Image: Wikimedia Commons
When I was twenty-seven I lived in a share house with four British men, which was at least three too many. They took it in turns to get sunstroke, one had flamboyant night terrors and they blasted Oasis day and night.
Over the time we lived together, all of them did stints working on farms. It was a relief to have fewer people in the house, but they’d always come back with stories.
Ryan encountered the biggest spider he’d ever seen and learned he could scream so loudly that he’d make his own ears ring; Carew had found that he’d be living in a metal shed cramped with bunkbeds and no electricity or running water, and it would cost him $200 a week; Jordan was given a knife and told to slit the throat of a sheep, which came as a shock to a guy who usually worked in publishing; Steven had taken a train, and then a bus and been dropped off on the side of the road in the middle of flat dusty plains that disappeared into the horizon. It got dark and no one came to get him and there wasn’t another bus until morning. An hour later in the pitch black, a stranger in a truck picked him up.
They were all on working holiday visas and, along with visitors from across Asia and Europe under the age of thirty, could extend them by a year by doing three months (eighty-eight days) of farm work in a regional area. Of course, as a writer, I was curious for entirely self-interested reasons. I thought it would make a great novel.
I write dark books that would be shelved in the ‘crime’ section of the library, but rarely include much in the way of police or investigations—‘Psychological thrillers’ is probably the closest label, though really, I just enjoy writing about things that scare me. Some of the stories my housemates came back were terrifying. Straight away I started working on what would become my novel Out of Breath, imagining these experiences through the eyes of a fictional character, Jo. Like my housemates, she’d be English, but unlike them she’d be a woman, an insomniac, a failed painter; she’d be a little bit broken (like all my characters seem to be) and looking for a sense of belonging out in the picking fields.
But the problem with being a massive scaredy-cat is that my imagination has always been far more daring than my experiences. As I started to research more about the 88-day program, it began to eat at me. How could I do justice to the story I was trying to tell? My fingers were calloused from passionate typing, not physical labour.
How could I do justice to the story I was trying to tell? My fingers were calloused from passionate typing, not physical labour.
First, I took the easiest option and went deep into Facebook. I joined backpacker groups, and farmer groups and chatted to people in both. The program was rife with exploitation, with workers being charged exorbitant fees for accommodation while making far below minimum wage (in the worst cases I heard less than a dollar an hour). But currency was also days, something they needed if they were going to reach the eighty-eight-day minimum needed to avoid deportation.
I started talking on the phone to fruit pickers and heard all sorts of stories. Some had positive experiences: They met the person they ended up marrying. They loved the push to get out in nature. They relished working hard and feeling useful. But others had moments which were quite scary—one young man, alone with a farmer and with no mobile reception, found that his bedroom and bathroom were riddled with cameras recording him.
A lot of people I spoke to had been ripped off by the hostels which were set-up to find them work: having their passports taken and been charged hundreds of dollars a week to live in flea-infested shared rooms for upwards of six months. They’d be lured out to these places with the promise of farm placement, but when they arrived the work be scant or sometimes non-existent. I spoke to women who had swapped sexual favours to farmers in exchange for days being signed off, and a woman who had been sexually assaulted by a farmer and hadn’t told anyone else. Unions and industry experts have been calling for years for the visa program to be shut down due to its exploitative nature.
*
The more I researched, the more my perspective clouded. I began to believe the only way to do justice to the experience was to do the farm work myself. I imagined this as method writing, going undercover—but maybe it was just a novelist’s guilt. I was sure that this would give my writing an authenticity that imagination could not. I’ve held many menial jobs in my life: checkout at an IGA, waitressing, working the phones at call centres, as a nanny-on-call for expensive hotels, but there was always enough variety in the work to keep it somewhat interesting.
Joseph Ponthus spent years working in fish factories and abattoirs when he wrote his celebrated verse novel On the Line, which captures his day-to-day with exquisite precision. Through his verses Ponthus evokes the way the long hours of repetition erodes your sense of self, the way time becomes elastic. I’d heard about this feeling many times in my interviews with fruit pickers. It was what I wanted to conjure in my novel.
I imagined this as method writing, going undercover—but maybe it was just a novelist’s guilt. I was sure that this would give my writing an authenticity that imagination could not.
I found a working hostel who said they’d had a place for me at an apple orchard. I got up at pre-dawn and made the long drive out to regional Victoria. When I arrived at the hostel, I started to feel nervous. After all, I’d spent the last months listening to some really scary experiences of people doing exactly what I was about to do. And what if the owners of the hostel found out that I was a writer, what would happen then?
The hostel used to be a family holiday park, but was now falling to bits. Broken machinery lay on the dead grass, the pool was drained, and an old man on a tricycle was doing rounds of the park. He laughed maniacally at me when I passed him. The owner of the hostel, a middle-aged man with pale blue eyes, gave me a quick tour. Half the backpackers camped for the entire three months. The others were in either the dilapidated cabins or windowless shipping containers.
