Australia is one of the few countries in the world where you won’t die of hunger, even if you want to. They won’t let you.
But living the easy life as soon as you arrive here is only possible under certain conditions: if you are young, strong and, what’s more, famous like Kostya Tsu; if you are skilled with your hands or have a bright and enterprising mind (better still if you have both); if your skills are so rare that Australia can’t survive without you; if you can rattle off words in English as though you were born in a luxury apartment on the banks of the Thames with a view of Big Ben (not a decaying little hospital in the town of Marfino outside of Moscow); if you rolled up here, as they say, with a suitcase full of money; if, in the worst case scenario, you are entitled to receive state or other kinds of welfare; if…
I could go on listing these ‘ifs’, but not a single one of them could have been counted among my assets when I first arrived in Australia – neither those I mention above, nor those I haven’t mentioned. Which is why, for the first couple of years here, I had to spend time in what the proletarian writer Maxim Gorky called ‘my university’. I delivered pamphlets and pizzas, cut shark fins and ox tails, polished floors, drove a bus… I had no choice. At some places I lasted weeks - other places for days only… There were even single-day jobs. But I remember best of all the time I worked a whole day and didn’t get paid a cent.
In Perth where I live now there are many Italians. Every now and then in sparsely populated areas you come across their rich farmhouses (at one time you could buy land outside of the city limits dirt cheap) with huge, slightly old-fashioned but sturdy, red brick mansions with every possible ‘architectural extravagance’, as they use to say in the old country - white columns and balustrades, arches, balconies, loggia, plaster lions, eagles and other knick-knacks - the obligatory fountains in front of luxurious portals with spacious courtyards planted round with palms and cypress trees, and well-tended orange or pair orchards. These mansions rise up unexpectedly before your eyes like magic, but when I see such visions from 1001 nights, memories surface in me which are far from magical.
Cities in Australia are all built the same way: there is the central part of the city (CBD) with its skyscrapers occupying a relatively small area, and the suburbs, consisting of islands of one to two storey buildings concentrated around local shopping and administrative centres. Between the cities there are vast tracts of agricultural land, gardens and pastures, or just native Australian ‘bush’, which looks more like forest-steppe. Travel through this bush among the stands and copses of eucalypts growing wild and you can forget you are situated within the boundaries of a city.
It was in this kind of hellish backwater on an Italian bird-farm on the outskirts of Melbourne that I spent the day I want to tell you about.
After getting the address at the job placement agency we headed off in a Datsun on its last legs to somewhere in the sticks. ‘We’, meaning my wife’s sister and I. She had passable English, which would help keep me from looking like a complete idiot in front of the employer. She was my support group, let’s say.
We finally approached a farmstead, which, it was pretty easy to guess, belonged to Italians. But this wasn’t your typical Italian farm. There were gates, but without the plaster lions and eagles. There was no fountain either. In place of palms stood ordinary gum trees. The house was a dark brown brick streaked the colour of baked blood. And there were no extravagances: no luxurious portal, no balconies, no columns, no arches - just a huge box with narrow windows covered by metal blinds, and a massive door.
This was no house – it was a fortress. Whoever had built this house was obviously in the big leagues. But tight. He certainly hadn’t frittered his money away on any fancy fluff. Which is why the legacy he had left was so enviable. From a distance the birdfarm was striking, with a ‘wingspan’ of 100 metres.
We spent about 20 minutes trying to get the owner to see us. A woman came out and when she learned the point of our visit, she went back into the house. Finally the heir himself of this avian kingdom appeared. Gloomy and taciturn, he was completely unlike his welcoming and joyous countrymen and women. I mentioned ‘hellish backwater’ before for a good reason. This lanky, bony heir with his shaggy, greasy long hair and sparse beard would have been just right for the role of Mephistopheles.
As a former psychiatric doctor (and I really was ‘former’ by then) I felt he was my kind of guy. Incidentally, in order to make a diagnosis, you didn’t need my experience or intuition. It was all pretty clear. His gloomy, swollen physiognomy, puffy, veined eyelids and dark red eyes gave him away as a great worshipper of Bacchus.
