Back in April this year, I went to Australia on a working holiday visa. These are special visas granted to citizens of participating countries who are under 30 and want to work to fun their travels. This was perfect for me as Australia is a highly developed country and I could earn good money there.
When I set out on my trip back in May 2009, I knew that if things were tight then I could always go to Australia and make some cash while living fairly comfortably. My friend Pete and I decided to do this together, after a month and a half of crazy partying in Thailand of course…
In March I returned to Kuala Lumpur, where I started this blog actually. I had an injured back and nothing solid booked. I ended up waiting 2 weeks to apply for the visa. It is all done online through a pretty decent system, considering this is a government not a tech company. However, my application raised a red flag on their system. Not because I’m a crazy badass or anything, but rather because I had been out of my home country for more than 3 consecutive months in the last 5 years.
This, to the Aussie Government, meant that I was at risk of having Tuberculosis. I had to go to a hospital in Kuala Lumpur and have a chest x-ray. This was a relatively painless affair, but I was kept in the dark until I actually received my visa. The hospital actually sent the x-ray digitally to the Sydney Immigration Bureau for processing.
As was usual with visa applications, you just cross your fingers and hope for a yes – the hospital didn’t even tell me if I had TB or not! I got the visa, electronically, and when I entered Australia I didn’t even get a fancy work visa stamp. It’s a shame as my passport is looking quite colourful now.
I paid a grand total of £100 (About US$150) for my flight from Singapore to Perth including tax and baggage (I took the bus from KL – Singapore for around £8). I arrived in Perth on a Tuesday night at around 10pm.
The next morning I woke up, got a local SIM card for my phone and opened a bank account. Then I had a look at some job ads for tractor drivers. I noted a bunch of phone numbers, then called the first one – voice mail. I called the second one and after speaking to me for 2 minutes the guy offers me the job and tells me to take a bus for 800km out to his place. “No dramas”, I said, as if it wasn’t a big deal.
Looking back and writing this now, that’s a pretty crazy situation. Even worse was the fact that I had never driven a tractor before and had lied about doing so – how hard could it be? My confidence was raised when the first farmer that I left a voice mail with called me back and offered me a job too.
As it turned out, my buddy Pete found a job just as easily. His one paid a little more and they were looking for 2 people so naturally I called the farm manager and again, after 2 minutes, was offered the job. We actually took this one and I worked there for over a month without crashing my quarter of a million dollar tractor, unlike my poor friend Pete who had a “slight” mishap – more on this in a later post. It was a really interesting experience and for the most part, extremely enjoyable. My first day on the farm was actually my first day of actual work in over a year!
The best part of this job was the pay. It was $23 per hour and we ended up working around 14 hours per day in total. This worked out at around $1,600 per week after tax, and we had free accommodation. Not a bad way to make a lot of money really fast.
I’ll be sure to write another post about how Pete crashed his tractor and how I ended up on another farm working for the worst family in the world. Subscribe for free to stay updated.
