Queensland

These are The Wonders of Down Under. This is the story of my trip to Australia.

In the last 5 months or so, I have been fortunate enough to find a job that has not only been consistent, but also allowed me to travel around Australia while still being relevant to my career. Sounds pretty good right?

When I first arrived, the job struggles were real. I was at the library all the time, applying to anything that sounded decent. My original plan was to get a job very similar to what I had at VLMK as an engineering designer, i.e. working in an office, creating construction plans via AutoCAD and other software. The fact is that I had underestimated the difficulty of getting such a position. Several people had mentioned that the decline of mining ore prices sent many of the mining engineers back to the cities in search of work, saturating the market with potential candidates. Additionally, hiring someone who is a foreigner on a temporary visa for a role in which you need to invest a lot of time and energy into training and teaching (such as an entry level engineering position) can be risky business to most employers.

Hiring a citizen or permanent resident makes much more sense, and thus companies in Australia are looking for Australians, preferably with experience in Australia. Several of the people I have worked with have told me stories of how difficult it can be to break into the engineering market as it is. One colleague told me of a friend who had permanent residency in Australia, and yet couldn’t get a position. When he approached a firm with the proposition of free labor in exchange for experience with their company, they responded that it would still be too difficult to train him. Pretty ridiculous.

Anyway, around the same time that I landed the interview for James Hardie in Sydney (see the Brisbane post), I was also fortunate enough to get an interview for a Melbourne based company called Macutex who had just scored a contract with the Queensland Department of Education and Training. The contract involves performing building audits for state schools (public schools) in Queensland. Our goal is to create a comprehensive report for all of the infrastructure at the schools, which includes identifying current defects, required maintenance, remaining useful life of the building elements, and overall building value for the next 8-10 years.

This position has been especially interesting for several reasons:

1. We are doing schools all over Queensland (the northeastern state in Australia), and the company covers the costs of flights, accommodation and food. At this point, I am pretty sure I have seen more of Queensland than most Queenslanders have!
2. The people I work with come from all different backgrounds. From civil engineers and architects to plumbers and carpenters, everyone has a different background, perspective, and knowledge base to share.
3. The work is pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

So what exactly am I doing?

My official title is Assistant Building Auditor, and my main role is drawing floor plans of the existing buildings. My sketches are later drawn up by someone else in CAD, so I do a rough sketch of the rooms and buildings in order to gain an understanding of the layout of the building. The end result of the rough sketch looks something like this:

Since we do a lot of schools in the Brisbane metropolitan area, I figured a reliable mode of transportation was due. Cars are cool and all, but I love motorcycles, and since parking at the hostel was a nightmare (I only moved out of the hostel three weeks ago) a motorcycle seemed like the best choice. I bought a 2008 ER6N, complete with saddlebags for when I decide to do a motorcycle trip across Australia (still in the planning process). The licensing process was super simple – for citizens of specific countries, your drivers license can transfer over without any additional testing or coursework! Since I already had a full motorcycle license in the US, I was given a full motorcycle license in Australia (which is actually much harder to get). Easy as mate!

Some of the places I have been able to visit include Cairns, Mackay, Longreach, Woorabinda, Blackall, Mundubberra, Gold Coast, Toowoomba, Rockhampton, Moranbah, and Emerald. In addition to that, I went on a fishing trip with a coworker to Lake Eucumbene in New South Wales. Most of the time we take commercial airlines, but we also were able to take a charter flight once and ride in a tiny 9 person aircraft with our own personal pilot. Enjoy some pics!

Brisbane

These are The Wonders of Down Under. This is the story of my trip to Australia.

When I originally arrived in Australia, I had planned on traveling for a bit, then finding a permanent job and permanent residence. After visiting Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Cairns, I figured Brisbane would be a good place to stay for a while. As I left the Cairns airport, I scrambled to find a decent hostel to stay at for the next night or two. It turned out that I was choosing the place I would live for over four months.

An original staved water pipe

After arriving in Brisbane, I visited some of the free exhibits around the city. The Gallery of Modern Art and the Queensland Art Gallery both turned out to be within walking distance of the hostel that I am staying at. The exhibits were all from artists in Australia, Asia, and the Pacific. The gallery included a large portion of aboriginal art, which provided a lot of insight into aboriginal life and culture. I was also able to visit the Museum of Brisbane, where they talked about the original settlements as a penal colony and some of the infrastructure used.




















I was looking to find a permanent job, but in the meantime I decided to take advantage of the "job club" at the hostel. Basically, it is just a way of connecting backpackers and employers in the local area. Most of the jobs only last for one day, and are paid under the table. They were mostly dirty work, but for temporary work they were great.

