Photography exhibition shows what it’s like to pick fruit on Australian farms through the eyes of international workers

Friendship and adventures aren’t often the stories associated with Australia’s seasonal worker program, but a photographic exhibition has captured just that. 

Seasonal farm workers using disposable cameras have photographed some of their everyday life: picking fruit on farms, camaraderie and unique experiences.

“We’ve been handing out cameras across the state,” explained Kaya Barry, a cultural geographer from Griffith University behind the project.

“They take a bunch of photos and then post them back to me and we get them developed.” 

Lino Uhi from Tonga was one of hundreds of people who participated in a project shining a light on the seasonal workers who keep Australian farms ticking over.

He’s lived and worked in Australia on eight separate occasions.

Each time he has stayed and worked for nine months, and each time on the same farm in regional Queensland.

Every return trip has been driven by the same desire, to support his family back home.

“We pay for my sister, for the kids, for the school and for building [a] house,” Lino Uhi said.

The project aimed to get a sense of what life is like for seasonal workers on Australian farms, through their eyes.

Dr Barry said seasonal workers were not given a lot of space in public discourse and debate.

“When they are in the news it’s often not for very positive reasons,” she said. 

“I wanted to create a project that celebrated and captured the good times and the good experiences and the quite big contributions that they bring to regional places.”

Opportunity for insight

Across Queensland, it is estimated at times there are more than 20,000 jobs filled by seasonal workers on farms, the majority of which are foreign.

“These people live and work and spend their spare time in a community and having a bit more insight into their everyday life is something that perhaps a local might not ever see,” said Dr Barry.

“They might pass them at the supermarket queue, or they might see them in the street, but they don’t actually get to see from this perspective, their side of what life is like when they’re here in Australia.”

Treloar Guenthroth is the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) and Farm Supervisor on an orchard at Gin Gin, in the Wide Bay region. 

“I supervise all the work that gets done by seasonal workers — so the Tongans or Solomon Islanders, and sometimes we’ll use contractors with Koreans and Japanese, a lot of people from Asia, sometimes Timor, sometimes Samoa,” said Mr Guentrhroth.

While the citrus harvest is underway on the farm at Gin Gin, Mr Guenthroth has encouraged the seasonal workers to participate in the research project to snap photos of their daily lives.

This year, there were 50 seasonal workers on the citrus and blueberry farm, but some years that number was much higher.

Regardless of birthplace, language or culture, Mr Guenthroth said the seasonal workers were unified by a common goal.

“All they want is to improve their life for their family and their country and everyone they’ve got at home,” he said. 

Supporting a group of seasonal workers from different parts of the world was no small feat. Language was a common barrier.

To help, Mr Guenthroth has been learning and practising the different languages spoken by the workers on the farm where he worked.

“A bit of Tongan, not too much but enough to get by, and pidgin, I know a fair bit of pidgin because it’s just broken English,” he said.

“It’s pretty easy to learn and just learning from them, it starts off with all the swearwords and all the fun stuff, and then you progress from there.”

Providing good support to the seasonal workers on farms in Australia is important, especially since many leave behind entire families.

Andrew Makolo is a father of three from the Solomon Islands whose youngest child is still a toddler.

He will be away from his family for nine months, before returning home for a quarter of the year.

“Back home, we a little bit struggled, life is too hard,” said Mr Makolo.

“So when we have the opportunity to come over we can develop our community — send money back for our kids, for school fees and to build houses.”

Tough but rewarding

Over the course of her research, Dr Barry received and collated more than a thousand photos taken on disposable film cameras by seasonal workers across the state.

“I think they tell not quite a story of somebody’s life here, but they show quite nice snippets of what the everyday is like,” Dr Barry said.

“I think it’s really important not to sort of over-glamorise this because it’s tough, hard working conditions, but it is also really rewarding and enjoying.”

Nunes Da Costa Barreto, from Timor Leste, is one of the seasonal workers whose photographs have been included in the exhibition, called Seasonal.

“This is my first-time exhibition,” Mr Da Costa Barreto said.

“I’m so proud of it. And I’m very thankful to Kaya for inviting me here.

“This is amazing for me.”

The “Seasonal” exhibition is currently on show at the Childers Art Space. It will be on show in Brisbane in August, before touring to Gayndah and other regional galleries next year.