Writings

High summer means beans

(National Outlook, March 1998)

Picking beans is a summer occupation. In Victoria, in the cooler hills outside Melbourne, there are cherries, then follow peaches, nectarines and, in January, beans!

The bean-fields' straight lines run like green vertebrae over the hills that flank the spinal creeks. Beans need plenty of water and so the best fields are usually found where there is a reliable supply, where the creeks don't dry up in the summer. The growers usually have large, beautifully sited dams (private ganglions) from which comes the water for the overhead sprinkler systems.

Sometimes when drought strikes, there are midnight raids by one grower on another's dam, opening the stopcocks to feed their own dams further down. So naturally people have to take protective measures, such as all-night vigils, as well as locks and bolts.

Besides water, beans need heat, so when it is hot enough for the first pick, the pickers begin to arrive in the fields. (Somehow I can't think of them as bean 'gardens' or bean 'paddocks'.)

On one of those days in the 1980s I was one of those pickers. We were Australian-born, Vietnamese-born, and Bert who thought he was born in Finland. On my first backbreaking morning I looked up to greet the Vietnamese lad who was picking the row alongside me and read his T-shirt. "As clay in the hands of the potter", it said. This reading amazed me; so I asked him where he got the shirt and I think he said Hong Kong. His English was brand-new; I'm still not too sure what to make of it but am certain there could not have been a more appropriate 'reading' for the day.

A row of beans takes about one to one and a half hours to pick. If you have a plastic back the technique is, taking only the large beans, to pick with both hands legs astride the rows so that the empty row streams through your legs like an organic green jet-trail. As this is an unlikely possibility on your first row and on the first day, the next technique, favoured by women and children, is to squat with the back in a vertical position as though you were getting ready to lift the entire row as an offering to the great bean-god! The third technique is to sit on your arse in the red earth and work your way down as best you can. This is favoured by two-row pickers. What happens on the first day are weird and painful ritual contortions of all three, plus positions that cannot be described.

The first workers to arrive were always the Vietnamese and they were usually under way by 7.00 am. They arrived after a 23 km drive from the city. Watching the older members of the family work, I knew that the Americans and the French before them had never had a chance in Vietnam.

Next was an Australian woman and her six children. The youngest, a four year old, wandered up and down the rows with a newly bought gun 'shooting' the occasional bent back.

At one point I overheard her discipline the oldest boy who was horsing around with the youngest with "do as I say or I'll give you one across the mouth". Everyone was soon working steadily.

After an hour we came near enough to talk and introduce ourselves. We swapped info about ourselves, where we were from, what did I think about picking beans; she told me about her father who had been known as the 'white wog' since he was such a good picker. She laughed as she told me and she confided her desire for another child, her love of the life, and life.

And then there was Bert, the oldest, maybe in his late sixties. He usually wore an old jacket that had been torn by a thousand trees. That particular morning he was not feeling too well, a very bad night—toothache. He didn't believe in dentists. "Why give them my hard earned money." It was simply a matter of twisting the offending tooth in the right direction and it would gradually loosen and fall out as nature intended. This was evidently a successful procedure as he had no teeth at all in his smile.

During the night he had consumed half a bottle of port and five aspirin and despite his best efforts it had all been to no avail. Nevertheless he had come to the bean fields.

I saw him on the way down and stopped for him and his dog and his story of the night. To cheer him up, I told him a story from the previous day: how the owner of the fields had regaled me with stories of the great bean pickers of the past. It was obvious that he was disappointed with my performance, and wanted to present me with models and so encourage me.

There was the 'Maltese Falcon' who descended on the beans after cutting sugar cane in Queensland and, after spending all his money on women and the city, had come up to pick beans to recuperate. Somehow he not only picked at an incredible rate using the first technique, he was also particularly tender with the plants, not breaking them, not inadvertently pulling them out and then deceitfully shoving them back into the ground as though nothing had happened. The second pick was as good as the first.

