WWOOFing in Broke

After two weeks in Sydney and Newcastle, seeing a lot of Australian city-life and their love for the beaches, the contrast could hardly have been bigger:
I went to the countryside into the amazingly beautiful Hunter Valley: a wine region quite close to Sydney.

Through the WWOOFing-Network I found a farm in Broke, where I could stay for a while and work in exchange for food and accomodation. I was really happy about this experience and about my luck with the farm:
I couldn’t have found a better place and more welcoming family! Marian, the proprietor of the Estate, is a really nice woman and the head of a family with big open doors. Aside from me there were two other WWOOFers on the farm – the Belgium guy Alan and the Irish girl Heyley, who accomplished her 88 days of work needed to get a 2^nd year work-and-travel-visa (which we Austrians don’t get at all!!! I wonder what we did wrong in the region, because in New Zealand we don’t get it neither. My dear Austrian embassadors in OZ and NZ: I see some potential for negotiations!).

The estate – River Flats estate – is an olive grove with over 3500 olive trees. They also have 3 cottages rented out for people on holiday or for wedding groups. 

But that's not all:
Not too far away from the farm Marian runs the little shop “Pickled & Pitted”, where she sells all the delicious products she’s producing: different sorts of olive oils and vinegars, different jarred olives, but also heaps of different chutneys, tapenades and of course cheeses (you knew, I'd be mentioning this, right...).

Marians daughter Michelle owns the shop “BARE  Nature'sKin” right next to it, in which she sells different kinds of soaps and kosmetic products, most of which she was making by herself with the olive oil from the farm or the goat milk of the goats she owns in the back garden. The smell in her shop is simply breathtaking – you feel like in a big foam-bath. I can’t tell you how lovely these two little shops are: You can see that all their love flows into them!

The work I had to do was really diverse and I was doing something different everyday. After all I was lucky to see most of the steps in the process from olives on a tree to finished pickled olives in jars:

On the first three days we were picking olives in the mornings – 12 boxes are needed for one big bucket. Unfortunately this summer had been really bad with a lot of rain, so most of the fruit is diseased and can’t be used. So picking was sometimes really frustrating: you stand in front of an olive tree full with olives and when you get closer you see that they are all rotten… So you are even happier for each healthy branch, which are really nice to pick then!

While Marians daughter makes cosmetics out of the olives, her also still on the estate living son Andy has his own company Olicare, which is working in the establishment, care-taking of olive groves and in harvesting. But no no, not hand-picking like we did – he’s more into mashines ;) 
I was lucky to see them in use once – 

and you are now lucky too, because I made some nice videos of it: cool, isn’t it?!

After Andy had shaken many trees we still had to get rid of all the leaves, that had also been shaken off the trees – we found a quite fun way of doing so. (yes, that's me lying down there...)

Ok, I reckon, you don't really get what we are doing here without seeing this clip:

When the olives are all more or less sorted out, they are put into big buckets and filled with saltwater (1:10) and closed. On another day we were checking the salt level of buckets which had been filled months ago: open the bucket (on the top everything is white because of the natural malt), get rid of the olives floating on the top, and then take your whole arm into the smelling liquid to mix it a bit and test the level of salt with a special salt-level-measurer.

The last step in the process, after the olives had been months in these big buckets, is the "jaring" itself: the olives are taken out, washed, the crappy ones are thrown away and then you heat them a bit, fill them in heated jars and fill the whole thing up with boiling saltwater. That’s it!

(On this photo you can see Marian - my WWOOFing-mama, and the two other WWOOFers Heyley and Alan)

However, I didn’t see how olive oil is produced due to the bad season – I guess I have to come back there next year when the harvest will hopefully be better!

Apart from the works connected to olives just described above, we were helping with whatever had to be done: cleaning the cottages and making beds, on another day we spend hours mowing around a fence that had to be put higher… There is always something to do on a farm! However, even though I enjoyed these two weeks and it was nice for a change, I know, that it is not the work I would want to do for the rest of my life…

I arrived in the week before the culinary festival “Little bit of Italy in Broke” was taking place – so I came perfectly in time to help out with the last preparations for this festival. During this festival many venues – mainly vinyards – of the region Broke Fordwich participated and prepared something in addition to their regular wine tasting. 

