WEDNESDAY 26 APRIL     ADELS GROVE

I did smoko for the builders in the morning. Made potato rosti, cooked bacon and eggs to go with same.

The mail plane came in and we received the mail that the house sitter had forwarded from home.

The weekly supply truck came in and we helped unload it and put things away.

John used the public phone box to start making calls about jobs. Yes, there was work at Bundaberg, but it was mostly picking vegetables. That was too hard for our physical abilities and mental inclinations!

The lady near Clermont who wanted a teacher wanted him and offered him $700 a week wages. That was equal to what we would earn, combined, here. But there was no role for me. I could not see myself sitting around in the van doing little, for months on end, on some remote station.

An ad for a couple to do our sort of work, at the Bark Hut Inn, in the NT, on the road to Kakadu, seemed interesting. John tried to phone them, but could get no answer to his repeated calls. We found out later that they had just had the cyclone come through and were busy dealing with the damage. That included to the pen that held their “pet” saltie croc, where a tree branch had fallen over the fence. The croc apparently did not like chain saws, because it had attacked the man who was up a ladder cutting away the fallen timber, and taken away the saw! The worker was very shaken. A photo of the croc with the chain saw in its mouth subsequently made the front page of the Darwin paper.

John phoned friends H and D, who we had previously worked with here. They had spent the summer working at a resort on Fraser Island and we knew they were about to leave there to travel. The company had just hired replacements for them, so we were too late there. They suggested we call the Monsoon Cafe, at Wangi, near Litchfield National Park. Last Dry Season, H and D had staffed a tour company’s seasonal camp near there, and gotten to know the cafe owners. They said they were great people and they had previously mentioned us to them, as fellow seasonal workers.

So John phoned and spoke with one of the owners. Then he  wanted to talk to me, and he hired us then and there, because I could cook. He offered me $15 an hour and John $13 for outside work. John took over and negotiated that up to $16 and $14.

We decided to give it a go. It could be good. It would be new scenery in a great part of the country, at any rate. Being paid by the hour appealed too – provided we got enough hours to make it worthwhile. It might even end up being better than here.

It was arranged that we would start in a week’s time.

John phoned the Clermont station to say we would not be coming and explain why.

Then we went and told the bosses that we would be leaving tomorrow. They were really taken aback. One said to John : “But you’ve got all the knowledge!”. I think they were both truly surprised that we were not prepared to stick around, doing some of the work and not being paid, indefinitely. Also keeping M on hold, somewhere, as we’d been asked to do, in case she was wanted later. But there did not seem to be any hard feelings, so that was good. I guess they understood.

As if to underscore the point, the couple we had encountered at Tambo arrived at lunch time. There were staff queued up, waiting for work! I wished them more joy than we’d had!

The back packer bus groups would not be coming until the Gulf Track was open, which would be another month or more. Last year, we had made it through, quite easily, on 10 April. This showed that there could be such variation in seasons and conditions, up here.

We told V and F we were going. V said that she and F would not go off camping tonight – tomorrow was their day off – but would stay to spend a last night with us. We said they had to keep to their camping plans, knowing how much they valued time away on their own.

By the late afternoon, we had done most of our packing up.

Phoned everyone who needed to know that we were moving on: our offspring, M, the house sitter – asked her to hold the mail until we contacted her again.

An email came in from the Pungalina boss. He said the place was slowly drying out. O had bogged the tractor on the track to the Safari Camp! I found it hard to imagine that track that wet. He said it would be many weeks more before they would be able to get supplies in and open the camp.

Said our good byes to V and F, with promises to keep in touch and see each other when we could.

There was no fuss at night. It was just staff and builders to tea – no guests. The bosses went to the office after the meal, for a video conference with the Isa partners. We helped with the dinner clean up. John helped MS learn a computer program for a while. I gave her some ideas for the builders’ smokos, because it looked like she would now be doing them. Then we went off to the van.

We felt sad to be going like this, but at the same time felt we needed to be true to what we had been feeling. We had been here for eleven days and in that time, contributed substantially.