Hearing all this Bert began to laugh and laugh and pointing at me said, "You little Aussie kookaburra" and "Slacker." The more he thought about it the more he laughed until he quite forgot the toothache and the previous night.

Towards mid-morning he began to falter and said that he would have to stop. He asked me and the mother of the children to cut him out after we had finished our rows. Normally after picking a row you select another and leave your neighbours to finish theirs.

Picking, like every other aspect of contemporary Australia, is competitive. No stranger fills your bucket or bag; groups, families, work together, the individual is on his or her own. For those families and individuals who live this way, life is without the material domestic detail that describes place and time and which accumulates in personal layers.

Each year the woman and her family journeyed south to these fields and a 3-bedroom pickers' hut. To hear her talk of it was to imagine a three-bedroom house in the suburbs with all its family photographs and clutter. She looked forward to a small nursery on a fruit block sometime in the future. Nurturing was her whole life, living with little, but living in beautiful landscapes shaped by the seasons and the needs of the cities.

Bert, however, lived permanently in a small picker's hut on the property. Too old to move, he no longer visited the city, content to make enough money to survive and remain independent. The base of his hut seemed to rest on a foundation of hundreds of port bottles; he added to these regularly when he felt inclined to clean up. The back wall of the hut was a spectacular 'wallpaper' of racehorses cut from the Sunday press and pasted up over the years.

Forty years before, war had cast him up on Australian shores, all contact with his family severed. During his lifetime he had spoken four languages, Russian, Finnish, German and English and, though not at home completely in any one of them, English in its Australian variant seemed to fit him well. All he retained, so he said, was the capacity to swear and curse in the languages of youth.

We had first met in the cherry orchards. There we had discussed race and war, and sometimes, even allowing for the fact that he had been through a war and I belong to a generation, the first since the gold rush generations, not to know the pits of that experience, sometimes it was as though some part of his brain had been programmed a long time ago to run along closed opinion tracks where these subjects were concerned and the only way to short-circuit the obvious and terminal logic was to dig an improbable shaft of humour, into which fell the prejudices, the fears, and the names of the leading actors of our times.

So down the rows of cherries we went, picking the low fruit first and then planting the ladders firmly in the hearts of the trees, removing every fruit until the tree stood bare with free springing branches divested of the weight and colour of early summer.

We knocked off when we felt like it, after six boxes or at a quarter to five boxes and eventually we picked the last trees. And that meant the beans!

With the various berries, beans are the hardest work in the summer. The most exploited labour in Australia is agricultural labour and the poorest workers are in the fields in the summer. When I first arrived at the sheds looking for work, I had noticed the sign which proclaimed the message that only union label was employed. If you didn't have a ticket – no work. But that didn't apply to itinerant pickers who lived like Bert or who came with the seasons. Consequently the value for a box filled or a bag picked was to say the least in the wishing well of chance, varying with the market and the greed of the grower. In 1980s figures, $6.50 to $10 for a thirty kilo bag of beans, forty-five cents a kilo for cherries; and these retailed at $4.50 and up. The system – tithes in reverse.

Even though this is the way it is, the woman preferred it to suburban subsistence and so her family took the dole for no more than three months each year. There is dignity in a picker's hut, liberty, a sort of surrogate self-employment with no pretence on the part of the employer for any ongoing responsibility, and the most obnoxious person of all, the foreman, is absent. (I remember a foreman forbidding an hourly paid worker in a vineyard the right to sing.)

On an upturned bucket in the red earth, Bert sat disconsolately begging us to finish his row and take him home. The woman with her children finished before me and started picking down towards us.

Within twenty minutes the rows were finished. She then took the beans from the children's buckets and pressed them down into Bert's sack and mine, filling them to overflowing to make sure that we would not be robbed at the weigh-in.

The next day Bert came to work grinning, having successfully extracted the tooth.