In the office, one wall was just exposed insulation. The television was on: Who Wants to be a Millionaire. He told me that he didn’t often get Australians there. I told him I was just interested in doing the work. He stared at me for a long while.
‘You seem like a smart girl,’ he said eventually, ‘what are you doing here?’
I tried to keep my gaze steady, ‘I’m broke,’ I said, which wasn’t really a lie.
He just stared at me some more, then told me I’d have to pay four hundred dollars up front for the fortnight’s accommodation. I asked him if the work would begin the next day and he was vague. I insisted he check. He admitted that there wasn’t any available work on the apple orchard after all, but he was sure he could get me some other work soon. I told him I’d think about it.
I left, feeling both very foolish and very relieved.
At the time, I was in a writer’s group with Laura Elizabeth Woollett, where we swapped early chapters of Out of Breath and The Newcomer. After a creative block she was experimenting with method writing, and ended up in a coma. She writes of this time: ‘My methods felt worth the risk, as long as I was productive—I didn’t realise at the time just how unsustainable they were.’
I decided to take a step back from the dangerous edge I was teetering on and move towards more traditional methods of research.
So I went to the Kimberley and had a mango farmer walk me through the process of harvesting and packing their fruit. This part of remote Western Australia, while spectacularly beautiful, has a dark history of worker exploitation. After the horrific treatment of blackbirded Yawuru pearl divers was outlawed in 1871 by the West Australian colonial government’s ‘Pearling Act’, the pearl shell industry turned to indentured workers from Asian countries, mostly Japan and Malaysia. They paid them very low wages for long hours of dangerous work. One in ten indentured workers died each year.
I interviewed workers, farmers and hostel employees. I spent time staying at friends’ farms. I watched hundreds of videos. I spent hours and hours at the State Library. By now, years had passed since my last release and I was no closer to finishing the book.
Before this I’d been a dutiful genre author, writing a thriller every year without fail. I’d done research for them too—interviewed academics, firefighters and detectives. I’d spent lots of time on Google Maps, and on weird internet forums and the dark corners of Reddit. But this was different. I felt like I had a duty to the workers I had spoken to. If I was going to attempt to write a story about this experience, I had to at least try and do it right—otherwise I was just exploiting their situation too.
It was time to put away the transcripts, put away the facts, and remember my character—I needed to find my way back to her.
By that time I only lived with one of the British men, Ryan, who was by now my fiance. Sloshing red wine around in my glass, I asked Ryan about the fruit storage system of the farm he’d worked on for the umpteenth time. ‘Isn’t it fiction you’re writing?’ he said. ‘You’re not a journalist.’ It was what I needed to hear.
*
‘Research is formalized curiosity,’ writes Zora Neale Hurston. ‘It is poking and prying with a purpose.’ Hurston, whose novel Their Eyes Were Watching God is a favourite of mine, was also an anthropologist. She did all sorts of fieldwork for that novel, collecting folklore and songs in the Black South and going to Haiti and Jamaica to study voodoo. But she also knew how important it was to set perimeters for herself.
I realised I had reached my purpose. I knew I needed to step back, let go a little. It was time to put away the transcripts, put away the facts, and remember my character—Poor messy Jo, who was still at the farm, working in the fields. I didn’t want to risk the integrity of the project, but I needed to find my way back to her.
In an interview with The White Review, Deborah Levy discusses the allure of research:
Research is so fascinating, why would we ever want to stop researching and do something as hard as write?… You have to stop. And if I find myself wanting to return to research halfway through a novel I know that I’m stuck and that it’s not going to deliver for me, and that I’d be better off going for a swim in Hampstead Heath, or just anywhere really.
It was getting claustrophobic, not just because I was getting bogged down describing mango harvesting in extreme detail, but because Jo’s story there was done. She—we—needed to leave.
All the stories I’d been told, all those places I’d been, were there in my subconscious. Just like you can’t learn to swim by standing on the shore, I had to take the risk and accept the challenge before me. It was time to just jump in.
So, after a farming accident, Jo packs up her bag and leaves the meticulously-researched farm, for a place taken fully from my imagination. A place by the ocean, filled with other workers who’d abandoned their farms; a place where she learns how to dive to the ocean floor. (But of course, it’s a thriller, so there is another level of manipulation lurking in this seeming utopic community.)
After that, I couldn’t stop. I woke up to write as the sun rose, but it wasn’t enough. I borrowed an iPad and a mini keyboard and started writing on the train, my formatting wonky and my grammar wanting. It took me three years to write the first half of Out of Breath and, now that I was finally trusting myself, just a few months to write the second half. Finally, the creative tap was well and truly flowing.
Out of Breath is available now from your local independent bookseller.
