“Deep Weathered Jam”: Creative Conversations with Geologic Mobilities and Farming Landscapes

Abstract

“Deep weathering” is a geologic process that takes millions of years of seasonal wetting and drying of certain rocks to produce high levels of iron-oxide. The result is a rich, red soil, perfect for crops like sugar cane and sweet potatoes. Evidence of deep weathering is in the fertile soils of Bundaberg, a regional town in Australia with a violent colonial past, yet a key part of the nation’s food production and hub for seasonal migrant workers. The region is a hive of mobility, millennia in the making, that epitomises contemporary debates on housing, migrant labour, global supply chains, and ecological destruction. This visual essay presents a series of creative experiments of making jam at roadside rest areas. Using a hiking stove, third-grade fruit the farm workers bring home, locally produced sugar, a hint of soil, the process is a creative conversation across geologic and human mobilities in the region.

Key Words:

• creative practice
• farming
• migration
• mobilities
• soil.

1. MILLENIA IN THE MAKING

“Deep weathering” is a geologic process that occurs over millions of years. It is the outcome of many seasons of wetting and drying of certain types rocks from rainfall, flooding, humidity, and evaporation cycles, which results in rock degradation and decay. The process produces a “reddish-brown layer of iron-oxide rich (or ferruginous) material” (Wilmott n.d., 5). The result is, over millennia, a transformation of rocks as they break down, creating a rich, red soil—high in iron-oxide—and ideal for fertile growing soils for certain crops like sugar cane and sweet potatoes (Figure 1). These are “intra-actions between mineralogy and the weather” (Bremner 2021, 28), which co-mingle with other animate and inanimate lifeforms over millions of years. Evidence of deep weathering remains today in the fertile soils of the subtropical town of Bundaberg, in the Wide Bay–Burnett region on the east coast of Australia. This visual essay explores the contemporary outcomes of geologic forces that are entwined in the politics of labour, mobility, and food production in this region.

FIGURE 1 Red soil.

The Wide Bay–Burnett region has extensive evidence of deep weathering that occurred during the Cenozoic period, and in combination, as geologist Wilmott describes, this region has:.

Significant areas of alluvial flats adjacent to the major streams [that] also provide fertile soils … Deeply weathered basalt of the Gin Gin Basalt gives rolling hills with fertile chocolate soils used for horticulture. The areas to the east of the city are dominated by the distinct edifice of The Sloping Hummock [a large hill and popular tourist lookout]. Gentle slopes are developed on basalt lavas radiating from its centre. They are covered in fertile red soils which originally supported dense vine scrubs but these have long been cleared for sugar cane. (Wilmott, n.d., 3)

Often referred to as the “nation’s food bowl,” the farming town of Bundaberg (pop. 99,000, ABS 2022) is surrounded by the by-products of deep weathering. It is a horticultural heartland of Australia; the region produces up to a quarter of the nation’s fresh fruit and vegetables at peak harvest times, while attracting thousands of seasonal workers who migrate annually. The region is intersected by a two-lane stretch of bitumen that makes up the national highway, a long-distance freight and passenger railway line, a small airport, and many narrow cane railway tracks criss-cross through the urbanised centre and feed out into the cane fields to the footsteps of the rolling mountain ranges (Figure 2). The place is a hive of mobility, millennia in the making, that presents itself to the unsuspecting visitor as a sleepy farming landscape.

FIGURE 2 Railway tracks for cane harvest.

In this visual essay I borrow from the geologic term “deep weathering,” as a way to unpack the interrelated mobilities and timespans. I do so through a series of creative experiments, which riff off the geologic and human histories of the region, attending to the injustices of recent century of migration slavery, and the contemporary condition of seasonal migration. In a play on country cuisine, I use locally grown produce and the “third-grade” fruit and veggies that migrant workers are permitted to bring home as a “bonus” for their toil, to make a series of preserves and jams. “Deep weathered jam,” as I term it, is a creative dialog across geologic timespans, in which this visual essay contributes to literature and debates that unsettle landscape aesthetics and settler-colonial visualities of place.

The contributions cross three areas: first, it builds on recent literature on elemental and sedimental geographies, attending to the materiality of rocks, soil, dust, weather systems, and more (e.g. Edensor 2020; Bremner 2021; Zee 2021), in order to sketch out how landscape aesthetics and relations are practiced, felt, and aestheticized through such terrestrial aesthetics (e.g. Hawkins 2020). Second, it connects to contemporary concerns around labour mobility, particularly in the Antipodean context around horticulture and Pacific mobility (e.g. Barry 2023; Petrou and Connell 2022). And finally, through the format of the visual essay, it bridges these first two areas to consider the role of creative practices that provoke and subvert attitudes to food production and farming and the settler-colonial visualities of landscapes (e.g. Haedicke 2021; Hore 2022; Qualmann and Vogel 2023; Springgay 2022).

