Some Might Say Its Cheesy But There's Nothing Ordinary About This Island.
At the end of October, we decided to hand our notice in for another dairy job that we’d picked up quickly after arriving back in Australia. After some weeks, we’d come to the decision that there really is only so much cow smell that you can put up with and we wanted to try something different.
Our time in Australia has been filled with ‘quirky’ decision making. I say quirky because at home, decisions always seem so boring. “Find a stable job and stay in it forever”, or something along those lines. While there are many pros to this, it’s definitely fun (after all of the stress) to see what opportunities come up once you’re really not tied to anything other than each other. I’d certainly have never thought I’d have ended up spending several months milking cows and then along came an opportunity to work on King Island. I’d not even heard of the place and it would be the first time we’d actually leave ‘mainland Australia’ over the whole of our WHVs. We’d need to actually relocate to an island! But like so many decisions before, it was another “Why not?”- it ticked the something different box and here we are 3 months down the line.
King Island, for the majority of you who have also never heard of it before (even those who actually live in Australia!), is slap bang in the middle of the Bass Strait that separates Victoria from Tasmania. It’s about 100km long and 30km wide- from the air, it was so strange to be able to see both coastlines at once! It’s full of wallabies, possums, pretty venomous snakes, turkeys, peacocks and penguins(!), and home to a population that is barely enough to fill a school hall (possibly a slight exaggeration, oops).
The job offer? Factory hands at a Cheese Factory. Cheese you say? Yes please. We milked the cows and now we could help make, pack and eat the cheese. It’s all coming full circle- even more so when I realised that we’d met the cheese during our travels before at the Say Cheese Festival in Melbourne. We finished our last shifts with the cows on the Sunday, packed up the car on the Monday, left at nearly 3am on the Tuesday, raced to Melbourne docks to send the car over by boat, got stuck in Melbourne traffic, didn’t have the right paperwork to make dropping our car off at the docks quick and easy, stressed about missing our flight that we were due to catch in 15 minutes, pleaded with the airline to have a few extra minutes, managed to hand the car over, got in an Uber and arrived at the airport with approximately one minute to spare, was given our laminated ‘boarding passes’, stooped into the ‘one seat a side’ plane and off we went. Easy.
And we get to the now. We are at the end of our 3 month spell at the ‘Cheesy’ and it’s time to move on. Kjel has spent his time slaving hard on the cheddar production floor and I’ve wrapped, packed, waxed, x-rayed, loaded and turned cheese left, right and centre. I still love cheese. But I don’t want a fridge full of it ever again!
We’ve been so fortunate. King Island to us is still behind the times and definitely has symptoms of small-town syndrome. The weather has mostly been naff- genuinely like being at home with the exception of being extraordinarily windy most of the time but we haven’t been on fire, or been pelted with tennis ball-sized hail stones and for that, I’ll always be hugely grateful. It wasn’t the cheapest place we could have come to (a loaf of bread actually does cost $5 here) but as there are no cinemas or fast food outlets or other things to entertain us, we’ve managed to actually save some money, be able to book many things for future travels and we made our own entertainment to keep us sane along the way. Having some wheels allowed us the freedom to explore the beautiful, rugged coastline in every direction of our temporary home, with beaches that give you that child-like excited feeling when you arrive, sheer drops down to rolling waves and that smell of kelp that just doesn’t get any better no matter how many times you have to inhale it.
But more fortunate still is that we’ve made some wonderful friends who have completely made our time here. There have been moments when I’ve been able to sit back and enjoy what reminds me fondly of the great bits of being at uni without any off the sh*t assignments and seminars. It’s been a laugh from beginning to end and felt a part of our own little community that we're definitely sad to have said goodbye to
.
The strap line for the factory is No Ordinary Island. No Ordinary Cheese. You’re damn right: the island is certainly not ordinary to us, and the cheese? Well, for a short time, we helped to make it so it’s pretty extra ordinary to us too!
Comments