Surviving The Work Camps of Southern Australia

Nate Chai
Nate Chai
Aug 31, 2018 · 3 min read

I used to want to be a cowboy more than anything. Standing on my wooden lodge, smoking a cigarillo, sipping from a bottle of bourbon and watching the sunset across the plains, that was my fantasy. I finally got that dream…from a one-legged man that I met hitchhiking, but this story isn’t about him.

It’s about what happened before.

This story is about the work camps of Southern Australia.

Now, before we jump in, there are a couple of things you need to know about Australia:

1. You can make a tonne of cash (I didn’t)
2. You need to work in a “rural” area for three months to get your second-year visa

Fresh out of cowboy school, I got a job working on the stables of an Olympic ranch. The kind of ranch in which the horses are worth MILLIONS and the staff are paid peanuts.

The first night I got there, they were having a party, celebrating someone’s birthday or something. Great! I thought it’s always going to be like this.

Bad move brain.

The night after, I groggily woke up in a strange bed, ready to half-ass my way to my fortune and went out into the impossible heat of Australian summer.

The yard consisted of two barns, housing 44 horses. The barns sat perpendicular to each other, creating an encloser for the horse bath. Both barns fed into a giant skip full of this stuff that you put into a horse box that absorbs all the horse piss.

Here’s how each day went:

1. Get up at 5am
2. Silently eat breakfast (I tried motivating the team but at 5am, people just want some quiet)
3. Grab YOUR pitchfork (it got weirdly possessive because you had to pay for pitchforks you broke)
4. Spend four hours shoveling the old piss and shit out of the horse boxes (and then shovel in the new stuff)
5. Clean the fields of horse shit
6. “Lunch time” (this was used mostly for sleep)
7. Cleaning
8. Cleaning
9. Cleaning
10. Feed the horses and tidy up
11. Finish at 5pm

You worked for six days a week, had a day off, then back to the grind. Also, you never had a day off with anyone so that day was spent alone. Now, the day off’s were a precious commodity but you’d need them to go shopping for food as the ranch didn’t provide any. Also, the ranch didn’t provide any transport to or from the shops.

So it was a $15 to $20 cab ride to buy $50 of food…and we got paid $150 a week!

Me and 11 other guys were taking home around $80 per week!

And to top it all off, after working the first box of my first day, I found that I’m super allergic to horse hair (which gets everywhere btw). My face would get all puffy, my asthma would kick in, every inch of my body would become itchy.

Working at this stable taught me a lot about people and the world.

1. If you treat the people that work for you with respect they will do a better job
2. People are more scared of the unknown than they think (there were guys here that had been there for six months)
3. Some things just aren’t worth the hassle
4. Everything happens for a reason

I do have some fond memories of this work camp, if you guys are interested I’ll share them in a later post.

After two weeks, I found a savior in Noel (the one-legged man) as I was hitchhiking back from the shops.

#ThePowerofStorySelling #MakePersonalBrandingPersonal

Nate Chai

Written by

I help people write books, share their stories, and present their message to the world — www.storywand.co

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