If you haven’t been there, I can’t think of any reason why you’d have heard of Moriarty. It sounds like an artistic graveyard. It was for the remains of thousands of broccoli plants that I cut there. I went to a remote farming village in Tasmania, Australia for a little broccoli harvesting! When I asked my workmates Hayley and Curtis (a local) where the city centre of Moriarty is, they pointed to a “community hall” and a Fire Station. Welcome to Moriarty. It’s basically a village of farms east of Devonport in Australia.
On my second day of broccoli cutting I was driven out to Moriarty. There I first worked with Greg, who would work with me in Tasmania right until the final day there, some 4 and a half months later at a wet cauliflower field in Ambleside.
It was a wet day, a not so fine introduction to farming life. I didn’t own a pair of Wellington Boots (or Gum Boots as Australians will have you call them) and on the first day (a very hot blistering summer’s day) I had borrowed a pair from Hayley at Work Direct (the agency I joined in Devonport). However that pair were far too small and tight and hurt my feet. So I had already ditched them in favour of my trainers.
Now wearing trainers in a rain drenched broccoli paddock isn’t a good idea. Your feet get soaked, they get cold, and at the end of the day I had written off my pair of trainers and a pair of socks. Not to mention the fact that my once fashionable jeans were condemned as well, though I dragged them out to last me until the end of my farming time in Tasmania.
I worked with a local girl there, Christi Emery, who explained to me that she can see her house from the broccoli paddock! Christi lived a busy life, spending her days on farms, and her spare time riding horses and going to motorbike tournaments.