We at the "Pickled & Pitted"-shop were doing a big effort to offer the customers more than the everyday offer: apart from the normal shop, we created a small veggie-garden, where fresh veggies were sold. Furthermore we had live music and other stands joined us in the garden:

A food-stand with fresh pumkin pie, a coffee-car, a pizza-car, a stand with hot olives and a small stand of a guy, who made new furniture out of old timber wood. So the preparation work was big, and the cleaning afterwards as well. But we were a big bunch of people, all helping out together and enjoying the time together with good food and wines once the big rush was over!

On the second day of the festival, when it wasn’t too busy, Alan and I had the chance to make a tour to the other venues to see a bit of the valley and of the festival. So we were driving around to the different vinyards, enjoying the region and tasting their typical vines (some of which I had never heard from before, like Verdelho for example – ever heard of that before?).

The whole festival ended of course with big celebrations in one participating vinyard. The people all know each other –  surprise, surprise: Broke has only 400 inhabitants – and know each other's wines and products. You can see that the people in this region are proud of and do really want to preserve their cultural and culinary heritage.

And it is definitely a beautiful region too, don’t you reckon:

It is scary to know that all this could just disappear: the energy company AGL is researching in the region for coal-seam-gas (CSG) resources. What is now a wine- and touristic area could become a unpleasant area with a big network of pipes for CSG-mining. I was so positively surprised by the cooperation of the people in the region, and  therefore even more shocked by what could happen to it if AGL gets through. I learned about it because in many places - so as well in front of the "Pickled & Pitted" and inside Michelles "BARE - Nature'sKin" shop -  you can see the signs of the association "Lock the gate" fighting against it, or simply “AGL – go to hell” signs. You should check this website to learn more about it - I don't know enough about it but I felt I have to mention it here!

I was so lucky with this farm, because the mix of working and reward (food and accomodation) for it was simply perfect. And even though I was often working longer than the from a WWOOFer expected 4-6hours, I was highly recompensated for it: Marian and her family definitely know how to celebrate life every day: we had great meals every day, freshly cooked with only really high quality products, always accompanied with great wines.

By seeing and living their way of life, I can even more say that for me the pleasure of life often lies in the simpliest things: It is such a high pleasure to drink a good glass of wine after a hard (and also after not so hard J) day and enjoy a great meal in great company. And this is what I loved soooooo much about their attitude to life: to celebrate life every day! It is more or a less a continuation of what I already wrote about the Australian way of life in my last blog story…

Nearly every second or third day Marian had friends coming over for dinner and on these occasions the dinner would be even bigger and more celebrated. In the back of their house they have a big dining area with a huge barbeque and even a pizza-oven! I can’t tell you how social a pizza-evening can be! Yes, I do like the idea of celebrating life everyday like this… I only have to learn to do it better: because now my goal for the next few weeks is to get rid of the few  additional kilos of celebrated life...

In the beginning I had planned only to stay for around one week, but then I changed my plans and ended up stayin 2 weeks in total and not going up the East coast at all. For Easter a big party was announced at one of the cottages. Oh, big it was indeed: it was a huge and never ending drinking-and-eating-orgie, starting on Thursday and finishing only on Monday evening (I heard they continued on Tuesday). Many friends came up from Sydney, and even me I invited Jean-Marie and his house-mate Jean to come up for that occasion. Oh my god, what should I say?! The first beer was opened before 9am each day and the last one was drunk around 4am…

Welcoming as the Aussies are, we – Jean-Marie, Jean and me – were invited by Andys father to drive around the Hunter Valley and go for wine tastings in the different vinyards. So I ended up seeing and tasting wine of many of different vinyards I hadn’t been to so far. It was really so generous of him: he spent the whole afternoon with us, driving us around and tasting wines. I still can’t believe how welcoming these people are: I now have invitations to going sailing in Sydney from 4 different persons I got to know on this very farm…

So like one fellow Austrian would say: I’LL BE BACK!!