as $200 pe
r tonne for some varieties, and reports suggested more than eighty per cent of the nation’s grape growers were not making enough to cover costs. Keeping her ear to the ground, Daljit learnt of a buyer prepared to pay $210 per tonne for her Chardonnay grapes at a time when rumours were suggesting the price might fall as low as $180, and took the offer.

  Throughout this ongoing tsunami of events beyond her control, Daljit kept going. At least six days a week she pulled herself out of bed, put aside her personal sorrows and the stress of what was going on around her, and went to work.

  Keeping a watchful eye on her mother, and doing whatever she could to lessen the burden, was KJ. Only six when her father died, she found it difficult to come home from school and see her mother upset. Even at a young age she would try to help by preparing the evening meal, or making lunch and taking it out to her mother in the orchard, and she accompanied Daljit everywhere, even to agricultural bureau meetings. ‘When I look back, we did do a lot of things together. She liked having the company so every time she went shopping I’d go shopping. If she went to a meeting I’d still go with her, even though I’d just sit there and be bored. I worked at the farmers’ market making coffee for seven years so we were there together, too,’ KJ says.

  Although KJ didn’t spend much time working on the fruit block, during the picking season she would sometimes take over delivering bins to the orchard so Daljit could head inside early. Occasionally, she would even pick a bin or two of oranges. One of Daljit’s favourite stories is about KJ’s endeavours when she was only about ten. Her daughter badly wanted a new pair of expensive Adidas sports shoes, so Daljit told her she could have them if she earned them by working in the orchard. ‘She was really young and the pickers get a big surprise. She was picking all day. She filled the bins all by herself. I can’t remember if she filled two bins or three, but she got the expensive shoes.’