Grey nomads: Australia's roving retirees

[Rodney Mills]

March 19, 2015 BBC News


“The mangoes nearly killed us,” said Julie McKenzie with a smile and a celebratory sundowner drink in her hand, recalling the backbreaking 10-hour shifts harvesting tropical fruit in northern Australia.

For the past few weeks, the 60-year old grandmother has been working alongside her 64-year-old husband, Ian McKenzie, picking grapes in the heat of summer in the New South Wales Hunter Valley.

The couple from the port city of Newcastle, north of Sydney, are grey nomads, a growing cohort of older Australians who have swapped the comfort and familiarity of the suburbs for a life on the road following the fruit-picking trail.

The exact numbers of grey nomads crisscrossing Australia are unknown, but academics have estimated there are tens of thousands constantly on the move, and around a quarter of those have sold their homes. For some, trips away can last for a few months, while others travel indefinitely. Unlike itinerant snowbirds in North America, who travel south in recreational vehicles to escape the winter, Australia’s wandering retirees do it year-round.

“It is quite a phenomenon,” said Tim Harcourt, an economist at the University of New South Wales Business School. “Retired people don’t want to stop working. They want to combine a bit of fruit picking, a bit of leisure and a bit of travelling in their retirement. There is actually a shortage of people needed for fruit picking, so having these experienced workers is a really good thing,” he said.

In other corners of the world, including Spain and Sweden, the fruit picking industry is beset by poor conditions and meagre wages, and often involves unskilled migrants or illegal immigrants. Australia, too, has its problems, especially with unscrupulous operators ripping off backpackers, but the nomads have an informal network that helps them weed out corrupt outfits.


A newfound freedom

Retirees join the fruit picking trail for different reasons. Some do it for a change of lifestyle; some do it to avert boredom. For the McKenzies, a health scare followed by brain surgery prompted 64-year-old Ian McKenzie to walk away from the pressures of his old life working in logistics in search of something more peaceful. “After about four months [on the road] all the stress seemed to drop away… and we realised that we were free and we could do what we wanted to,” he explained. “We’ll do anything and have done anything.”

The drudgery of a 9-to-5 workday grind prompted Brian King, 68, and his wife Denise King, 65, a former dental nurse, to strike out. They have spent about seven years on the road, including four stints harvesting at Tyrrell’s Wines.

“What would we do if we sat down now and stopped working? I mean, just sit there and vegetate,” Brian King said. “Boredom sets in and that is what happens to people, they sit round, nothing to do, bored to tears, get unhealthy, end of story.”

Earning their keep

To be sure, it isn’t a glorified holiday. Labour is intense and hours are long. The pickers’ day begins in the dark at 04:30, and they start their shift at 06:00. It is monotonous work, often in searing heat. Each picker pockets a well-earned 176 Australian dollars ($137.50) for an eight-hour shift harvesting grapes, and Ian and Dallas Waldrom from New Zealand aim to work for eight months of the year.

“It doesn’t cost us much to live, so we’re able to save quite a bit of money,” Dallas Waldrom said. The Kiwi couple made A$16,000 ($12,500) working 10-hour days over a six-and-a-half week period picking pistachios. Apart from the initial purchases of caravans or motorhomes, this group of wanderers is financially self-sufficient, partly because their living costs are low.

Jobs on the fruit trail go beyond just picking. Other opportunities include loading fruit into boxes in the relative comfort of the packing sheds, or working in administration. This work isn’t formally organised by any overarching organisation. Instead these nomads have an informal network, by which they share job leads by word of mouth or email. They can then phone ahead to arrange work directly with farmers.


The grey hair advantage

It’s 11:00 and the sun burns high in the sky over the rows of grapes near the town of Belford. In the distance, a coal train loaded to the brim with another lucrative Hunter Valley commodity rumbles past as a 70-strong legion of pickers heads towards lunchtime. Ankle-deep in mud, everyone is sweating. For this they earn A$22 ($17) an hour. Most are foreign backpackers, but it is the experienced and hardworking older workers who are the bedrock of the harvest.

