In early 2020 in Canberra, I left my job in human resources. Ironically the constant onboarding and offboarding of employees made me realise no one ever stays in the same job forever.
By the time winter rolled around, it was Covid lockdowns. I had grown a scruffy beard and turned my bedroom in my mother’s house into a man cave, complete with empty beer cans, a TV blaring sport and a glowing gaming setup in the corner.
I had two issues: I needed money, and my mother wanted me out of the house. Fortunately my brother had recently launched a landscaping business, which had won a tender to mulch parks throughout Canberra, and he needed a workforce.
I offered my brother my landscaping CV, which included mowing Mum’s lawn and trimming the occasional hedge. I was hired, and joined a ragtag team which included an ex-sports physio, a former Canberra Raiders rugby player and a former plasterer. So while most of Canberra worked from home, we were sent out to empty parks.
Every morning at 5am, we would pile into a filthy Toyota HiLux, pick up a skid steer loader – essentially a forklift with a bucket – and drive to a park we’d been designated for the day.
We spent the days mulching along. A truck would dump a pile of mulch in the park, and my brother would drive the loader to move some mulch to the base of a tree, where we’d evenly spread it out with rakes. Rinse and repeat.
The thing was, each truckload of mulch was only enough for five trees, and the job would only take about an hour to complete – which meant we would sometimes just be twiddling our thumbs, waiting for the next truckload to arrive. During this time, onlookers would approach us wondering why five blokes in hi-vis were lying on the ground next to a rake.
The work was repetitive, but there were moments of drama. One time the loader stopped working in the middle of the road, and we scrambled to push it onto the footpath. It was heavy, and we could barely steer it, like pushing a car with no steering wheel. On the trailer, we once forgot to wind up the jockey wheel – which helps raise the trailer for attachment – and it became severely bent. We had to manually lift the trailer off the ground to attach it to the ute.
It became clear to me – and my brother – that I was not made for landscaping life; I would lose focus and distract other workers by talking too much. And unlike the others, I wasn’t cut out for manual labour. After months indoors, my body was failing me; I would often have lower back spasms and put my shoulders out.
My performance caused tension between my brother and me; we would regularly argue about my commitment to the job. He said I was terrible at mulching. He was right, but I also learnt it’s not easy to work for family.
We ultimately decided, to protect our sanity, I should leave my brief and illustrious career as a landscaper. And before tearing up my contract, my brother said to me: “Go to university, dickhead; you’re far too smart to rake mulch for a living.”
I was surprised, even frustrated, that he saw something in me that I couldn’t: a brain. He wasn’t the first person in my family to tell me to further my studies. My father and mother had also nagged me in the past but I’d shrugged it off as a “parent” thing to say.
After leaving landscaping, I did a short stint in communications, before moving to Melbourne to study journalism, where I found my true calling. But if I had never tried landscaping, I wouldn’t have learned the importance of having a job that challenges me mentally – rather than physically – every day, and where I am passionate about what I do.
No one will ever know why the parks needed mulch in the middle of winter. The work apparently led to an outbreak of weeds throughout many of the parks, which eventually had to be de-mulched. My brother’s business would stop trading a year later, the world would return to a new normal, and Canberra would forget the five brave souls who mulched their parks in the dead of winter.
