A personal story..

I stole food from the Woolworths in the city because I rationed my Social Security Newstart payment out to be, after rent and some basics, $8 a day..

I needed it for fun. Sometimes for transport. If I didn't want the adrenalin of jumping the ticket gates. Then I could play a few rounds on the computer games in George Street. Then I could buy batteries for my walkman and listen to music more. It made me able to walk around some days, otherwise the security blanket of the Walkman would not have been there to hold me in the feeling, in the mood, in the energy of the music. I used to dance to the music down the main streets of Sydney. Hugging and kissing trees as I went by, thinking of every tree and apologising to them. I am sorry tree, I hugged you too hard! I am sorry tree, for all the pollution around you. Sometimes almost bitten by spiders on the trunk.

I never reckoned on the sudden change in my life that a train ride up to the Blue Mountains would make. It was nearly the middle of winter in 1998. I suddenly felt like going up to the Blue Mountains 2 hours away from my home in the inner city of Sydney. Away from the polluted streets, noises of cars and massive building sites clanking, up to the romantic Blue Mountains. I didn't quite know why, I just went with the urge to go there. I picked up a paper, and opened it to the classifieds section. There was a job advertised for Green Corps Trainee positions. I was within the age group and applied. A short time later, I wandered lost, at the top of a dirt driveway in a warm coat. I walked down the side of the driveway for a little way on a dirt path. Turning back I realised I had to walk down the driveway itself to get to the interview. I found my way down the driveway, and sought out the boss. I found him and seated myself nervously inside a passive solar building at a wooden dining table.

I left there soon after with no idea if my trouble was worth it. Then I was told a few days later that I had the job! I was elated! I was to move up there and start work. But I had no money for a backpackers to stay temporarily, and how would I make it there on time? The house I was living at was luckily a youth housing place, which meant I could ask them for help, a special favour. They said they could help me out with a week in a backpackers, so I travelled up with my favourite things, leaving other things behind easily. I kept my favourite Doc Marten rainbow velvet boots I had paid off in small amounts, and remember them being with me, at least for a short while. They didn't survive the muddy bushwalking or the adventures I had in nature. I was able to hang from trees, climb them, and hug as many as I liked.

I found a place to stay at temporarily with another team member in Mt Victoria. It snowed one morning at 6am, it was so bright, and my steel caps sank into the snow as I walked slower than usual, carefully, out to the train station to go further down the mountain to work. I found a better place that meant I lived alone and walked up to the van collection point for work instead. I brought my cat home from my parents who looked after him in the meanwhile, and he loved his new place. Playing in the ever growing long grasses out the back, and meeting the neighbourhood cats. We used to play chaseys around the little cabin, and were content there.

The work with Green Corps began on the last day of June 1998. I met my other team members, there were ten of us to begin together on our project in the Blue Mountains. We were not glorified weed pullers. Instead we were at a site that had an aim to improve homelessness and increase public awareness of self sustainability, of eco friendly and solar passive housing, of permaculture, including composting. All of us were all fitted out with green or murky yellow overalls, steel cap boots, Green Corps t-shirts, and working shirts, wide brimmed hats. All of us were given a Senior First Aid Certificate after an initial week of paid training in Senior First Aid.

It was useful for me to learn because a week later on, I was on the train and it stopped at Linden for ages. A woman rushed past us to towards the drivers carriage and I kept telling myself to look and find out. I had to look and burst out of the train onto the platform. A tiny 2 year old boy was sick with a fever and he had infant convulsions. I had only just learnt about this, and was able to be very clear on the way to treat him and how to direct others to help as everyone just sort of stood around in shock. I asked a person to get a bit of cloth wet, and then after it was wrung out I cooled his little body on the back of the neck. In case he vomited, I yelled at them to turn him on his side as soon as I saw him and recognised what it was. If he had vomited and choked he may have died from being unable to breathe. His mother panicked, crying by my side, and said “I didn't know what to do!” I stood up and hugged her and said “that's ok, don't worry.. he'll be ok.” We waited with him until the paramedics arrived and gave him a shot. They took him away to hospital for treatment.

The rest of the training involved tool identification, so we knew what to use when it was asked for at the start of the day. To get a round mouthed shovel from the tool shed. What was it used for? Digging deeper holes. What was the difference between that and a square mouthed shovel? A square mouthed shovel was useless in digging more than a bit a of gravel or sand, to move bits of bark and gravel, to move topsoil. That sort of thing. I enjoyed the aspect of using the whipper snipper! The growl of the engine as it started up and then whizzing through the plants close to the ground. Someone commented, look at her face! I must have had rev happiness on it, even though I can count the number of times I have driven a car. I am no petrol head who goes around madly.

Sudden cliff edges and big safety signs were at several of the areas. It used be a mined area and the miners had dug away at the hill creating erosion and real danger zones. The beehive area was also a danger zone with a WARNING sign before it too.

Slop. Some days were filled with utter slop. We'd start off before 8am, huddled in the team area building with the kettle and toaster, some had two minute noodles, some had strong coffee. The wind factor measurement that a team member made every day was pretty strong, and the tree tops were bending like aerobics maniacs. Sleet was in the air, and we were trying to have snow fights. Ended up pelted with a painful chunk of hard ice instead! Then the sleet softened as we tolled on digging fence post holes, and then it rained. The endlessness of digging mud away from itself where it ends up again leaves me with sympathy for road workers. I know what it feels like to endlessly labour for nearly nothing to change. This is part of the reason that the team fell apart and people left.

What's the point?!! Maybe some were only staying because once they completed the 6 months training they were to be rewarded with $500.There were the inside perks, sometimes when the weather was too bad to work, of watching plant identification videos, as part of training. We also took part in helping Blue Mountains Wild Plant Rescue, and helped their business of removing native plants from sites to be cleared and felled of trees for building on. Sometimes Wild Orchids were found. The plants were then taken to their nursery to be sold in pots. I could recognise differences in the plants from learning plant identification. Different leaf shapes, different ways the leaves grow on the stems, why they are like that. All quite nice really. I went around to the team members places sometimes, and one of them lived near me. I smoked some dope at their place after work one night, and then my life took a downturn.

For the first time ever I struggled to get to work. I became very moody and began to anger at the team members, and then I cried, and kept crying, and ran down near the beehives and bawled my eyes out. I couldn't handle it anymore for some reason, even though I had smoked plenty of dope before for a few years, since I was 16, and I had also worked too without a drama.

One of the staff took me to a medical team for counselling, we sat outside in the ute but I refused, said I was fine. I soon gave up work. But it wasn't unhappy as such. I was free to be in my little cabin, with my cat, and to see some friends. There was the emotional issue of a man who I had fallen for, and how he had abandoned me. I thought he was going to visit me and never saw him until the next year. I had met him a few days after I started work in Katoomba. I saw him soon after on the train station and was drawn into an attraction and then love that became a self-destructive obsession for several years after.