2. WEATHERED SOILS

Forged by the energies of surging magma, the collisions generated by continental drift, or the relentless layering of miniscule grains and tiny particles from marine bodies, stone is one of the most durable of the earth’s materials. (Edensor 2020, 9–10)

In this passage, Tim Edensor describes how the materiality of stone—and the coveted by-products that are excavated, extracted, and transformed—are entangled in almost every aspect of contemporary human consumption. As many scholars across geography, humanities, and the arts have shown (e.g. Bremner 2021; Cullen 2021; Hawkins 2020; Massey 2006) not only do rocks provide the foundations that we walk upon, but as they degrade and break down, are ground up, dug out, and seep out in microscopic or millennia-enduring processes, they provide the foundation for growth, consumption, and in the interest of my study, the potential for harvest production.

The area surrounding Bundaberg is made up of over 80 documented soil types (Donnollan et al. 2015; Wilson 1997), and is home to the iconic red Kandosols commonly used in tropical horticulture and irrigated cropping (Soil Science Australia, n.d.).

Lindsay Bremner explains that rocks are “lively, decaying, rotting, transmogrifying weather bodies, just like, albeit different from our own” (2021, 30). Just as the rocks in Bundaberg have decayed, transformed, and given life to new animate and inanimate features in the landscape, so too has their by-product: the rich red Kandasols. Conducive to expansive horticultural and plantation cropping, the red soils enabled settler-colonial dominance and opportunity throughout the region’s recent centuries. This richly charged soil, which amongst local knowledge and admiration, might be considered as a kind of “subterranean aesthetics” (Hawkins 2020), which has branded the region in the national imaginary as fertile growing plains (Figure 3). The landscape has been shaped by violent colonial slavery and invasion, transforming much of this unique topography into monoculture farming. European settlers quickly cleared these sub-tropical landscapes into prosperous growing regions and towns, and during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, enslaved South Sea Islanders were brought in to assist in farming and construction of these expansive settlement. “Blackbirding,” as it is still referred to as today, was the foundation for many multi-generational and national-scale farming endeavours in contemporary Queensland. In addition to people forcibly removed from their home countries in the Pacific, were displaced Indigenous peoples from across the continent, in which wage theft and slavery of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people occurred across many farming communities of Queensland (see Kidd 2010; Petrou and Connell 2022). Even the main street of the town, “Barolin Street,” translates to “big rock” in the language of the Bunda peoples¹, one of the traditional Indigenous nations who are custodians of these lands and waters.

FIGURE 3 A patchwork view of the red fields around Bundaberg.

The deeply weathered rocks have produced soils of varying qualities and types in a “complex geomorphic history” (Wilson 1997, viii). The sandier regions, which have a more recent volcanic activity documented, are made up of acid sulfate soils of a mid-grey-black tone, and are gritty in texture, which has largely been used for cane grass plantations (Wilson 1997). The settler-colonial intention for large-scale sugar cane production quickly achieved this goal, ploughing and cultivating the landscape with the slavery of South Sea Islanders and unpaid Indigenous peoples to produce a major cane region. The historic sugar mill in the small village of Isis, around 40 km outside of Bundaberg, still operates today, alongside a large mill in Bundaberg, which feeds the now multinational company Bundaberg Sugar, and two major international breweries (Bundaberg Rum and Bundaberg Brewed Drinks), exporting sugary products to the world (Figure 4). The region produces around a quarter of the nation’s fresh fruit and vegetables at peak harvest time, and although figures vary, Bundaberg region is arguably one of the biggest employers of horticulture in the nation. What might look like a sleepy farming landscape is, in fact, a vital part of the nation’s food supply chain.

FIGURE 4 An irrigation pipe in a sweet potato field; fragments of cane alongside a railway line.

