Seasonal workers are vital to Australian agriculture. Across Queensland farms, there are times when more than twenty thousand jobs are filled by mostly foreign workers. Some have taken part in a photography project exploring their contribution to the country’s progress.
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00:00On any given day all over the country, thousands of workers are tending to crops, picking,
00:18packing or processing across all different types of farms.
00:24And in Australia the majority of that workforce is made up of migrants.
00:31Without them our agriculture sector would come to a screeching halt, but many of us
00:36never get to know much at all about this huge community that keep Australian farms ticking
00:42over.
00:43They're not given a lot of space in public discourse or debate.
00:48When they are in the news it's usually not for very positive reasons.
00:51So I wanted to create a project that sort of celebrated and captured the good times
00:58and the good experiences and quite, you know, big contribution that they bring to regional
01:03places.
01:04Second season, yeah?
01:05Yeah.
01:06So you three are together?
01:07Yeah.
01:08Yeah.
01:09Kaya Barry is a cultural geographer from Griffith University who has spent a lot of time with
01:15seasonal workers.
01:16I actually grew up like the first I don't know how many years of my life was living
01:21in a caravan because my parents toured around just like a lot of backpackers do now.
01:26And we lived in a caravan, toured through New South Wales, Queensland, Northern Territory
01:30while mum and dad picked up bits of seasonal work, cleaning, caravan park stuff.
01:36For the past few years Kaya's focus has been on giving others an insight into the daily
01:41lives of some of those migrant workers during their time in Australia.
01:47The project's called Momentarily Immobile, the futures of backpacking and seasonal farm
01:52work in Queensland.
01:53Have any of you used a camera like this before?
01:56Yeah.
01:57It's got film in it.
01:58We've been handing out cameras across the state and they take a bunch of photos and
02:01then post them back to me and we get them developed.
02:04The project is about getting a sense of what life is like for the seasonal workers through
02:09their eyes.
02:11Because people live and work and spend their spare time in a community and having a bit
02:16more insight into what their everyday life is like is something that perhaps a local
02:21might not ever see.
02:22They might pass them at the supermarket queue or they might see them in the street but they
02:27don't actually get to see from their perspective their side of what life is like when they're
02:32here in Australia.
02:34We a little bit strangle like life, it's too hard.
02:38So when we have opportunity to come over we can develop our community, send money back,
02:45send money for our kids, like school fees and we can build houses.
02:51Help for the food, we pay for my sister for the kids for the school and the building house.