Transcript of AE 1331 - How Australia Nearly Killed This British Man

G'day you mob. Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. I'm your host, Pete. I hope you're having a good one today. We're going to be reacting to the video Why I'll Never Return to Australia from the channel Curls. Don't forget guys, you can check out the Aussie English podcast and listen to all these episodes there. It's 100% free on Spotify, on Apple Podcasts. And besides that, let's get into it.

This is the unbelievable story of why I will never return to Australia. Quick warning before we start, there are a couple of graphic descriptions and a few upsetting scenes. I'll try and keep them to a minimum, and I'll also be using as many pictures as I can throughout so that you don't get too lost in the story.

So, editor Pete here. I ended up doing this video thinking he was going to list all these things that sucked about Australia. That's not what he does. He tells a very, very compelling story about some really, really, really atrocious stuff that happened to him in Australia. He talks about working on farms. He ends up getting very sick and almost dying going to the hospital. So initially I was like, maybe this isn't relevant, but there's so much good information in here. It's a compelling story. He's a great storyteller, so I think you're going to enjoy it. And yeah, I would love to have a discussion with you guys about any horror stories you might have in the comments, too.

So our tale begins in June 2018. I just received my one year working holiday visa for Australia. As you can tell, I was very, very excited and thinking back to it now puts an instant smile on my face. So let me be absolutely clear. The year that I lived in Australia was absolutely amazing. What a country, what a culture. The people are absolutely amazing. I had the time of my life, for the first nine months.

So if you didn't know, if you're from the UK, anywhere really in Europe, South America, and lot of countries around the world, you get a one-year visa to work in Australia. There are some restrictions on what you can and can't do, but generally speaking, you get the year. It costs about 400 AUD, which is around about 250 English pounds. And from there, you can work and enjoy the year at your leisure.

But, to get the second year visa, you have to complete 88 days or 13 weeks of agricultural work on a farm. Now, not a lot of people actually know this, but it's a bit of a rite of passage for a backpacker or a traveller going from UK, Europe, South America, wherever in the world, over to Australia to do this farm work. It's very, very difficult. It's very intense. But you're living in a backpackers, with around about 100, 150 other people. So the weekends and the evenings are absolutely wild. But the farm work itself can be quite intense.

It depends on what you're doing, from what I understand. I had two Estonian mates that I was living with in Melbourne when we were there, and their farm work that they ended up doing was working on a cotton gin. And I think they were loading bales of cotton, just in harvesters or whatever. Just sitting in there listening to music, chilling out. They would often call me on the phone and be like, "Tere! Tere, Pete!"; 'Hello, how are you going?' in Estonian. We would just chat away and they were getting paid like $1,200 a week. It was ridiculous. They said they ended up saving thousands of dollars whilst they were doing this.

But yeah, definitely shop around. We have this set up in Australia because we want workers out in these areas, these rural and regional areas on these farms to do the work that many other Australians don't want to do because they move to the cities. So we encourage people who are over here on these working holiday visas to do this for, as he said, 88 days. Or at least we did. I don't know if the rules have recently changed, but shop around. Because there are places too, that take advantage of their workers. I think I've heard horror stories about strawberry farms and other fruit farms, where they will say that your wage is deducting all of your things, like rent and food, and they will just effectively overcharge you for that and then give you like $50 a week, effectively, spearing you in your pocket. So yeah, definitely shop around and look for some good options if you're doing this.

So now you know a little bit about how the visa works. Let me take you through what happened to me in Australia.

Ugh.

So after travelling around the east coast for a bit, I settled in Sydney. And what a place. A very, very underrated city.

Oh, end of the video. That's where it all went wrong, guys. All right, see you next time.

People, myself included, haven't been there and judge it. Thinking that it's some kind of oversaturated, pristine, tourist trap-kind of place. And yes, obviously there are some elements of that in and around the city, but generally speaking, it is an incredible place. Pristine landscapes, great restaurants. It's just amazing.

If you're rich.