Like a fine vintage wine, these aging nomads don’t go unnoticed.

“The core of them have been coming to us now for, oh, it must be 10, 11, 12 years,” said winemaker Bruce Tyrrell. “The experience works when you are picking like this where we have a bit of damaged fruit, knowing what to cut and what to get rid of. [They are] part of our team we don’t have to watch. We know they are going to do it properly, and that can be the difference between A$10 a bottle and A$50 a bottle.”

Simple luxuries

After a hard day’s work in the fields, the Waldroms retreat home to their A$80,000 ($62,500) custom-made caravan that has solar panels, two TVs and a library with more than 900 movies for those quiet nights in the Australian outback.

“This lifestyle is difficult to start off with,” said Ian Waldrom, a former machine operator from New Zealand. “It took me a whole year to adapt to it. The conditioning of 40 years working supporting a family and all of a sudden you are doing casual work and having days off during the week. It was very foreign. But once you get past that, how could you go back?”



I guess my wife and me beat the crowd. From about 1985-1998 we spent six months a year in Oz. For seven visits we worked (for free (well we did have a free camp site)) on our mates farm in Childers, Queensland. We met our friends during our first visit to Oz. Like us they were on a walkabout —except they're dinky-di Ozzies)— planning to drive and camp their way around Oz. They made it as far as Childers from Cairns, Queensland, and bought an avocado; lychee, and small crops farm.

The following year we drove from Cairns down the center to Melbourne; across to Tasmania and then on our return to Cairns and home, we stopped off in Childers, Qld.. The farm was 'magic'. So from then on in, we stayed for six weeks to two months working for free on the farm. My wife sorting, grading, and packing with Joanie (the wife), and Les (the husband) and me picked the fruit. We made sure we never arrived for small crop though (picking pumpkins melons etc.), that's back breaking, I wouldn't do that for pay, 'avos' are bad enough.

Three photos of the crop. #1. In the packing shed(my wife and I are in the middle). #2 My wife and I in the middle and our farmer friends. #3 My wife picking lychees.



The life of an Australian 'Cockie' (farmer) is no joke. Drought, flood, infestations, you name it.

One day the sun comes up and you have a beautiful crop of fruit, just a couple of days away from harvest. A drought causes starvation in the bush and lorikeets swarmed in to the orchard and peck at the fruit and ruin it...thirty to forty thousand dollars worth of crop gone in a couple of days. You can't, by law, shoot them they are protected, but out of the goodness of their heart the Dept. of Agriculture gave my mate a license to shoot a hundred...there's thousands! I'm a bird fancier and one year I'm feeding lorikeets and the next I'm having to help my mate salvage what he could by shooting the lovely creatures and hiding their bodies out in the bush for burial...so my mate doesn't exceed killing the hundred he's been allowed. My wife and I, and our farmer mates crying as we're having to butcher them.

Rodney...God bless the farmers.
packing shed 001.jpgavos for market 001.jpgJm picking lychees 001.jpg

[happy daze john in oz]

Yes Rodders one of the biggest groups of people outside of towns and cities. Have a couple of friends who do it, might see them every two years or so. It is becoming more popular by the year with caravan building one of the biggest growth industries in the land. Some fruit grown regions would not survive with out them.

[Richard Quartermaine]

Up here in the NSW Mountains we have a more temperate climate but we still get the birds so need to cover the ripening fruit with nets. Last year we had an invasion of rainbow lorrikeets, small, very pretty and highly intelligent parrots that descended on our granny smith apple tree and had half the fruit before I had time to get the net on properly. This year I had the net on early and I saw a few in a nearby tree. One came down, had a decko at the net, flew off and didn't return.
This morning there was a currawong (black and white - size of a raven) caught inside the net on a fig tree. I went down, gave it a good bollocking, lifted the net and it shot through at a great rate of knots and they stayed away all day. When I pick the fruit and take off the nets there are quite a few I throw on the grass as well as those that are bruised and go off in storage. The parrots, cockatoos and bower birds and a host of others hardly ever seen come out of the bush as the bush telegraph swings int action.
Richard

