Look, we rural folk know that public servants and journalists haven’t the faintest clue what life is really like outside the latte belt.
But do they have to make it so obvious?
When former PM Julia Gillard went on a “fact-finding” tour to darkest Rooty Hill, she packed more luggage than an Edwardian heiress doing the Grand Tour. When the ABC sent its journos to “regional Australia” to get an idea of what the deplorables were actually thinking, they travelled a whole ten clicks to suburban Bankstown.
A new tourism campaign from the WA government is yet another illustration of just how hilariously misinformed urban elites really are about country living and working.
Soaked in golden afternoon sunlight, laughing merrily, two beautifully manicured young women stroll arm in arm through an orchard. Almost as an afterthought, one of them reaches over and plucks what appears to be a solitary cherry.
The scene is part of an advertising campaign from the Western Australian government aimed at luring idle youngsters from the city out to the country to help fill a chronic looming shortage of fruit pickers and harvesters.
It’s a depiction that has prompted derision from growers and which has even left the state’s agriculture minister Alannah MacTiernan feeling uncomfortable.
As writers will, I’ve done all sorts of jobs in order to sound interesting in a blurb. Living in the country as I do, those jobs have ranged from mucking chicken sheds to milking cows and, yes, picking fruit. In general, it wasn’t too hard a slog and I enjoy being outdoors. But the Good Life imagery of cheesecloth-wearing twenty-somethings swanning along the rows, giggling and chatting, is about as far from the reality as it gets.
Strawberry farmer Neil Handasyde is among those growers increasingly anxious about the sector’s ability to find enough workers, but he believes the advertisement’s ultra-stylised, unrealistic depiction of fruit-picking life is no good for anyone.
“They didn’t look like workers did they?” he said.
“I know there’s a disconnect with rural and city but that doesn’t help. It looks like they’re on a wine tour.”
[…]“It’s more like The Sound of Music than the reality of harvest time,” Donnybrook apple grower Steve Dilley said.
Just as hilarious was the imagery of a massive combine harvester billed as a “company car”.
“No farmer in their right mind is going to put a visiting metropolitan backpacker or new graduate trainee into a $750,000 header and send them out into the paddocks” Dr Thomas said.
The problem with this sort of campaign is not just that it’s hilariously at odds with the reality of rural work, but it’s as likely to attract exactly the sort of people farmers don’t need.
Called Work and Wander Out Yonder, the campaign advertisements pitch regional work as a holiday for city residents[…]
For the leader of the Nationals in WA, who has spent her political career trying to entice more people out to the country, the ad’s depictions are too much.
“I love the thought that people are thinking about coming and potentially working in regional WA, but you have to be realistic. What it‘s done is reduced a really serious industry issue down to ‘let’s all go and have a jolly holiday, and we’ll pick some fruit while we’re at it’,” she said.
“It’s all a bit twee.”
Rather than solve the critical worker shortage caused by border closures, the ads will more likely result in a single weekend of farmers being deluged by mobs of middle-class urbanites decked out in brand new Patagonia gear. They’ll stroll up and down the rows all day and pick maybe a basket of fruit – and won’t be seen for dust at the end of the first day.
But they’ll spend the rest of the year regaling their friends in the best cafes about their life on the land.
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