I've been working in Sydney for a couple of months and it takes us to October 2018. Now there's a company which you may or may have not heard of called Uniqlo. They're a Japanese clothing brand. They were holding a competition in the city centre of Sydney, A Wheel of Fortune, spin the wheel style competition, with different things that you could win on there. There was a queues and queues of people. There was about 500 people, I'd say queuing up on that Saturday morning. And there I was in the queue, ready to spin this wheel and try and win one of the prizes. Now the prizes obviously varied in quality. You could win anything from museum tickets to, to noodles, to money off. But the star prize on this wheel of fortune are very, very small sliver. If you landed on that little segment, then you got entered into a prize draw to win a trip to New York. Now I spun the wheel and I landed on that little segment.

Wow.

Perfect. My name's in the hat, thinking.

So, like, you enter a game of chance to enter another game of chance. That seems so strange. One of the prizes is that you are entered into another game of chance to win a prize.

Nothing of it. I went on my merry way back to my apartment, but a few hours later, I got a phone call. Hello? Hello, is this so-and-so? Yes, yes, it's so-and-so from Uniqlo. Oh, wow. Hello. How are you? Yes, yes, yes. I'm good, thank you. Um, just to let you know that you've won our grand prize of a trip to New York. A trip to New York. Incredible. So there I am, on the other end of the phone, freaking out, going, oh my God, oh my God. Little did I know, the phone call was being beamed like being played aloud to the this massive crowd of people in the city centre of Sydney, and I could hear the crowd going wild down the phone. They were cheering. It was chaos. It was absolutely amazing. Obviously, went out to celebrate. Got a bit worse for wear. We'll save that story for another time. Then when Monday rolled around, the lady from Uniqlo, the brilliant lady from Uniqlo, she emailed me saying, Hello! Just so you know, the nature of the prize is actually vouchers. So it's a voucher with Flight Centre and a little visa gift card thing.

Okay.

So therefore New York as a location isn't actually enforceable.

I mean, just take the cash and run. Fuck New York and give me the cash. I'm fine, I'm fine.

A lot of my mom's family live in New York, so I've been lucky enough to go there quite a few times. So I thought to myself, okay, I'm going to Japan. Amazing. So I booked my trip to Japan for the day after my first year in Australia finished, which was going to be the 1st of July 2019, because obviously my visa was from June 2018 to June 2019. So.

Why do I feel like something here is going to happen where he didn't sort out his working, his farm work and he left the country and he won't be allowed back in the country? I have a feeling that's where this story is going, guys.

So it made perfect sense to leave for Japan the first day that I was finishing my first year in Australia. Hold that thought. Trip to Japan, booked. Now we're back in Sydney. We're working. We're enjoying ourselves. Christmas comes around, it's amazing. January, February. Then at the end of February, I realised that I need to start my farm work if I want my second year.

Yep!

So ringing around, emailing around, I found a place in far north Queensland, a little town called Innisfail.

Oof!

Now in this town, there are a lot of farms. Most of them though are banana farms. Now, I'd never been on a farm in my life other than when you're a kid and you go and visit a, you know, like an open air dairy cattle farm, whatever. I'd never been on a labour intensive farm.

Definitely, definitely do your research, guys, on the kinds of labour that is required on these different farms, because, yeah, there are definitely tears of intense labour, right? Some are definitely easy, others are not so easy. And I have a feeling that banana farming would be backbreaking work.

When I certainly hadn't been in the thick of it like this. So, end of February, I fly from Sydney up to Innisfail and I begin my work on this farm. Now let me remind you, when you are in these places, you are living in a hostel with 100, 150 other young people and you're having the time of your life.

It's got a beer bong there. So for anyone who doesn't know, it's like a funnel with a tube. And people just keep pouring beers in there and you're meant to keep drinking, I guess, until you can't anymore. So yeah, definitely a class, australian culture.

The work, however, is brutal. Now, let me say one thing. As a Westerner who grew up in London and obviously has had office jobs over the years, and, you know, and whilst I'm not from a mega wealthy family, I've certainly had a privileged upbringing compared to a lot of the manual labour that people in developing countries have to do. So I was very much up for the challenge of working on a farm.