Backfilling and compacting behind the retaining wall

Here was one of the first jobs I did. I worked for a contractor who was putting in a retaining wall to level out a backyard. I had only came in on the tail end of the job, but we wheel-barrowed topsoil from the driveway to the new yard, and then ran a compactor over the soil. Definitely got a new appreciation for how difficult it is to get the correct soil compaction....

A couple more pics:

Furniture delivery service

Building a deck

Putting up sheet rock (called gyprock in Oz)

I was also able to visit the XXXX Gold brewery here in Brisy. Brewery tours are always fun, learning about their manufacturing technology is funner, but drinking their product at the end was funnest! This is one of their old school bottling machines.


Mt Coot Tha is one of the best lookout points in all of Brisbane. Luckily one of my friends had access to a car, and we made a trip up to watch the sunrise. Definitely an awesome view!

On the days where I was not able to get any work, I needed a hobby to fill the time. There is a local skatepark and basketball court about 10 minutes walk from the hostel. I decided to buy a board, and pick up some of my old tricks. There was also several people at the hostel that were interested in playing basketball, and we were able to get some solid games together. Really wish we had a net though...

Spaghetti structure competition results (and free sandwiches)

Sydney from the air

Eventually my search for work started to show some results. After a pretty intense online screening process involving video interviews and an online aptitude test, I was given the opportunity to interview for a job in Sydney. The company was cool enough to pay for the flight from Brisbane and a rental car in order to get me to the interview. Getting there was still a bit rough though, as it was my first time driving in Australia and the flight had been slightly delayed. The combination of driving on the left side, Sydney traffic, having no clue where I was going and being late/hungry was a bit frustrating, but I was still pretty psyched to be there. Once I arrived, I found out I was one of six people whom they invited, and we basically did a large group interview where we did several team activities and had some fun together as well as received some free sandwiches (thank god). This picture shows one of the activities where we split into two teams and tried to design/build a structure out of string, tape and spaghetti in order to support a marshmallow as high as possible within 15 minutes. Initially my team lost, but then the other team's structure fell over, handing the win to us. In the end I was not offered the position, but like, free sandwiches right? It was also a good morale booster when they mentioned that out of 380 applicants, we were the only six worthy of their delicious sandwiches.

Some pics with friends from the first half of the stay:

 

This concludes the first half of my stay in Brisbane so far - I plan on writing more at a later time. That's all folks!

Adelaide and Cairns

These are the Wonders of Down Under. This is the story of my trip to Australia.

So to start this week, I want to talk about a few new words that I have learned. First, “pokies” are in fact a name for slot machines. Apparently the term started from people referring to poker machines, but developed into an umbrella phrase for slots. I was really perplexed when I saw all these bars advertising pokies, and had no clue what they were.

Also, there is a beer glass size specific to Australia, called the “schooner” (pronounced ‘skoona’). When you ask for a schooner, you get a smaller size beer that is approximately 11oz, as opposed to ordering a pint. They seem to be pretty popular. 

Lastly, I was talking to a guy about beer, and I had asked if Australians like to fill/drink growlers. A growler, at least in Portland, is a 64oz jug that is filled with beer (usually a microbrew at a growler filling shop). When I asked an Australian guy whom I was on a tour with in Cairns if he liked to fill growlers, his face became a bit puzzled and he responded “What? When you talk about growlers here mate, you are referring to a woman’s lady bits. So yeah, I like to fill growlers”.

That one cracked me up.

Adelaide

So earlier this week I landed in Adelaide, South Australia. I did not necessarily have any plans for Adelaide, and so I mostly just enjoyed the beaches and checked out a few of the City sights. Adelaide is much smaller than Both Sydney or Melbourne, as Adelaide has a population closer to 1 million compared to approximately 5 and 4 million for Sydney and Melbourne respectively. According to the bus driver I talked to, Adelaide is to Sydney/Melbourne as Portland is to LA/San Francisco in regard to the relative home prices being approximately 20-30% less for a comparable home in Adelaide, as well as the influx of people moving to Adelaide for the relatively low cost of living.

I promise its raining super hard in this picture!

I first visited Port Noarlunga, slightly south of Adelaide. The little town and beach at Port Noarlunga was beautiful, however the weather was not. It started raining sideways once I got there, with approximately 30 mph wind gusts and big droplets. Twas a bummer.

I also visited Glenelg beach, which provided me with much better weather. Glenelg is much closer to Adelaide and has a tram dedicated to transporting beachgoers directly from Adelaide. It was much less packed than any beaches in Sydney, and faced west to create a really nice sunset.

