A great one-off story I came across was working in the outback. A great cultural experience and one that is very rare to hear about but is a lot more accessible than you may have first thought. It is predominately bar work and the bars main customers are aboriginal natives. I caught up with Jess who shared some details of her experience with me. “I worked in the Coen Exchange Hotel, which was in a town 8 hours from any city, all dirt track to get there. The only people there were the people we worked for then the town was full of aborigines. When I say town I mean the only thing in it was the “hotel” (more like a motel) and a little shop that the people we worked for owned. At first I thought I was going to hate it, but by the end I loved it and was sad to leave! Sounds hard but we pretty much worked 14 hours a day everyday but there is literally nothing else to do and the jobs weren’t hard. There were 8 of The Mulleys (people we worked for), then two friends, the chef and me. We cleaned the rooms/worked behind the bar/worked in the shop. Just did whatever they needed us to do. It was an amazing experience working in the environment, the aboriginals were so funny, and when we worked behind the bar we pretty much spent all day just talking to them, they told us everything and were drunk 24/7. We got to see some really amazing stuff whilst we were there! We were there for two and a half months but over that period managed to save $7500 which is how I afforded Asia afterwards.”
If you are planning on staying in Sydney then you have no worries, there are plenty of opportunities there. I spoke to Sarah who had an abundance of jobs, some she enjoyed, others she didn’t. Sarah worked at a cruise bar and a small café on Sydney Harbour; both were short stays for Sarah. She then managed to find a job on the Darling Harbour working in the local ‘iMax’. One opportunity Sarah took was to work for Dominos at the Cricket Ashes between England and Australia. She had a lot of fun at this job, being in the middle of such a buzzing atmosphere really adds to the enjoyment of a job. Sarah offered me some really interesting advice to do with travel companies. “We travelled on a programme called Work and Travel Company which promised to find us work when we got to Australia. They were absolutely rubbish I think in the 9 months I was in Australia they got me one event job for one night. They didn’t have enough connections and too many people wanting jobs. So never travel with a company because you can pretty much do it all yourself if you find the vacancies and it’s not worth the extra £400 we paid.”
So if there’s one thing you can take away from this piece it has to be that there are plenty of opportunities down under. As long as you put yourself out there, apply for plenty of jobs and are willing to get your hands dirty you will do fine. What’s really encouraging about Australia is the chance of building a real career out there. All it takes it persistence, networking and a willingness to build from the bottom. You can’t go far wrong with using familiar sites like ‘Gumtree’ either, although, do not limit yourself to this as you will not always be as lucky as the people I spoke to. Even in the most remote parts of the country there are plenty of opportunities to get employed. With a little ambition and a drive to succeed you can obtain employment anywhere down-under.