Oi Mate, Where’s Your Pork Crackling?

Armraynald Station near Burketown, Queensland – I wanted to run from here shortly after arriving. I was about 8 months into my Australia trip when I landed at Armraynald. My backpacking routine in Australia was cyclical: travel, go broke, find work, make money, repeat. It’s early August in 2014 and this story picks up in the ‘find work’ stage of the cycle.

I had just come off one of the best road trips of my life going from Adelaide to Cairns up the eastern coast of Australia. Going to Cairns along Australia’s east coast from Sydney or Melbourne is a very well-tread backpacking path. It was more or less six weeks of partying with other backpackers while mixing in some surfing, snorkelling, and wildlife watching. It was the time of my life.

At the end of this trip I was in Cairns with maybe $100 to my name. The hostel I was staying at was $15/night. You could get by on $10 of food for the day and a box of goon was about $10. You’d easily get 2 nights out of that box, unless you were doing the goon challenge – 6 hours to drink it all. The goon challenge was a most unpleasant experience. You get blind drunk and it’s only willpower that gets you to the finish line. Going off that budget I had about 3 days of money left.

Goon, if you’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing it, is a borderline unpalatable 4 litres of boxed ‘wine’. I put wine in quotations because that’s what it most resembles but I’m sure under inspection you’d find that it couldn’t be classified as wine. On the box it’s described as a “wine-based beverage that may include egg and fish products”. It’s awful, but it’s cheap and it gets you drunk. It’s the drink of choice amongst backpackers in Australia.

Stay safe while on the road. Here are my 21 travel safety basics.

I was at the tail end of my goon-fuelled trip up the east coast when it was time to find work again. I only had money to last a few more days in Cairns. I went online to Gumtree and started applying to anything and everything. I didn’t care what the work was, I just needed money. I ended up getting a response from a cattle ranch in Northern Queensland that was looking for a cook. The pay was $150/day, with lodging and food provided. Perfect.

I had some experience working as a restaurant cook but it was very basic. It was a national chain restaurant so in essence I was just following instructions and assembling dishes rather than cooking – but it was enough to land me the cattle ranch job. I had to embellish a little on the phone interview, but I needed them to hire me.

Baking cookies and cakes? Yeah, I love doing that sort of stuff, I find baking so stress relieving – and I’ve got a bit of a sweet tooth so it goes hand-in-hand.

Sunday roasts? Yeah, I’ve cooked a few. Brings the family together y’know?

My specialty? I’m pretty versatile in the kitchen, I wouldn’t say I necessarily have one thing I specialize in but gun to my head I’d say that steaks are my specialty.

All bullshit. Though I do cook a nice steak.

The phone interview went well enough, and they sent the head stockman out in the farm’s little bush plane to pick me up from Cairns and bring me back to Armraynald. The head stockman was an extra-large human. He was about 6 foot 7 and had to have been upwards of 300 pounds. He wasn’t fat, he was just huge. It’s a miracle the plane made it off the ground. He was also the pilot and was eating throughout takeoff. One hand on the control wheel, the other on a convenience store meat pie. It was pretty impressive.

I knew that I was biting off a little more than I could chew with this job, but I also knew that it’d be a good learning experience and I usually catch on to things pretty quickly. It wasn’t until I landed at the station that I realized just how big this bite was that I took.

The farm itself was massive. They were raising a few hundred thousand head of cattle, mostly for sale to Southeast Asian markets. The homestead was just off the highway but essentially in the middle of nowhere. There was a very small town, Burketown, about a 30-minute drive through the barren outback where you could find a convenience store, gas station, and a small restaurant – not much more.

I was expected to cook all meals for the farmhands, about 12-16 people, every day, starting with breakfast service at 6:00am and ending with dessert around 8:00pm. So essentially I’d be in the kitchen from 5:00am until maybe 9:00pm each day. There was no menu, and I had no help. It was just me, cooking what I could come up with, for about 16 hours per day. The hours didn’t bother me. They were long sure, but I was used to working long days, and the work wasn’t that strenuous. What bothered me was that I had no recipes, and not much more than half a clue of what I was doing in the kitchen.

To make matters worse, I had no internet access. I needed wifi to be able to access the internet, and there was none here. I needed to find recipes and ideas for what to cook these 16 hungry farm boys for the next 2 months. I wanted to leave. I wanted to get the hell out of this place but there was no civilization within reasonable walking distance, and I had no money. I was stuck.

My first two days were spent trying to figure out how I was going to get out of this place. I had some friends that were looking for work about an 8-hour drive south from where I was. They had a car and maybe I could just join up with them. I’d have to hitchhike my way there, but this was the best option I had. I would leave tomorrow morning after breakfast.

Later that day, however, something happened that changed my fortunes. While digging through my backpack I found a wifi stick that I had gone half-ers on with a friend while we were working on an almond farm in Victoria. I thought I had given it to him to keep when we parted ways, but I guess I had it with me all along. This was a game changer. I had the ability to access the internet’s wealth of recipes. Having recipes doesn’t suddenly make me a good cook, but it makes me a hell of a lot better than if I am just freestyling. With this revelation, I decided that I could stay and survive the two months that I’d signed up for.

The previous person they had cooking for them at Armraynald was a professional chef who moved on to a more lucrative position, so to say I was a bit of a downgrade would be an immense understatement. I was competent in the kitchen, but that’s about as far I’d go with describing my cooking abilities at the time. I wasn’t going to make anyone sick, but of the 60-odd days I spent there, only a handful of my meals impressed. I knocked it out of the park with the steaks – better than the previous chef I was told. So, steaks became a very regular meal. Probably too regular, but it was one of the only meals I had confidence in preparing.

