Love Story

Last week, on our way to Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, Lily’s university classmate, Darren, told us that there would be an open interview for jobs of a strawberry farm in Caboolture where there were lots of backpackers looking for farm jobs. Darren who had a part time job for picking passengers up from Brisbane Airport said that this information was provided by a well-known celebrity who was very enthusiastic about helping backpackers. Darren needs to collect second visa because his wife is studying in Brisbane now. Thus he decided to take this interview and shared this info with us.

Originally our plan is to find jobs after finishing our language school courses on July 29. After considering our situations and discussing with Lily, we adopted Darren’s suggestion since it is really hard to live here by NTD. Moreover I found this is a 5-star farm job which we want to apply for by surfing the internet. Why do people say that? First, the welfare in this farm is much better than others. For example, you won’t be afraid to work overtime. Second, the salary is also very good for the jobs. Basically there are two ways to gain salary in farms, one is by time and the other is by piece rate. In this farm, the salary is 18 AUD per hour at last and if you worked fast, you could change your wage by piece rate which means you could earn more than 18 AUD an hour if you want. Even I saw some blogger said she could earn 29 AUD an hour at most.

On June 2, Lily and I went to Darren’s house and he drove us with another classmate, Mia who had lived in AU for 8 months, together to Caboolture. On our way, Darren told us that there were totally two days for the jobs interview, June 1 and June 2, and by his saying, lots of people had already gone to interview on June 1 but I was not surprised because I had known there were 180 people competing 30 vacancies for these jobs in the previous season. One hour later, when we arrived B&J Strawberry Farm, there had been some cars parking in the lawns already. At 9 o’clock, Jane came out and announced some information for this job as well as the schedule of the interview. She said if we were in a group, we would be interviewed together. Because we had had a plan to find an accommodation in Carboolture if we all could pass this interview, we went inside together. First we took a photo with a number tag individually and stapled our resume with the personal info form provided by Jane. Then we started a simple interview with another staff. After that, I saw Lily’s and mine were marked E 1 1/2 and D 1. Then we entered a private room to have a formal interview with Jane by herself. We talked about our current situations and job experiences and tried to make more conversation with Jane in order to give her deep impression. Smoothly we finished our interview and Jane said she was very interested but could not give us any promise until the first week of July. Finally Darren asked Jane to give us a call no matter if she would hire us or not and then we drove back to Brisbane.

Good! The result is not far away from my expectation. At least we will finish our courses in July. If we pass the interview, we’ll go to Caboolture but if not, we’ll try to find a job after courses in Brisbane city in August. Good luck to me!