Flow-controlled Weir

Downtown Adelaide has some interesting city planning, as they surrounded the entire downtown with a block-wide park, similar to the Park Blocks in Portland. It made a nice boundary and relaxation area in the urban environment. They had a really cool pedestrian bridge to cross the river (which was actually more of a reservoir due to a large flow-controlled weir downstream of the city).

After nearly missing my flight due to more concern about fixing my uncomfortable hostel bed than making sure my alarm was set correctly, I arrived safely in Cairns, Queensland. Cairns is a big tourist town in the northeast section of Australia, and is situated within the Daindee rainforest. Although the Great Barrier Reef includes over 3000 individual reef systems along the north east coast of Australia, a large majority of tours are based out of Cairns. I couldn’t visit Australia without seeing the Great Barrier Reef, so I decided to do some scuba diving and snorkeling. Scuba diving is taken pretty seriously, as we went about 20 feet below the surface and the body needs time to adjust to water pressure variations as you go down. It was intense to feel how big of a difference the water pressure had on the body as we went deeper. Nonetheless, the experience was incredible, as we were able to see some clown fish swimming in an anemone, and get up close and personal to the coral. The only downside was that as an introductory diver you need to hold onto the scuba instructor the majority of the time, and don’t get much of a chance to explore. However, later on I had the chance to go snorkeling, which I took full advantage of. I was able to see some turtles, reef sharks, and hundreds of different fish species. The reef really is as special as it looks on television, and surrounds you with sea life in a way that no where else on earth can.

The hostel in Cairns had some cool evening activities. One of the nights, a couple Aussies brought in a python, a young saltwater crocodile (3yrs) and a lizard, which they let people hold and pet. The snake was very mobile, and it was a bit scary when it got its tail wrapped around my neck. He probably just thought I was a tree and decided to spare my life. The crocodile was a little more calm, but was looking at me and probably thinking "this guy looks delicious... I'd pair him with a nice sauvignon blanc".

He is actually 3 years old!

One of the crocodile supervisors talked about crocodile farming. Crocs are raised for their skin, which is incredibly valuable. However, difficulties arise in trying to kill them. Crocodiles have become one of the most physically resilient creatures in the world. They existed in the age of dinosaurs, and survived through the mass extinction that followed. Years of fighting with each other has left them with extremely thick skin, high pain tolerances and even the ability to cut off circulation to a particular limb should it be necessary (eg there is a cut on the limb and it is bleeding out). The supervisor told us about a crocodile he had that had been shot in the head 6 times by an Australian whose son was in danger of getting killed. Instead of dying, the croc merely lost sight in one eye. Also, none of the crocs in captivity have yet died (thry have only been doing this since the 70s) so it is unknown exactly how old they can get. However, they seem to age and grow similar to humans, in that they can take over 20 years to reach an adult size.

 For my second day in Cairns, I went on a waterfall tour through the rainforest surrounding the city. The majority of the rainforest has already been wiped out through deforestation from government policies of cheap land for farmers moving to the region. However, the rainforest that remains is beautiful. It is thick with vegetation, thriving with wildlife, and rains 240 days a year in some areas, with average rainfalls between 5 and 8 meters per year (Portland receives about 1 meter of rain per year). The tour visited several waterfalls, a lake, a natural waterslide, and several hilltop viewpoints. Some of the cooler spots included the Cathedral Fig Tree, which is a massive parasitic strangler tree. What is a parasitic strangler tree you ask? Well let me explain:

1.  An animal eats a seed of the parasite tree.
2. Said animal takes a dump on the host tree.
3.  Parasite tree sprouts roots down to the bottom of the host tree.
4.  Parasite tree roots strangle the host tree of water and nutrients, which kills its.
5. The parasite tree uses the remaining host tree as support until it is stable enough to stand upon the developing root system.
6.  Host tree is dead and gone, parasite tree is big and strong.

Lake Eachem formed from the remnants of an old Volcano. Also, backflips are fun.

The rainforest was incredible to see, and almost rivaled the great barrier reef in its amazing sights and variety of wildlife. The photos can explain them way better than I can.

Although Australia has a reputation for the most dangerous animals in the world, in fact the animal that causes more deaths than all other animals combined is the horse, which can be attributed to approximately 30 deaths per year. This is followed closely by the car-eating cow, which is one of the most feared highway animals in all of Australia.

Cairns had a really cool esplanade along the coastline. It had some sand volleyball courts, several children play areas, some personal workout equipment, and one of the coolest skate parks I have ever seen. Props to Cairns for being a cool city.

I have now landed in Brisbane, and I am planning on taking the tourist thing down a notch – I am still on the lookout for a job, and should probably focus more on finding a place to live and work.

I hope everything is going well in the great northwest, and that everyone is enjoying winter!

Thanks for reading!