The mighty Burnett River, known as Burral Burral in Tarebelang, slips in and around the busy road and railway lines that service the cane and horticulture harvests. Legacies of slavery are still scattered through the region, enshrined in rocky remnants of stone walls built by the South Sea Islanders, commonly referred to as the “Kanaka walls” (Figure 5). Some sections of the walls have been dismantled, but one small stretch within a national park is heritage listed, and many other walls are still present on farmlands and roadsides today. The term “Kanakas” was used for over a century, but now is broadly understood as discriminatory (the origins are in a Hawaiian word for “man,” see Flanagan et al., n.d.). But this label, “Kanaka,” still echoes in this regions today, and is, as I have heard several times in conversation with locals, sometimes used to describe the contemporary cohort of workers from the Pacific.

FIGURE 5 A section of the heritage listed stone wall.

To attend to the geologic as entangled in everyday life is to recognise “the dynamic properties and capacities of matter and the active role of nonhuman agencies” (Cullen 2020, 862). Inspired by Beth Cullen’s follow-the-thing exploration of how a brick comes to shape social migrations and livelihoods, merging weather systems and geological forces (2020), my exploration follows a similar course of geologic scales and more-than-human interests. These cropping and plantation fields become “surfaces” of weathering, as Tim Ingold might describe, that are “produced in this commingling of forces and movements, constitutively from the ‘inside out’ and erosively from the ‘outside in’” (2017, 104). From the inside out, geologic and meteorologic forces at work; and much more recently, from the outside in, terraforming human projects of agriculture and settler-colonialism have gripped these lands.

3. CREATIVE CONVERSATIONS

I am interested in, to borrow Cullen’s words, “moving beyond human-centric capital-driven commodity chains to consider the agency and mobility of the environments” (Cullen 2020, 865) from which certain types of produce, attitudes, migrations, and histories emerge. How do such rocky climates² produce the contemporary place, which we now know as Bundaberg? A town notorious for its dark colonial histories, its vital place in the nation’s food security and global agribusiness, and its hosting of thousands of seasonal migrant workers? My intention is to be attentive to such questions through the more-than-human ways that food, labour, mobility, and the geologic forces of weather come together.

In this visual essay I have used a mixture of practice-led arts methods, along with extensive ethnographic fieldwork. It is purposely written as a visual essay, as a form that balances the visual accounts (the photographs) alongside the text and personal tone of the essay, and allows for the emergent and creative practices of my fieldwork to find their place in the page. In this way, being a “visual essay” format it does not necessarily adhere to the standard formula of a standard academic paper, and I purposefully blur in and out of journal reflections, first-hand accounts, interview data, and, above all, use the photographic visuals as the guiding “voice” of this essay. It is a form of “creative practice ethnography” (Hjorth et al. 2019), which brings techniques and transmissions from both ethnography and creative practice to the fore. The photographs are both documentary in their ethnographic sense, but also performative, as in the examples taken from the in-situ experimental practices of jam making. I draw inspiration from other visual essays that blend ethnographic materials with the visual (e.g. Lisle and Johnson 2019; Squire 2016; Zhang 2018), in a way to prioritise the in-situ intensities and materiality of the place and context.

Over the past year and a half, I have spent many months in the Bundaberg area, conducting ethnographic observations (in-situ observation, journaling, and photographic documentation) as well as qualitative interviews to explore the day-to-day experiences of people involved in seasonal horticulture (Barry 2023). This ethnographic work focuses on people who are on specific temporary visas which are geared towards horticultural work through either incentivised or mandated visa requirements.³ They are either from the Pacific Islands and Timor-Leste, or are on the Working Holiday Maker visa and considered as “backpackers.” Migrants do the bulk of horticulture work across the continent (Dufty et al. 2019), and the state of Queensland, where Bundaberg is situated, hosts the majority of migrant workers employed in farming. This paper is part of a three-year study of regional farm workers in Queensland, and to date has captured 75 interviews with seasonal farm workers (who are on temporary visas), and an additional 50 interviews with local businesses and community groups that support, host, and employ these workers. Interviews range from 15 minutes to over 2 hours and were conducted on-site either at the place of accommodation or employment. The interviews delved into topics around migration trajectories and desires, their living conditions (most seasonal migrants live in communal worker hostel accommodation, see Barry 2023), their attention to more-than-human encounters with the environment, landscape, and the weather a conditions they endure in farming labour (Barry 2023). All interviews were conducted by me: a white, Australian-born female, in my late-30s, and although I now live in the city, I grew up around rural farming communities, living in a caravan and moving as my parents did low-paid seasonal work when I was a child. In this visual essay, interview excerpts related to food consumption and the take-home produce are highlighted.