He studied me too. With a ‘hmm…’ of contempt he looked me over from all sides. I was amazed he didn’t look at my teeth. I was reminded at the time of scenes from films about slavetraders, when the buyers of slaves would check the slaves’ teeth. Then he asked me to show my hands. I stretched my arms out palms up, then turned my hands over, the way first-graders do before the school nurse. My hands, which women had once loved, did not make quite as pleasant an impression on the Italian.
He grinned an evil grin and showed his own hands. Well, not hands, but paws, with thick and broken nails, blackened from the primordial earth. My sister-in-law moved away; it seems she had the jitters.
In brief, the Italian made a diagnosis which was obviously uncomplimentary toward me. But clearly the diagnosis wasn’t conclusive and required field testing, since the diagnostician himself uttered the expected, ‘Okay, I’ll call you’, which in work terms means, ‘I won’t promise anything’.
However, the Italian kept his word. The next day the boss (from now on I’ll crown him ‘boss’, because he became so to me the moment I stepped on his land as a worker) escorted me to the farm. The cackling cacophony issuing forth from the endless rows of metal cages deafened me at first, but I soon got used to it. What I couldn’t get rid of was the pungent odour invading my nostrils and palate.
My first task was to sprinkle feed into the channels in front of the cages with the help of an electric machine reminiscent of a hand seeder. You had to turn it on, move smoothly along the cages, then turn it off as soon as you completed the operation – all at approximately 10-metre intervals, since the channels were supported by cross batons for strength. Then you had to drag the machine across to the next section of channel and repeat the action. It was costly if you didn’t switch the machine on and off in time as you would end up with too little or too much feed.
The boss demonstrated for me. With one hand he turned the machine on and off; with the other he effortlessly moved it around the feeding channels so that the grateful chickens, who immediately began to peck at the grain with impressive speed, received the feed equally. How’s that for socialism!
Having shown me the operation, the boss went straight back into his fortress. His disappearance surprised me, because at my previous job the Korean boss had got stuck into the work alongside the workers. I don’t think he had done so out of any democratic beliefs, but anyway… this one stayed around for 10 minutes then knicked off. He didn’t even stay to watch how the new guy was handling the work.
Well, he wasn’t handling the work as well as some. What the boss had done effortlessly turned out to be difficult to repeat. He had been right to look my hands over so critically. At first I couldn’t move the machine smoothly even with two hands, and as far as timing the off and on control, it was a dismal affair. As a result, some hens got heaps, some got none.
Nevertheless after a while I did adapt and it all became easier. And the socialist principal of fair distribution triumphed – I was happy. But just then, from literally out of the ground, an old woman appeared, all doubled-up and crumpled; she began staring at me with a suspicious look. I get a bit lost when someone stands over me. And especially with this kind of witch! I turned the machine off too late and poured extra feed into the end of the feeding channel. With a guilty smile, I showed the old woman my error. Why the hell did I do that? My idiotic honesty! It was worse than stealing.
The old bag disappeared as instantly as she’d appeared and within ten minutes the boss appeared. With a look of dissatisfaction he took the machine from me. Then he dragged up a huge shovel and, poking his fingers into the filth under the cages ordered, ‘Take it outside’. For clarity, he made a Lenin-like gesture towards the door.
Feeling that my chances for more work hung on the tip of the shovel, I began to furiously get stuck in (it was good they were well set up here and you didn’t have to be highly skilled) to the half-meter-thick deposits of shit, as though some treasure was buried here. But no chest full of jewels appeared, although I did come across the remains of some unlucky chickens which had not survived their slave’s fate. That was where I actually felt inside the saying: ‘If you don’t touch shit, it won’t stink’!
And my boss, the bloody tight-arse, hadn’t even given me a mask. He had probably grown up in shit, since he didn’t even flinch at the toxic stench. He was ‘in his element’, as they say. In this case a mask would barely have protected me from the deeply penetrating pungent stench anyway. I’m not even sure that the most advanced anti-gassing equipment would have helped.
There is a popular English slang expression: chicken shit. One of its meanings is: ‘a small, insignificant thing, a trifle’. I’ll accept any meaning you want for this expression, but right then I couldn’t agree at all with that one.