All the meat was incredibly fresh. We were working on a cattle ranch after all and whenever we needed meat, a couple of the boys would go out and shoot one of the bulls that had been selected as mature enough for slaughter. It wasn’t uncommon for meat to be hanging in the cooler, still having muscle spasms.

We’d also trade with nearby farms that specialized in other livestock. As a result of this we had some pork and goat to go along with the beef in our fridge. I knew that at some point in the coming days one of my dinners would be a pork roast. I had never cooked a pork roast before, but I had the internet to tell me how to do it.

A few days later when I was short on dinner ideas I thought, alright let’s do the pork roast. I found a recipe online and it seemed to be quite a bit easier than I’d anticipated. Great, this should go well and won’t be too difficult – or so I thought.

I pulled the pork from the fridge and could see the top layer was the skin of the pig and still had a few hairs on it. This didn’t seem to be much of a worry in the recipe, they just said to make inch-wide cuts into the skin just until you hit the meat. Sprinkle with salt and put it in the oven. Easy.

The skin was beginning to crisp up, and the meat beneath it was cooking nicely. Everything was going well. I didn’t really know how to cut it or what to do with the skin part, but I’d cross that bridge when it was done cooking.

In the meantime, I prepared some side dishes and a sauce for the pork. The sauce was actually quite a hit. It was a maple syrup-mustardy sauce that went nicely with the pork. I think I made a salad and roasted some veggies as well. It was all coming together nicely.

The oven timer chimed and I removed the pork from the oven, looking very nicely cooked. I still had this business though with the now crispy skin on top that I didn’t know what to do with. There were still some hairs on it before cooking, surely you don’t eat this part. I couldn’t find anything in the recipe about what to do with the skin part. They just said to cut the pork into thin slices and serve. In hindsight, that’s all I should’ve done.

Before I started slicing the pork though, I peeled off all the crispy, salted skin strips. Again, surely you aren’t meant to eat this part. They came off rather easily too – a bit of affirmation that I was doing the right thing.

I thought nothing more of the matter and served dinner up for 6:30 when the boys started filing into the kitchen. Everything started smoothly, people were enjoying their first few bites. Right on, I thought, I’ve done well here. At least I thought that until the head stockman, Zach, turned his head towards me and said,

“Oi mate, where’s your pork crackling?”

“My what?” I responded.

“Your pork crackling.”

“…. I don’t know what that is.”

“The skin. The crispy skin part of your pork, where is it?”

This is when I started to realize that I’d made a huge mistake.

“Oh, I uhhh took that part off before I sliced the pork.”

“Yeah alright. What’d you do with it? That’s the best bit.”

I had held my own to this point. This was maybe the fifth dinner I’d prepared for the crew. No doubt a bit of a downgrade from the chef they had prior, but I was providing an adequate replacement, or at least I thought I was. We were still sort of in the feeling out process. I didn’t know them; they didn’t know me. We were getting along alright though. They understood I was not a professional chef but that I was making the effort to do the best I could. That was all until I had to tell the head stockman what I did with the “best bit” of the pork roast.

“Oh, I threw it in the garbage.”

If there’s one way to get 15 hungry farm workers to all stop eating and look at you simultaneously, this is it.

“You what?”

“I – I didn’t think you were supposed to eat that part.”

“Holy fuck.”

Pardon the language but I can’t really sugar coat what he said while still carrying the same weight that only a “holy fuck” can carry.

Without saying another word, he got up, walked over to the kitchen garbage, and started finding pieces of pork crackling that still looked good enough to eat. He was eating pork crackling out of the garbage because that’s how much he loved pork crackling, and that’s the place where I thought it ought to be placed. There was no coming back from this.

The rest of the dinner was very quiet. I hadn’t felt that level of shame in quite some time. It must’ve been noticeable because the only woman that worked on the farm perked up and made a comment about how much she loved the sauce. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure that the sauce actually was a hit, I think she was just being nice and trying to break the silence. God bless her.

In the weeks that passed, every so often a few of the boys would give me a hard time about it, the way guys give each other hard times about things they deserve to be given hard times about. All fair and playful. We’d laugh at my expense but there were no hard feelings. The head stockman though, he didn’t speak to me much after this night. I think just as much as I was, he was also counting down the days until I left. Two months may not seem that long, but it can feel an eternity when you are in an uncomfortable place.

I never made a faux pas such as this again, although there was one lunch hour when Zach came up beside me in the kitchen and dumped the pizza I had cooked into the garbage, before going to the fridge to find some leftovers.

I want to say that my time at Armraynald wasn’t horrible, but it was. I felt trapped and couldn’t meet the expectations of my job. I felt very small.

There are three positives that I took away from this experience, however. First, is kind of obvious but it’s the money. I made enough money to pay off my credit card and afford myself 5 weeks in New Zealand as well as a flight home. New Zealand wouldn’t have been possible if not for Armraynald, and I loved New Zealand.

Second, I improved as a cook, and that is a valuable life skill to have. I had to make some unfortunate mistakes, but I learned a lot and became a more competent cook during my time there. I still, to this day, don’t like cooking for other people because of my Armraynald experience, but I’m cooking better meals for myself, and maybe one day I’ll cook for others again.

Lastly, I’ve never felt so trapped and uncomfortable at any time in my life than I did at Armraynald. This doesn’t sound like a positive, but it is. Whenever I find myself in a bad situation, an uncomfortable location, or doing work that I loathe, I always remember my days on the cattle ranch and think to myself, “hey, at least I’m not at Armraynald”. Just the thought of not being at Armraynald puts a smile on my face.