Exploitation is widespread in agriculture across the world (Holmes 2013), and Australia is no exception (e.g. Berg and Farbenblum 2017; Commonwealth of Australia 2016; Barry 2023). Although the country has fairly well-regulated conditions of employment and involvement of unions, people on temporary visas do not have the same rights and support services as citizens (Mares 2016), and seasonal workers are often bound by stringent visa conditions that dictate their freedom of mobility or choice in employment, housing, and more (Barry 2023; Wallace 2023). Exploitation often manifests in more subtle, material ways, rather than monetary outcomes, due to the insidious manoeuvring of visa conditions and provisions on offer to migrant workers. In the next section, I will highlight how the fruits of their labour (pun intended) are often used as an incentive, or supplement, to employment conditions and pay. Further, these two visas are part of a longer legacy of slavery and wage theft of migrants (Petrou and Connell 2022; Quanchi and Moore 2002), of which many farming regions—including Bundaberg—were founded by violent settlers that established contemporary horticultural conventions.

In addition, as a geographer and artist, I use a practice-led arts method (Barrett and Bolt 2007; Hawkins 2015) in my fieldwork, allowing for time to undertake creative and experimental activities while I get my bearings in each place of research. This project has been no different, and as I describe in the following section, utilising the materials on hand and in-situ is where the “Deep weathering jam” practice has emerged from. These jam making activities are part of a long lineage of artists engaging with communities by inviting interaction with the seasonal, in-situ, landscapes and produce that are enmeshed in place (see Haedicke 2021). Of note is the recent work of Clare Qualmann in her ongoing project East End Jam (Qualmann and Vogel 2023), in which communities foraged and picked fruits and vegetables for collective jam making workshops. Making jam and preserves is something easy to do with excess produce, something I learned from my mum, and from appreciating this practice that’s familiar to many living in harvest regions. I’m also inspired by Alison Knowles’s 1962 fluxus event score titled: Proposition #1 (Make a Salad), in which the instructions are to assemble ingredients and make a bowl of salad in front of an audience. This is a performance of doing, and preparing food, creating a multisensory relationship (e.g. Longhurst, Ho and Johnston 2008) with food, materials, and spectators, is also of relevance to my intention of documenting the jam making sessions (see also Springgay’s commentary on this performance, 2022, 82). While these might be “actions [that] are ordinary in their everyday environments,” as Stephanie Springgay describes (2022, 109), when practiced in the field and outside of the kitchen context, jam making highlights the obscurity of the “third-class” produce—which may have well been discarded entirely—and invites consideration of how these materials are produced in relation to the places seasonal workers inhabit.

4. FRUITS OF THEIR LABOUR

Due to the seasonal influx of migrant workers, the town of Bundaberg is equipped with a series of labour and accommodation services for farm workers, which facilitate employment and house them. Seasonal workers are usually able to bring home excess produce to eat, and this often forms a large portion of a worker’s meal basis. Referred to by industry as “composite” or “third-grade,” these fruits or vegetables do not meet consumer expectations for the ideal visual appearance, size, or may have blemishes not consistent with major supermarket supply demands (Figure 6).

FIGURE 6 Sweet potatoes being graded; boxes of take-home produce in a hostel kitchen.

In most worker accommodation, the communal kitchen areas will be filled with third-grade take-home items: boxes of lumpy potatoes, too-small pineapples, bananas turning black, suggestive and elongated zucchinis; basically anything that is not quite the right shape, size, or freshness is up for the taking. It is common to see workers in hostels eating nothing but the specific crop that they are picking and packing in their employment, alongside giant bowls of rice or pasta. In recent years, the promise of all-you-can-eat fresh fruit and veggies has been used as political spin by industry groups and governments, who suggested that seasonal work might be more attractive if “free” produce (otherwise known as “non-monetary compensation,” see Karp 2022) be given as part-payment for their labour.

Many interviews I’ve done with accommodation providers who house migrant workers acknowledge that the “fruits of their labour” often come home with them to the hostel (Figure 7), which in turn, can cause sanitary issues. One hostel operator explained that they have boxes of “tomatoes rotting, sitting there for days. I say to them, ‘if you don’t plan on cookin’ them tonight, then don’t bring ’em home’” (Interview, 2022). Another hostel manager told me that they would often “take bags of veggies and fruit to the local community kitchen,” as the workers would “bring way too much home, it gets flies, maggots, roaches, we can’t have all that, its not safe” (Interview, 2023). That hostel manager continues: “Especially in summer, the quality of fruit they’re bringing home, it won’t last, even in the fridge, but often they eat it anyway,” she says to me, shrugging in dismay. On weekends and days off, big communal cook-ups of excess produce often happen, to be dished out to fellow hostel residents, and packed up in containers to store in the industrial-sized hostel fridges for future meals. “Usually its chips—you’d think they’d be more creative with potatoes, but all they seem to make is chips or mash,” another hostel owner exclaimed.

