LIVE BY THE SPADE . DIE BY THE SPADE
So I spent 3 months working on a banana farm in a small town of Tully, North QLD, Australia. Famous for a giant gumboot and the most rainfall in Australia which the height of the boot represents and not a lot else. Living on a colorful caravan park (someone actually shat on the BBQ) in a decrepit box of a caravan with my beautiful girlfriend.
I worked as a 'Spader', essentially working in teams of 3 you go up and down endless rows of banana trees, acre after acre, using a spade to hack off the little banana trees called 'suckers' that grow off the mother tree. These pesky suckers suck up water away from the mother tree and this means that they wont produce as much fruit.
I wont lie its was fucking hard work and my hands after the first day looked like I had run them through a belt sander but it was incredibly fun and overall an amazing experience. I met amazing people, I saw amazing things and I drunk a lot of goon.
This inspired me to create this piece of artwork as a tribute to my time on the spade. Everything included in the illustration are things we came across daily on the paddock - snakes, lizards, toads, spiders, march flies, preying mantis', ibis, maggots .. basically it was small jungle out there. Then there are the ducks which were pets of my good friend Dean who lived in a tent for 3 months with his ducks that he raised from ducklings. He now is the proud owner of the original artwork.
This illustration took me some time to complete but it was a true labor of love for my time in Tully and all of my fellow Spaders.
Below are the initial roughs sketches :
And here are a few photos from the paddocks:
