Cherry picker Jules Sabourin, a freelance journalist, shares with readers of the Young Witness an insight into the lives of cherry pickers who visited Young this cherry season.
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“I'm from Vancouver Island, Canada, and I’m 28 years old. This was my second time in Young, the first time being eight years ago for a cherry season,” Jules said.
“I love cherry pickers because they usually are an atypical bunch, somewhat outcasts, seeking freedom over everything else - always a good raw material for stories.”
This is the second of three parts.
PART 2: Dylan Matthews
It’s a dry, warm December afternoon, the temperature hovering just over thirty degrees in the New South Wales countryside region of Hilltops.
If you happen to be wandering around Young’s Anderson Park, near the flagpole-stature cherry sculpture that reads ‘Young, Cherry Capital of Australia’, chances are you’ll encounter a fauna only observable here at this precise time of the year: cherry pickers.
READ ALSO: Meet Young’s cherry pickers | Part 1
Transient, they appear like magic in Young in perfect sync with the cherries blossoming in the nearby orchards.
Their vehicles, typically a white, sliding side-door van with a mattress at the back licensed in Western Australia, can then be spotted all over town.
The pickers themselves are often lounging on Anderson Park’s grassy area, just a hop away from the town’s old train station renovated into an information center, relaxing, or cooking food on portable propane stoves on the roof-covered picnic table. they’re here, usually, between the middle of November and early January; usually under thirty and from all corners of the world, they’re the gold-seeking, determined workers who will pick millions upon millions of the sweet, sought-after red rock fruit produced around “Australia’s Cherry Capital”.
This is a profile of one of them.
Dylan Matthew is a nomad. He owns very little, lives out of a backpack, enjoys simplicity, and hasn’t had a fixed address since he left home in 2006.
He was born and grew up on the Sunshine Coast, north of Brisbane, and got into fruit picking by necessity.
Having just landed in Perth after a two-year stay in China, he needed a job. Fast.
His background was in hospitality; he had worked, mostly, as a cocktail bartender and bar manager all around Australia.
READ ALSO: Young’s first baby of 2019
More recently, in China, fate had landed him a manager position in a youth hostel at the foothills of the Himalayas, a job and a place he remembers fondly.
Passport issues got him leaving prematurely. Perth had little opportunities in his area of expertise at that moment.
As it is, the only job offer that came his way was to go pick mandarines up north. Not thinking twice, he took it. Arrived late in the season, the job ended up lasting only a week. Just long enough, it turned out, for Dylan to find a new vocation.
He fell in love, he admits, with the great freedom picking fruits offered.
“I love doing my own job, being left alone, and having no boss looking over your shoulder,” he explains. That was eight years ago, and he hasn’t looked back. Since, he’s picked most fruits grown under the Australian sun; nowadays, he tend to focus on cherries and mandarines.
“I can make enough money in a few months to live for the year, he says, it pays well enough, I don’t really strive for more.”
That said, he acknowledges the job isn’t for everyone.
READ ALSO: Top cop retires from the force in Young
“It takes willpower and a certain amount of stamina. Days are usually between eight and ten hours, no breaks, under the beating sun. There are bad days, of course.”
Mostly, though, he says he manages to have a pleasant time out in the orchard.
“When everything lines up and you get good trees, good weather - not too hot, overcast - it can be truly enjoyable.”
Dylan even admits he occasionally enters a delta-wave, meditative state when picking the fruits that can last for hours.
“You just get in the flow, the fruits get picked effortlessly, you barely think about it.” For him, the key to success is mostly mental. “With a positive attitude, days go by so much faster.”
He picks cherries in Wombat for Hallmark orchards, and sometimes goes down to Tasmania when he finishes here to do a few more weeks of cherry picking on the island-state.
If not, he might stick around to prune cherry trees a few weeks after the picking is finished.
He picks mandarines in continental Queensland, during a long, physically-challenging period that stretches from May to September. The rest of the year, he usually travels: he visited South America, travelled Australia extensively.
Earlier this year he was backpacking through Europe before coming to Young, and admits having fallen for Estonia, where he’d see himself live one day.
In the meanwhile, you can catch him caught up in the branches of a cherry tree, deciphering their mysteries, listening to the birds, and, I suspect, dreaming about all the places he still has to go and the people he has to meet.
“There’s just so many, he says, I’ll never be able to stop travelling.” Isn’t it a fantastic thing that, with fruit picking as a job, he might never have to.