FIGURE 7 Leftover produce scattered around inside worker hostels.

I have conducted countless interviews with workers in their accommodation while they are preparing meals, using the take-home produce. In one instance, I sat for over an hour, captivated as we chatted, watching a young woman from Timor-Leste was carefully picking flowers off a banana plant. Struggling to chop the hard, starchy flesh of purple sweet potatoes, I interviewed three young men from Ireland, as they prepared “sweet potato curry” to go with their leftover rice from the night before. Dicing up and carefully cleaving out mouldy patches from oversized, misshapen tomatoes, a German backpacker told me about how she’d wished she’d learnt more cooking from her mum, as she prepared the fruit for a pasta sauce that would “see her through the week of lunches and dinners.” “Meal prep,” a British backpacker told me, “is all about what comes home with us from the pack shed. When we did the berry farms down south in winter, oh, it was lots of smoothies, fruit salads, that was my favourite job on berries.”

To be clear, it is not necessarily a situation of underpayment or lack of money for groceries that forces workers to eat nothing but take-home produce. Many workers have explained to me, it is more about the abundance of free produce on offer, or “not wanting to see all that waste,” as one woman from Timor-Leste told me. These workers are on an award hourly wage, which, when living in a hostel, their wages usually comfortably cover all expenses for food, transport, and accommodation, plus some left for saving, remittance, and discretionary spending.

5. MAKING JAM

Attitudes towards fresh produce shift and evolve, as workers see the ins and outs of what constitutes desirable produce, and what meals they can make do with based on these extra “bonuses” of their farming jobs. During fieldwork, I am often offered bags and boxes of produce too—by well-meaning workers, but also by farmers who are eager to show how fresh and rich their crops are. Several times now I’ve ended up with kilos of citrus, a carton of sweet potatoes, and countless more along the way, because to politely decline the offer of food or a meal is of course taken with offense. To cope with this excess, which begins to fill my duffel bag that sits in the back of the hire car, in the small motel rooms, or checked in as luggage on the long-distance train services, I began to consider what could I use it for, creatively, but also with my meagre cooking skills. I would take it home with me, kilos of fruit, and cook it up in my home kitchen. The obvious solution was preserves. I started out bringing a jar back to the farms on the next fieldwork trip: homemade jam from their hand-grown produce, as a token of thanks. But as the project wore on, this “exchange” felt like it had potential to take on a different role in the project, if I made the jam in-situ. In the following three vignettes, I recount the process of making “deep weathered jam” from fieldwork notes, audio recordings, and photographic documentation.

5.1. Moore Park Beach Jam (Sweet Potatoes)

27 °C, partly cloudy, relatively still. March 2023.

Sweet potatoes are in abundance. Every hostel I’ve visited had boxes overflowing in kitchens. The day before I’d visited a sweet potato farm, a small family affair, and interviewed some backpackers working there. These were purple ones—starchy, big, hard—as one of the backpackers handed over a couple for me to take home, she warned they were: “like cooking rocks, you have to boil them forever” (Figure 8).

FIGURE 8 Sweet potatoes from a nearby farm (left); “Nearby” if you’re zoomed right in on Google maps (right).

Locating the nearest rest area to that farm, it turns out to be almost beachfront. I park the hire car next to a campervan, and set up on the council-issue aluminium picnic table. Setting up the camera on a tripod, it sinks into the gritty sandy dirt below the table. I get out my tiny pocket knife, I try to attack this rock of a sweet potato. Although the Swiss-made blade is notoriously sharp, I struggle to cut it. It takes me nearly 20 minutes to carefully cut up only half of the sweet potato (Figure 9). I’m not really sure what I’m doing, I’ve made pumpkin jam before. I put the small cubes into the saucepan, I add the juice of one orange and lemon, plus some zest, and a small handful of soil I’d taken from out the front of the farm the day before, carefully sealed in a zip-lock bag. I realise, to my horror as I sprinkle the soil in—that if I was any further north in Australia, removing this soil from a farm would be a biosecurity breach. Maybe it still is. I feel conflicted about this endeavour.