However, let me tell you now, farmers in far North Queensland, based on what I've experienced are aggressive. I have a lot of respect for them, a lot of respect, because the work they do is incredible. It's the lifeblood of the economy. They've seen this farm passed down from generations and generations. It's literally their lives. So naturally, when a young English person comes in and you know, is there and working and hoping to make a quick buck just to get their second year visa, I can totally understand why their backs would be a little bit up. I'm not sure, however, if that really excuses the scandalous level of psychological abuse for a lot of the farmers give to young backpackers.

This is what I've heard, and it's like they see them as, as chattel, right? You're there to do your work. You don't really have any options. You have to do your 88 days somewhere. So once they got you locked in, you got to be careful. Again, it's not like that in every single location. Probably not the majority of them, but it's something to definitely be aware of and do your due diligence when, um, looking into these things and trying to find a good place. I, if it were me coming to Australia and wanting to do this 88 days work, I would probably be searching for places my friends had been and looking for good references. But yeah, it's a shame if this guy copped heaps and heaps of psychological abuse whilst there.

On my first day at 5 a.m. there I was in the paddocks, slipping over left, right and centre, carrying these huge, huge 50kg bunches of bananas on my shoulders, being screamed at, being told I'm useless, being told I need to lose weight. He's probably right to be fair. And this is how it went for the next few weeks. I was just berated every single day whilst working in the most harrowing conditions.

For those of you who don't know how banana farming works, and believe me, I certainly didn't before I got there. In these paddocks there are trees with big bunches of bananas hanging on these trees. What happens is you have one person who carries the bunches of bananas and the cutter who carries a very large knife. Now the carrier walks up to the tree, and with this huge bunch of bananas, probably about four foot tall, you grab the little vine at the bottom and you just gently rest the bunch on your shoulder while the cutter comes up behind and smashes an X into the tree so that it bends easily. You pull the bunch down onto your shoulder, then the cutter swipes the vine and you walk off. You walk off with this massive bunch of bananas. So imagine doing that from 5 a.m. until 4 p.m. every single day. Sick-

Nope. Nope. Just nope.

Six days a week for very little money, with people screaming all sorts of obscenities at you. It is physically, emotionally, and mentally scarring. It's not just draining, it is scarring.

I think one of those things to mention here would be if you're getting abused at work, it is not okay in Australia. It doesn't matter what your background is, doesn't matter if you're a migrant or not. You should have people that you can talk to. There should be lines you can call. I'll have to do some research and put something up on screen here. But if you're getting abused at work, it's not okay. It's probably illegal and you should definitely tell the right people so that hopefully it stops for you and for other people in the future.

So around five weeks in, I started to notice that my left foot was swelling up. I won't go into too much detail, but my toenails weren't looking too pretty. The skin on my foot was looking a little bit sketchy, and I took myself down to the hospital where I was told I had cellulitis. I told the farmer about this and he went crazy at me. Like, like I decided to get cellulitis on my foot, as if it was my fault. So after a day or two in hospital, I went back to the farm, but the swelling returned and this time it started travelling up my leg.

Then I had to spend four nights in hospital in Innisfail. I won't put up a picture of my foot, but let's just say that I showed it to a couple of locals and they said that it was probably ripe for amputation. I also was next to a 65 year old man in the hospital who told me that he'd been banana farming for 28 years. I pointed at my foot and jokingly said, Well, I'm sure you've seen things a damn sight worse than this before! To which he replied, Nah, mate, that's that's pretty much the worst I've seen. Which was quite crushing to hear.

Anyway, I recovered from this situation, but my immune system was pretty weak and I had quite a serious staph infection across my skin. For those who don't know, staph is something that run about 10% of people have to live with. It's an infection that gets onto your skin and can develop into something much more serious.

Well, this.

Is one of these bacterial strains that can become immune to antibiotics, and it just keeps effectively. It's a flesh eating bacterium right. So yeah it's a big issue.

