Picking Tobacco

A random opportunity to experience something new and backbreaking

Many years ago Simon, a friend from school came to me and said there is a shortage of tobacco pickers on the South Island. They need people urgently and are providing free transport and accommodation.

Mark Williams was making a name for himself on the New Zealand music scene. It wasn’t a song I particularly liked, but I liked his spirit and energy.

I was about to start looking for my first real job, but this sounded like a cool adventure. I had never been to Motueka and it sounded like fun. So we signed up. It was only going to be about 6 weeks and the pay was pretty good.

A few days later we were on a bus at about 8 pm. After about 5 hours, the bus broke down near a place called Taihape. They found a replacement bus, and it broke down. I wrote a poem about that trip, which I will share in another post. It is a story in its own right.

The poem was my first rejection, from a magazine called The Listener. I was very disappointed as I thought it was a really good poem. We got to Wellington and then caught the Interisland Ferry to Picton, followed by another bus. The trip took about the same time as it would take me in the distant unlikely future to Chicago, New York, Miami and other places in the USA.

Here is the poem I wrote at the age of 17. I need to explain a few things before you read it.

There was a senior Maori woman on the bus who sang for hours on the bus and was drinking, quickly becoming inebriated. I noted down her words, captured for posterity. Te rere ra is what she sang. I thought it was like a Maori la la la, but I think it means something like ‘The trip is flowing’. Pakeha is the Maori word for Europeans.

The bus broke down just before Taihape. It broke down on the way out of Taihape again. Then they put us on another bus. That all added about 4 hours to the trip.

Hellaby’s is the name of a freezing works and meat producer, who made terrible pies, with little bits of meat and big bits of gristle, congealed in gelatin. Railway pies were a bit of a lottery, sometimes you got meat, sometimes you got gristle and fat.

Getting onto the ferry from Wellington to Picton we formed an orderly line as we Kiwis are want to do, but there were a lot of tourists who ignored the line. This raised the hackles of those of us who had waited single file for a long time.

In the 70s, we had a lot of American tourists in New Zealand, retirees, women with blue hair, and veterans who had enjoyed R&R stops. American ships were still welcome here, our nuclear-free policy was still about 10 years away. The ferry from Wellington to Picton was a highlight. Sailing though Marlborough Sounds is very picturesque and large pods of dolphins led, jumped out of the water and followed the ferry, feeding on fish pushed to the surface by the ship. There was a cafe in Picton called the American success, catering to their needs to eat like they were back home, although I doubt it had typical diner food.

The final leg to Nelson and then Motueka provided more entertainment as 2 young girls hitchhiked, chatted up the bus driver for a free ride, and then made an absolute pain of themselves. The driver ended up offering them an ultimatum as paying passengers complained about them. Pay for the bus trip, or get off.

Map of the trip courtesy of Google:

The bus and ferry trip from Auckland to Motueka

A Tale of 5 Buses

Te rere ra. Te rere ra.
Wake up!
It’s not time for sleeping.
I sing Maori
You sing Pakeha words. 
When Maori talks Maori
Pakeha don’t understand.
When Pakeha talk Pakeha
Maori, he understands.

Te rere ra. Te rere ra
Where are we now, aye?
Taihape
This not Taihape
We been in Taihape
Yeah! We’re back in Taihape,
The bus broke down.
Oh…….

Te rere ra. Te rere ra.
Where are we now?
Taihape
Eh Boys, where are we?
We’re in Taihape, go to sleep!
Eh shudup.
We go to Porirua eh girl.
All my family there.
Got plenty more booze.

Breakfast in Wellington
What a feast
Best food in weeks
And coffee to soothe rough throats
Treated by our best road, SH1
Pork pie and gravy
Just the thought is enough to send
Saliva washing off dust-stained boots.
Here it comes.
Looks good enough to step in.
Hellaby’s pig blubber
Vaseline and jellied flies
Don’t think I’ll ever touch 
Another railway pie.

New Zealand’s best people collide
At the Interislander Ferry Terminal
Displaying good Christian morality
Until the queue starts moving forward
6 abreast
Dirty looks from 10th in line
Upon finding himself slowly moving back
While feet stand still.

Passenger count at a quarter to ten
Better bring some stretchers by then
Push hard
Your chance won’t come again.
Two in casualty and all get on
With room for a hundred more.

Into the ferry restaurant walks
Lincoln and wife
Weighed down by cameras, horse-rim
Glasses and thick makeup.
Unfortunately, the poodles were kept
Back by the Agriculture Department.
Buying quaint plastic teekees made in Hong Kong
To show the folks back home.
Eyes glittering as they savour the idea
Of chicken and rice for one dollar
They’re on holiday so they buy ten tickets.
Jaws agape, they see rice stew appear.
Laughs turn to stunned silence.
They can’t tell the folks back home about that.
Still, they can have a real breakfast
In the American Success in Picton.

Newmans driver
Almost friendly
Picks two chicks up, young and trendy
Lift up skirts, their knees are showing
His eyes light up
It’s Nelson they’re going
Riding the Rai forest
They moan all the way
So in the end the frustrated driver makes them pay.