FIGURE 9 Cutting the rock of sweet potato. In the distance, behind the low shrubs, the wind carries the sound of waves tumbling onto the sand.

Lighting the stove, I realise there’s nowhere near enough liquid for this. As I stir, I have to add water several times. I put the lid on and let the potatoes simmer at one point. Stirring, this feels like a stone soup. The potato is rock hard.

Around 20 minutes later, the flesh starts to separate from the purple skin, and the mixture gets flecks of purple, and the liquid starts bursting small pinkish trails through it. As I stir I can feel the grit of the soil—its dark grey, course, and every stir of the spoon it scratches against the saucepan. A few people come and go to the beach access path or pull up to use the public toilets, looking at the camera set up, the cooking array, asking what I am making. It’s a tricky one to explain, “sweet potato jam” doesn’t seem to satisfy this question. After 50 minutes, the mixture finally turns gelatinous and it looks done—enough. Well, I’m done. I pour the chunky mixture into an old pasta jar I’d taken from a hostel recycling bin, and seal the lid (Figure 10).

FIGURE 10 Purple sweet potato jam.

5.2. Roadside Passionfruit Stall Jam (Wallam Reserve Rest Area)

Light showers, around 24 °C, although it was supposed to be 30. January 2023 (Figure 11).

FIGURE 11 Wallam Reserve Rest Area, alongside the road to Childers.

I picked up the bag of passionfruit from a roadside stall, just outside of town. Netted in a small bag, claiming to be 500 g worth, it was $2 for the bag. I had two lemons that I’d been gifted from a hostel kitchen a few days before hand. I didn’t use all of the passionfruits, I had 4 left over, I just wanted to make a small batch. It was windy and there were gusts, so the stove was difficult to keep simmering. In the distance I could hear the large semi-trailers rumble past. This rest area is a favourite of mine—its between the towns of Childers and Bundaberg, and is just off the main road, a secluded opening surrounded by tall trees. There’s toilets, several bins, and enough parking for a good dozen vehicles. A ute is parked nearby, the window cracked an inch, someone clearly taking a nap inside. Two separate caravans with grey nomad couples pull up, use the toilets, and leave again, waving to me as they go.

I sterilised the jars in water, and start cutting up the passionfruit, cleaving the pulp out into the saucepan. I weigh the fruit, adding the lemon juice (although I realised later I should have used both lemons), and match the 120grams of fruit and juice with caster sugar I bought at the local supermarket “Bundaberg” brand sugar, I try to imagine that this much sugar can possibly be grown locally, but looking through a small gap in the trees I can see the cane in the distance. I take a spoonful of sandy grey dirt, more like dust, from off the ground beside the carpark, and add to the mix (Figure 12).

FIGURE 12 Preparing the jam.

I had a killer headache, and the wind wasn’t helping, as I’m stirring, stirring, the mixture never seeming to come to any gelatinous consistency through the simmering. Something just wasn’t right with the mix, maybe the wind blowing the flame too much from the saucepan, it didn’t look hot enough. After almost 30 minutes, I give up, pouring the runny mixture into two small jars. Throughout this time, a butcherbird has been hovering nearby, at one point standing on the far edge of the aluminium picnic table, and daring to hop over and pinch a passionfruit shell and fly off. As soon as the jars are sealed up, I sit down, exhausted, and rest my head in my hands. I hear a tapping on the aluminium table, look up, and there is the butcherbird—right next to the jam jars, staring intently at the contents. It starts pecking at the seeds through the glass (Figure 13).

FIGURE 13 A curious local inspecting the product.

5.3. Last of the Season Citrus Season Jam (Gayndah)

Over a year ago I was in conversation with a local bloke who drives the shuttle buses, ferrying workers to and from their accommodation to their farms each day. He’d never done farm work himself, other than the transportation side of things. We talked about how the current season of lemons was concluding. After a long pause, staring at the narrow bitumen road that curved around in front of us as we drove back, he said:.

What about the last of the season fruits? Have you thought about them? Do people realise they are the last of a year’s worth of work, growing, sun, water? Do the workers think about this, as they pick the last few lemons from a tree, that this is the end of not only this harvest, but their job here as well? Do people stop to think about the last moments of a harvest? (Interview, bus driver November 2022)

These words struck me, as I frantically scribbled them down in my journal, and tried to think of something that could respond to this poetic insight he’d expressed to me, as the shuttle van steered around the windy rural road on our way back into town. Months later, I was out in the citrus region—the North Burnett—and quickly realised that the cheap prices of tough, fleshy fruits for sale along the roadsides were just that: the last of the citrus season. The driver’s words echoed back to me, and I later found my interview notes from the year previous. Deciding to make the most of this moment of connection, I embarked on Last of the citrus season jam (Gayndah), a performance piece that used tough dry limes from a roadside stall, and a popular tourist rest area just outside of the town (down the road from the “Big Orange” ⁴).