So with this in mind, I obviously was in no fit state to return working to the farm. Therefore, after seven weeks of work, I thought to myself, well, I've got about two months left on my Australian visa. I'm going to move to Melbourne where I've not been before. I moved down to Melbourne and had a great time. So for three weeks I was enjoying myself. I made so many new friends. I was working quite a fun sort of salesy job and I was staying in a backpackers with a social life was amazing. And then I got bitten by bedbugs. But, the bedbug bites were intense. They were all over my back and-.

This is one of those things that backpackers in Australia are renowned for. I've never come across bedbugs anywhere in Australia, but I hear that in places like backpackers you will find them all the time. So definitely look for, I think you see their faeces, little like droplets of poo that appear on the white sheets and on the pillowcases and all that sort of stuff. You see any of that sort of stuff? Run. Run for the hills. Because, yeah, once, once you kind of get them in your stuff and in your bag and that it's very hard to ever get rid of them. And they're these little blood sucking insects that come out at night and effectively bite you everywhere and can cause a really bad reaction.

And then they started to swell, because I had the staph infection.

Oh, God.

That got inside my body.

Oh, great.

That got inside my bloodstream. And one morning, I woke up. Not only was there multiple abscesses on my back, I also had a swelling in my nose, a sort of throbbing feeling around this area. So I went straight down to the hospital and was told that it's possible that I'm infected with MRSA.

Are they meticillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus? Yeah. So this is that really, really deadly, antibiotic resistant bacteria, that you can get from hospitals.

Duly whisked off to a private ward where a doctor performed a very, very rudimentary bit of surgery on my nose to remove what was called vestibulitis. Now, when you have MRSA, it's colonises in certain places in your body, namely your nose. Now, if you recall earlier, my skin infection on my foot. I said it was swelling and the swelling was travelling up my leg. That's not such a worry because if it's a worst case scenario, you can amputate your foot. But when you have an infection in your nose, there is only one place that can travel.

Ugh. Into your brain. And then what is it? Meningococcal. Is that what you end up with? Bacteria in the brain? Good grief. Totally did not think the story was going this way, guys! I was hoping it was going to be like, Here are a bunch of things that I hated about Australia.

Your brain. So they knew, one, I had colonised MRSA in my nose. They had to operate immediately, so much so there was no time to put me under general anaesthetic. They tried to put a local anaesthetic in my lip, crossways, like that. Now, if you've ever had a pimple or a spot by your top lip, then you'll know how much it hurts. And obviously human beings kiss because all the nerve endings are in your lip. So imagine a needle going horizontally in your moustache area. It was difficult. So, as soon as the needle went in, I screamed and cried like a baby. It was harrowing.

I can imagine.

After they did the mini operation, they took me for an MRI scan or CT scan upon which afterwards the doctors told me that they were a little bit concerned with what they'd seen on the scan. What they'd seen was gas on the brain. This is what I was told. Now I have zero medical background whatsoever, but as I understand it from the doctors, gas on the brain is a sign of infection that has reached your brain. Panicking, I was told that it might be an idea to contact my parents. Bear in mind, I'm in Australia on the other side of the world to the UK, and it was sometime in the afternoon, so I had to wait a few hours until my parents were awake. And then I rang my mum, knowing that it was, or thinking that it was potentially the last time that I was ever going to speak to her and-

Jesus Christ, dude, I did not know that this video was going to go that sad and dark guys. But yeah, far out. I think for me it's like at the moment it's like, just don't go to backpackers, guys! Don't, don't do the farm work on banana farms and stay the hell away from backpackers.

And the last time that she was ever going to speak to me, so I just wanted, I didn't want to tell her about the situation. I just wanted to have a normal conversation, ask her, you know, how was the, how's the gardening going? You know something, something stupid like that. Because I knew that it was potentially going to be the last time, and I wanted it to be a happy conversation. Then after that pretty intense hour or two of feeling quite morose, doctor came in and said that actually the gas on the brain on the MRI scan was a sign of a little bit of anaesthetic that had got in, but they were told the anaesthetic application was unsuccessful, so they didn't realise that that's what it was. Panic, sort of slightly, kind of over.

