wallangarra farming horror

wallangarra is a hugely boring town on the edge of queensland and new south wales. here i stayed for ten weeks in a hostel called lillie's backpackers. DO NOT EVER GO HERE (see picture left). you have been warned.
the only thing that made me survive this hell hole, were the amazing girls i've met there. why was this place so horrendous? i'll try to be brief about it....
first of all the woman running the place. i've never met anyone as inhumane and horrible as her. she lived in the hostel and was a total pain in the ass. she treated us like we were 'the enemy' and talked about us behind our backs to the farmer. so not a very welcoming place. the work itself was actually not so bad. i really enjoy working outdoors, so i don't mind farming, unless i get treated badly, which was the case at this place. the farmer is a dirty racist scumbag who while talking to the supervisors referred to us as 'bitches', and who would lower the payrates whenever he felt like it (which was usually whenever we'd made enough to cover the rent) and he made the supervisors fire anyone who would say something about that. and get this, when you do get fired, you get one hour to pack up and leave and you even have to pay money for the woman from the hostel to pick you up!! i'm normally the type of person who cannot stand unfair treatment, but i had no money to go anywhere else and i was scared to lose my job, so i stayed quiet for ten weeks until i exploded of anger....almost literally! it also didn't help that it was raining a lot while i was there, it was in the area that got flooded during the heavy rainfall in the summer of 2010 (prior to the brisbane flood in 2011).
the farm itself was about 30 minutes from the hostel and we had to thin different types of fruit trees. like i said the work itself was really ok, but there was no toilet on most of the farms we worked at. there was one portable toilet, but from the looks of it, it hadn't been used or cleaned in a very long time. we started out with three really nice and friendly supervisors but they ended up leaving, because they also thought the owner was an asshole. after that we got stuck with a disgusting, chauvinistic, alcoholic macho loser who used to ride around on his quad, stopping near some of the girls and just sit there and stare. he really made my skin crawl, and i ended up getting into a fight with him. he of course had someone else fire me (i got fired the day before my last day there which he knew about, such a pathetic thing to do if you ask me) and when i went up to him to comfront him about this, i just went totally insane and all the rage from the past ten weeks just came out!! it's really not my style to do something like that, but when i was finished everyone was so happy that i just yelled in his face what everyone else was thinking!
so there i was, in the middle of nowhere with no money and no work. again. luckily for me my mates backed me up, but it also meant that they were fired too...we ended up hitching back to the hostel, because there was no way we were gonna pay to be picked up!! but they already called the woman from the hostel and we actually ran into her. she stopped and asked where we were going. i explained to her that there was no way we were paying to get home because we had no money and instead of giving us a free ride, she just slammed the door shut and drove off. we first stopped in town at a jobagency where the lady who worked there arranged for us to stay at a different working hostel nearby. she was so incredibly sweet and had so many girls coming in from lillie's backpackers and felt really bad for us. we ended up baking her a cake later on :)
when we finally arrived back at the hostel after that, the woman from the hostel was incredibly rude and yelled at us that we had an hour to leave. even though i had always been really nice to her and never had any conflicts, she treated me like i was scum. it really sucked and it definitely ruined my australia experience a little bit. even looking back now after two years i still get a bit sad, it was like a total kick in the face. (here to the left a picture of us waiting to get picked up by the other hostel).
i remember sitting on the road after working really hard that day, with a paycheck in my hand that said AUD18. i just sat there and i was so disillusioned and realised that no matter how hard i worked, i was never gonna be able to do all the cool stuff i wanted to do in australia, due to the greedy farmers that use backpackers and just don't give a shit. to them we're all easily replaceable workers who can be fired whenever and the worst part is that as a backpacker you have absolutely no rights. there is not one organization that stands up for backpackers and there is no place you can go when something like this happens!! of course not every farm is like this and luckily for me i was able to actually experience that a few days later.

and now for the stuff that got me through all this: the girls, new dawn magazines, my camera, cooking, so you think you can dance, the veggie lady down the road, going on adventures in the rain, junior masterchef and my psp! when you're stuck in a situation like this, knowing you have to stay for a few weeks (for the 2nd visa) you try to make the best of it and i was lucky to have such awesome people around me who felt the same way. i had my ups and downs like everyone else, but what made me really happy was cooking. i started baking, because even though the hostel was shit, the kitchen was amazing! plus flour, sugar and butter were so cheap that baking wasn't too expensive to do. and there's nothing better than cheering up bored backpackers stuck in the middle of nowhere with a nice banana cake or tiny cheese croissants. it's also the place where i perfected my veggie soup, it's the cheapest dish you can make and if you just make a huge pot, you can save small portions in the freezer: food for a week, BOOM!

so we entertained ourselves and of coursed bitched and moaned a lot. there was suprisingly not a lot of girl drama going on, or maybe i just blocked it in my memory haha. but seriously, i think that because of the shit situation we were all in, we had such a good time together. i'll never forget me and cristina singing songs at the farm all day long; sophie making me laugh and putting catpoop on my arm (that's a long story); getting dressed like a zombie and having a halloween barbecue; making eight homemade pizza's for pizza night; buying cheap and fresh veggies at the veggie lady down the street; chilling out in our pyjama's and watching so you think you can dance; trying to fish; trying to slap a cow on its ass; watching natalie portman rap on my psp and laughing a lot.
the next working hostel we stayed at was called the summit which was a short drive away. the people owning it were so incredibly nice and decent and they arranged a new job for us quite quickly.