Nearby, two women – egg collectors – were tossing jokes about and laughing occasionally. I waved to them and smiled in welcome, but my desperate smile was only honoured with an indifferent nod. I must have been at such a low level in the social hierarchy, that you couldn’t go any lower.
Squirming in convulsions of disgust, I nevertheless spent three hours cleaning up several dozen square metres of space under the cages. This was a feat comparable with that of Hercules, who had cleaned the Augean stables. I had shovelled out the Augean chook sheds.
Hercules? Hercules - schmercules! Later on that day I had to help load sacks of horse manure (the farm also had a stable with a couple of dozen horses). Now, with profound knowledge of the subject I can state that the smell of a stable is nothing compared with the stench of chicken shit. Correspondingly, compared to my feat, Hercules’ effort was no more than a stroll past a confectionery shop through a cloud of coffee and chocolate caramel aromas.
The boss appeared – not exactly like the sun, but more like a cloud – gave his ‘valued instructions’ and disappeared again into his fortress. I could smell what he was doing there from the alcohol on his breath, which even penetrated the dense stench of the farm.
There were still two hours left to the agreed end of my working day. The boss’s last assignment for me was to clean the boxes with a broom after first transferring the poor young chickens into cages where their brethren already stood pressed together like penguins in an Antarctic snowstorm. At least penguins are protected that way from the cold; on the poultry farm the heat floated over everything like strong whiskey.
Struggling, I stuffed a few chickens into a cage but quickly decided I’d had enough of this sadism; I would have to wait for the boss and tell him that birds were God’s creatures too. So as not to waste my time, I started another job: sweeping the paths between enclosures and fixing the crooked feed channels.
The boss appeared (by now saturated with alcohol the way storm clouds are with condensation), saw that the chickens were still in the boxes, and flew into a rage. I tried to make him see it from my point of view, appealing to his humanist side, but he didn’t understand my compassionate urges. He then started shoving the chickens into the cages himself, throwing out the dead birds as he went. He nonchalantly tossed the little bodies at my feet for me to drag away to a large plastic container outside.
As for the chickens which were still alive but dying, he simply wrung their necks – not a spectacle for the faint at heart – and I also had to take them away, still fluttering, to the mass chicken sarcophagus. He thinned out the chickens like radish shoots in a backyard garden: in a businesslike way and without a trace of pity.
Finally the executions were over – as was my working day. The boss stared at me with muddy eyes, as if asking why I was still hanging around. I began as best I could to explain to him that he didn’t have to pay me for the two hours on the final job which he’d had to do himself.
The boss growled, ‘alright’ and with a satisfied grin headed off to his fortress. I soon guessed that either he hadn’t understood or had deliberately let the part of my speech about the two hours pass his ears, unwashed since birth. He understood as he wanted to: ‘no pay’ meant no pay at all.
For about half an hour I loitered about the courtyard expecting the boss to come out and fix me up until I finally got the message.
In one corner of the farm I came across some containers crammed to the brim with empty bottles. Out of professional curiosity I decided to examine what Australian alcoholics drank. What I saw impressed me. It wasn’t like our cheap booze; there was a variety here like in the chic bars, though most common were empty bottles of Wild Turkey. He was an alkie sure, but a rich one.
Not waiting any longer for the boss to appear, I left empty-handed, reassuring myself that the boss would ring tomorrow and invite me back to repeat more feats worthy of ancient heroes. But the boss was obviously not a fan of ancient-Greek mythology and the call didn’t come.
The smelliest day of my life remained an unpaid one. What’s more, I then had to spend several dollars on soap for scrubbing myself and my clothes. Not to mention the petrol money. But that’s life.
Why I didn’t demand my pay back then I couldn’t say exactly. Those who have come here in their fifties and without any English would probably understand. The feelings of downtroddenness and powerlessness, which initially persecute an immigrant, are well known to many.
In addition I’d also suffered a relapse of the excessive shyness and timidity I’d suffered from childhood, and which I thought I’d successfully overcome as an adult. Not completely, as it turns out.
Another meaning of chicken shit is a ‘frightened, insignificant person’. This slang is dead right here.
Now that I have got the hang of life in Australia, if I were to find myself in a similar situation I would probably demand compensation for my labour – especially for that type of work.
Although… I’m not sure.