[cappy]

more fruit there richard than all the big ships out of saaafamton.....regards cappy

[Richard Quartermaine]

That fruit keeps me as regular as the big ships on the Atlantic run Cappy, regards Richard

[Rodney Mills]

Richard, re.#3



It was the same lovely birds we had to kill. The terrible thing was it was worse than sitting ducks. Lorikeets mate for life, so we would kill one and the other one would chatter away and look around for its mate, then pop...and aim at another pair.

My buddies had 300 lychee bushes, and had nets for a quarter of them, but it was no good with lychees. During the off season one prunes the inside ('guts' in Oz speak) out of the of fruit trees ( so the fruits are easy to pick), and with no wasted leaves drawing food from the fruit you get more fruit. Thus, lychees grow on the outside of the bush in bunches, like grapes.

The lorikeets hung from the net took a peck (breaking the shell), spat the piece out and took a bite out of the next lychee, ruining the fruit. Plus fruit-bats crawled under the net and had a feed too.

It was the drought. There were no natural fruits that birds and bats could eat. Thank goodness they didn't like his avos, as he had five hundred trees. As it was, it would have cost him thousands to net the rest of his bushes, and he didn't have the cash.

The year before they lost about thirty mature avocado trees to a wind and hail storm, plus heaps of damage to the fruit.

The year following the birds and bats, the rain and wind from a hurricane blew the side out of his dam and damaged his irrigation equipment and cost $20,000. to fix the dam and equipment...another bank loan against the next years crop.

Poor bastewards. Farming's a year to year existence.

I loved your photos, a pretty good crop...watch out for , birds, bats, hurricanes, rhinoceros beetles and all the other 'nasties' that like fruit. (And little boys like I was, who loved scrumping.)



Cheers, Rodney

[Richard Quartermaine]

In England (apples) and Scotland (plums and pears) the only birds in our trees were looking for insects. In Jakarta the same with our lychees and longans. When I went down to free the currawong it's mate was at my feet (normally they keep at a distance) trying to help. I have a photo of the lorikeets somewhere inside this PC and will post it.

Up the top of Queensland there have been cyclones this month, one doubling back for a second whack at Cooktown and a nasty one in West Aust that stretched down as far as Geraldton. Banana plants are particularly shallow rooted and the poor b*ggers in both areas have lost a years production.

We had a nasty ah soul of a neighbour when I was a kid in a small farming community who poisoned my brother's dog that fell in love with the attractive odour emanating from AS's bitch (the one in the kennel). A bunch of us raided his watermelons and ate them as we walked home along the dirt road. At each gate there was a spread of black seeds as we chatted before moving on and it didn't take Wilf L long to track us down. Fortunately we all had dads that hated Wilf L's guts!!

Cheers, Richard

[happy daze john in oz]

I have three apple, one pear, three plum, e apricot, one nectarine, three orange, one lemon, and two madarin trees in my garden, never net them
he rainbow Lorakeets, Green Parrots and even Blackbirds eat half the fruit. But I d not mind, there is more than we can eat anyway. But I love sit and watch the birds eating, as much pleasure there as eating the fruit.

[Richard Quartermaine]

I reckon this is appropriate John.
Richard

[Richard Quartermaine]

]

watch out for , birds, bats, hurricanes, rhinoceros beetles and all the other 'nasties' that like fruit.

Rodney, Re#6
Flying Foxes (Bats) killing a tree in Nuku'alofa.
I was checked out for Rhinoceros Beetles on arrival in Tahiti from Suva, Fiji in mid 1961. Those nasties love coconut trees.
Rainbow Lorikeets and R Ls with a pair of King Parrots.

Cheers, Richard

Bats Nuku'alofa.jpgPair Rainbow Lorikeets.jpgPapeete Quarantine.jpgRL KP.jpg