Later that night they put me under general anaesthetic to remove a humongous abscess from my back. It was essentially like putting an ice cream scoop in the middle of my back. And I also had quite a few scars because- and I won't show this picture because it's very, very intense. Let's just say I had a complete accidental but somebody, again, complete accident. And I assure you they did not mean it whatsoever.

But a knife, actually on the farm, went into my skin. So you can imagine that that posed quite a risk as well. I had an open sores, I had abscesses, my foot was swelling, my face was messed up. It was a really, really tough time. But let me just put this out there now, I know that whenever anyone has a medical issue, they always say, Oh, doctors and nurses were amazing. The people who work, the men and women who work at Royal Melbourne Hospital are superheroes. They are superheroes. They are the most incredible people on this earth and anyone.

This is one of the best, hospitals in Australia, so I'm glad that he got treated there.

And watching this, who works in medicine, whether you're a nurse, a doctor, a surgeon, whatever, I bow to you. You are just, you are the closest thing to a god or a goddess that we'll ever have. And I, and I owe, literally owe you my life. Because as you- guys, spoiler alert, I didn't die. I'm still here.

Did he? Did he live? Did he live?

After waiting another week or two in hospital, I gradually recovered and gradually got better. The MRSA left my system, but I had this huge gaping wound on my back from the surgery, which was fine, but I had to get it medically dressed every single day using gauze, bandages, disinfectant, all of these things. If it was on my leg or my arm, I could do it myself. But it was in the middle of my back, the middle of my back. Now, at this point, I only have about a week left of my visa in Australia. And the doctors-

I'm thinking, did he go to Japan? Did he end up getting to enjoy Japan? Damn it! Come on, man!

So to me, well, you need to go straight home back to the UK because you need to get this tended to. You need to get this changed every single day. I hope you've got plans to go immediately back to the UK. But of course I got my trip to Japan and let me just put this out there. Now, in Australia they're quite liberal with prescribing painkillers and goodness gracious me, did they give me some strong ones. So there I was. I discharged from hospital. I had to wait a few days, saw a couple of doctors in the city of Melbourne, and they were rather alarmed when they saw the wound on my back. I had a massive bag of medical supplies and there I was walking around Tokyo after having just performed daily surgery on myself, smacked out of my brain on painkillers, still kind of processing the previous few weeks events. But I was in Japan and I didn't die. Of course-

For those of you who can't see, there's an image of him on screen and he looks pretty out of it, eating an ice cream. But yeah, I'm glad he made it to Tokyo.

Also, of course, the fact that I was injured so severely and that I couldn't complete the farm work meant that I'm unable to get my second year visa. I'm unable to go back to Australia now. I've lived in New Zealand for three years and I absolutely adore it here, and as far as I'm concerned, I'll be in New Zealand for the rest of my life if this lovely country will have me.

But Australia, I kind of felt like I had unfinished business, but I had no choice. I had absolutely no choice. After Japan, I did go back home to the UK for a few months and even though I wanted to go back to Australia, I couldn't. I couldn't go back to Australia. So I went to New Zealand and I arrived on the 1st of March 2020, just before the world shut down, just before the borders closed. About seven days before. So 1st of March 2020, cue frantic week of trying to find a job. Trying desperately to find an apartment. I managed to do it. I somehow stayed in New Zealand. I got a great group of friends. I found people that I absolutely loved and cherished. And three years later, here I am in New Zealand making videos about how much I love the place. But if it wasn't for Australia quite nearly killing me, then I wouldn't be here at all.

Plot twist, he gets a New Zealand citizenship and then can just move to Australia if he wants anyway! Anyway guys yeah, I'm sorry, that was a bit of a downer of a video, but I'm definitely glad that he came out of it seemingly unscathed on the other end and hopefully better for it.

Make sure that you tell me your horror stories. If you've been in Australia, have you had horror stories working on farms? Have you had bedbug infestations? Have you had, you know, bacterial infections? Let me know in the comments. Youtube reckons you're going to enjoy this video next. I hope I see you there! Tooroo!