Sunny and hazy with smoke, bushfire warning, 36 °C, September 2023 (Figure 14).

FIGURE 14 Limes from a roadside stall (left); Zonhoven Rest Area (right).

This citrus jam (Figure 15) was an attempt to capture a moment of reflection as one season rolls onto the next. The day I made this jam, at the roadside rest area just outside of Gayndah, there were several bushfire alerts, it was a warm, dry wind, with gusts of dusty area being blown around from the rest area ground, and a hint of smoke haze in the air. It felt like the season had changed, with a bump into mid-30s temperatures and the onset of a late Spring. An El Niño had finally been declared the week before after months of speculation, and the last of the citrus harvest, in its dry, hardy state, felt fitting. The jam making itself went smoothly, I cut up the mandarin segments, added lime juice and pulp, and made a small batch of around 200 g fruit, matched with sugar, which cooked in less than half an hour. Whether I had wanted or not, dust blew in with some of the wind gusts, and small speckles run through the mixture.

FIGURE 15 “Last of the citrus season jam/Zonhoven Rest Area near Gayndah.”

6. GEOLOGIC LEAPS

It has become quite a kit that I carry with me on fieldwork trips now: hiking stove, saucepan, plastic container that doubles as chopping board and a sterilising wash tub, sterilising tablets, spatula, a lightweight hiking spoon, small zester, pocket knife, kitchen scales, recycled jars, tablecloth, and tea towel. Although many of these materials would not usually be implemented in jam making at home, out on the roadside the size and weight, and convenience of small, lightweight equipment becomes key. As I’ve explored elsewhere, the luggage and equipment one might bring on a hiking tip, or for travellers trying to achieve a light solution to cooking on-the-go, requires significant preparation and planning (Barry 2019). This speaks to mobilities of travel and migration, the necessities of some items and preferences over others, and the limited choices of what one carries with them when they are on the move. The mobility that is embedded by performing this jam making on the roadside, using (mostly) hiking materials, is a small gesture to the nomadic nature of the seasonal worker too. Many seasonal workers are backpackers who follow the harvest trail around the continent, often living in campgrounds and stopping overnight at roadsides; for the workers from the Pacific Islands, their housing in hostels and shared on-farm accommodation also means making do with (usually) outdoor (but sheltered, undercover) large communal kitchen facilities. It could be said that this plays into the imaginaries that glorify the “mobile neighbourhood” (Wilson and Obrador 2022) that forms when touring and dwelling in mobile, provisional, shared or communal accommodation facilities. Campgrounds, rest areas, and hostels can and do often provide lively, convivial spaces (Barry 2023). But these jam performances take this a step further. They’re not purposefully attempting to make country-fair-winning preserves, let alone edible substances. The deliberate sourcing of ingredients that are either take-home third-grade produce or sold in nearby roadside stalls, along with the soil, dirt, and dust that exists in-situ, makes these jams another type of relation with place.

I purposefully lean heavily on colonial country cooking traditions, in which the gendered labour of farming communities was to always use any scraps available, to prepare and preserve. Or, at the height of regional couture, offering up the fruits of one’s labour in the form of glistening sugary jars carefully sealed and decorated with gingham and twine. Such displays replicate the imagery of what Laura Rodriguez Castro and Barbara Pini term the “white middle-class settler farming woman” (2022), whose gestures through food epitomises the supposed “welcoming” rural community. But this creative play on jam making highlights the neglect that occurs in many of these regional and rural farming communities—inclusive of some, but excluding those who may only be there temporarily, people of colour, people with accents, people on temporary visas. For many of these farming communities—both in not-too-distant pasts and in the contemporary tales—the fruits of one’s labour is not produced by local hardworking “Aussies,” but rather by swathes of migrant workers toiling in the fields, which were built upon decades of slavery and exploitation.