Finally, we arrived and saw what tobacco looks like.

Tobacco plants ready for topping

The plants stood around 6 feet tall, not counting the flowers. Which we had to remove first. You walked down a row and as you went past, you snapped the flower stalks off and tossed them on the ground, being careful not to damage the ‘tops’, the fine leaves, which were worth a lot of money.

The radio played Fleetwood Mac

It was an easy couple of days and we were thinking, “they are paying us for this”. The accommodation was pretty average. A kitchen with a dining table, 2 chairs, a stove and a fridge. The bedroom contained 2 single wire frame beds. The toilet and bathroom were outside. The former being a drop hole aka a long-drop. It smelled pretty rank.

Your author in front of my hut

We started working for a guy called Ian Hunt. He appeared to have a short guy complex. We were the only Europeans in the gang. The others were Fijian and he treated them almost like slaves. Obviously, there was no physical violence, but he swore at them and belittled them. He held their passports and had prepaid their flights. He would recover their travel costs and his charges for bunk-house accommodation and essential supplies before they could even think of leaving, and they needed the money for their families back in Fiji.

BJ Thomas played on the radio. I said it was a long time ago :) :

I hadn’t met any Fijians before that. They were big, strong, supported each other and had a great sense of humour. They spoke pretty good English and kept up a pace that at first, I struggled with.

You pick tobacco from the lugs at the bottom, to the tops. The temperature was in the 30s and the ground was river silt and stones. You got the heat from the sun and again reflected up from the ground. For the Fijians, it was pretty normal. Not so much for us.

We were shown how to frog walk on the ground, spinning our right hands around the lugs, picking them, and then piled them into our left arm which cradled as big a pile as we could without dropping them. Then we would walk to the end of a row and gently drop the leaves onto the trailer, towed by a Farmall Cub tractor, lining them up so they would be easy for the other team to sew them onto sticks to hang in the kiln.

It was backbreaking work and at the end of the day, we were wondering what we had gotten ourselves into. The Fijians were used to cutting sugar cane. I had done some labouring when wagging school, including putting up scaffolding and carrying huge sheets of drywall up the sides of buildings 40-50 feet above the ground, and as a lifter (picking up rubbish bins) with Pasifika rugby league players who thought they got paid for football training. It was good exercise and they were great fun to work with.

I was reasonably fit, but man, did I hurt at the end of the day! Simon was very unfit. He had been studying to become a chef, which is not the most physical of work, but he sure knew how to cook a steak.

Did someone say steak?

Our second day wasn’t too bad, the muscles weren’t fully exhausted from the first day’s work. But that second night we felt sorry for ourselves, had a light meal and crashed.

I had a little transistor radio for our entertainment. There was no TV.

The following day it was raining and we thought someone was looking out for us. We could relax and recover. We stayed in bed.

At around 8 o’clock there was a loud was banging on the door and someone was calling us to get outside. It was Mr Hunt, we already had a new name for him, but it won’t be shared here. It rhymed and was crude.

We pointed out that it was raining, and he said something along the lines of “Get the f**k out here in 15 minutes. The rest of the gang is already getting wet on the effing trailer waiting for you.”

It seemed that inclement weather did not give us a day off. We did get Sundays off because the Fijians were very religious.

So out we went. At least it wasn’t cold, but it was pretty miserable and the lugs weighed more because many of them were lying in the wet ditches.

Around 10:30 Mr Hunt arrived with a billy of tea with milk already in it. We got 15 minutes break, and couldn’t even have a smoke, because it was raining pretty hard. The water was going under our hats and into our eyes. We couldn’t wipe them because our hands were covered in thick, black, sticky tar that came off the tobacco leaves.

Around 12, Hunt was shouting at Simon who was still halfway down a row when the rest of us were all but finished. He called him all sorts of names. None were words his mother would want to hear. Simon was about to deck him, and I calmed him down, telling him to hang in there. We all helped him finish his row.

After a quick lunch, we were at it again and after about an hour Simon stood up and said “Stuff this, I’m done. I’m going home.”

“You can’t do that, said Hunt. You still owe me for the trip.”

“I’ll leave it on the counter in the hut,” Simon retorted.

By the time I got back to the hut to try and talk him down, he was already in a taxi heading away. I wouldn’t see him again for about 20 years. He had given up on being a chef and had staked a successful gold claim in Australia. He wasn’t prepared to say where it was but said he was making a significant income, working hard 3 months of the year.

I stayed on. I worked for Mr Hunt for the rest of the picking season and when we had caught up on his crop, he subcontracted me and my Fijian friends to other farmers who needed a hand. They were all very nice people, a distinct contrast to my tough boss and landlord if you can call it that.

There is more to come in this story. Did you ever work on a tobacco farm or plantation? Were you in Motueka in the 70s. It was a great place and while my start was a rude awakening, it got better. Much better.

If you are enjoying my writing, and know someone my story might resonate with, please share this blog with them, or on social media. Many people charge for their Substacks. I aim to keep mine free for now, if I get enough encouragement.