It is not that I mean to trivialize the horticultural work, or to simplify the practices and skills that both local and foreign workers bring to their farming labour and lifestyles. Instead, these activities of making jam, as a creative practice during fieldwork, seeks to query the seasonal aspects of migration of thousands of people to this region. How does this forge different relations across landscape, labour, and experience? Here, I am reminded of Seth Holmes’ question on seasonal labour: “How might we respect this intimate passing of food between hands?” (2013, 65). Perhaps our attention shifts “through the collaborative process of picking, preparation, cooking, jarring and labelling” (Qualmann and Vogel 2023, 96), attending to the sensory and intimate aspects of making in relation to others (Longhurst, Ho and Johnston 2008). Exploring these connections across geologic time, human and nonhuman chains of migration, consumption, and production, the creative practice of making roadside jam becomes a way to consider the scales, textures, and materiality of this specific region.

Geologic imaginaries have great potential, and can work towards attuning to more-than-human modes of cohabitation, or drawing attention to the circuits of injustice and exclusion that are present below the surface. For instance, Michele Lobo and Amelia Hine ask us to consider the imaginative potential of “deep time travel,” an exercise in acknowledging geologic timescales that move us beyond the human. They write:.

Deep time travel is an exercise in thinking about time in geologic terms that dwarf human timescales and civilisations. The focus is on the movement, evolution, and sometimes decay of nonhumans across the vast temporal expanses of geologic periods, epochs, and ages. (Lobo and Hine 2023, 491).

However, this imaginative leap of geographical thinking does more than purely abstraction or captivation. Lobo and Hine highlight how too often, in the contemporary condition of geologic concerns (in their context, coal mining), “racialised and marginalised peoples are silenced in the narrative of development” (2023, 491). The extractive, profit-seeking terraforming of landscapes, may be evident in the voids, mounds, and construction we see around us in contemporary life. Yet, as Massey reminds us, it is also about “what one allows it to do to the imagination” (2006, 35), and how such “tectonic wanderings” might challenge assumptions about our all-too-human preoccupation with controlling the landscape. Massey talks about “immigrant rocks,” namely the glacial erratic boulders, which have “arrived ‘here’ from somewhere else” (2006, 35). While these (relatively) intact solid forms may be easy to conceive as going on a millennia-long journeys across regions, considering the decay of rocks, as they decompose into smaller forms, soils, particles, dust (e.g. Bremner 2021; Zee 2021), might take a further leap of the imagination.

While it is tempting to consider the mobility of rocks as terrestrial bound, earthly matter—regolith, including dirt, dust, soil, and entities that become mixed up with it—it is far from being fixed to the ground we walk on. The scales of manipulation that global agriculture requires of soil means that, far from being static or contained to one farm’s perimeter, soil is always in motion and formation. Agentic in its reach, as it covers workers’ clothes and skin, as it is inhaled, consumed, and transformed. In other instances, soil becomes “engrained in the geochemistry of the troposphere” (Zee 2021, 10) through its interactions with wind, weather, and pesticides, and pollutants. It is precisely this leap of imagination that is required: to reposition the individual human scale of a day’s farm work; to the global scale of agribusiness that these workers are employed within; to the hyperlocal socio-material liveliness of country jam making; to the planetary scales of thinking about the geologic processes that have led to this precise situation of fertile red soils and the contentious nature of seasonal labour.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (project number: DE220100394) funded by the Australian Government.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kaya Barry

KAYA BARRY is Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University, Brisbane-Meanjin, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]. Her current research interests include the experiences of mobilities and migration, in particularly how everyday, mundane, and weather conditions affect being on the move.

Notes

1 See ABC Education (June 20, 2019) for an overview of introductory Taribelang words: https://www.abc.net.au/education/this-place-learn-some-taribelang-words/13723788.

2 This performance series was encouraged and developed in part for the “Rocky Climates” live performances, hosted with support of the arts collective “Future Everything” and part of the Centre for Mobilities Research conference at Lancaster University in October 2023. Further details at: https://wp.lancs.ac.uk/rocky-climates/rocky-futures/.

3 There are two specific visas that the project investigates: the “Pacific Australia Labour Mobility” visa, commonly known as “PALM,” which caters to 9 Pacific Island nations and Timor-Leste, and allows for either a 9-month “seasonal” contract, or up to 4 years in full-time work, usually in agriculture in regional areas. The other visa is the “Working Holiday Maker” program, commonly known as the “backpacker visa,” which is available for up to 47 nations and jurisdictions, and has incentivised regional work, usually in farming, in order to gain a second or third-year visa.

4 For further reflection on regional Australia’s celebration of “big” agricultural monuments, see the detailed reflection and creative work by McCracken, 2022.