Excerpted from Nick's latest and soon to be published book, "Three Poms in a Campervan." --j.h.

I don't know if you've ever cut sugar cane for a living, if so you have my sympathy, if not you are extremely fortunate. Because it was without doubt the hardest, the most back breaking, most exhausting job on the itinerant agricultural workers seasonal trail down Eastern Australia.

The year began in Queensland on the sugar cane farms, starting up near Townsville and gradually making your way south. Taking a breather every now and then to pick avocados, pineapples and bananas. Down into New South Wales for potatoes, asparagus, cauliflower, oranges and cherries. Into Victoria for grapes, peaches and apricots finally ending up in Tasmania to pick hops and apples before returning to Queensland for the next season's cane harvest.

Others followed the wheat and grain harvests or joined a shearing team as a roustabout and general dog's body, although those jobs tended to be more long term, working as part of a team.

The true Itinerant worker was a loner, or a family of loners, who stuck mainly to picking fruit and vegetables, each job only lasting a matter of weeks, sometimes days, before moving on to the next farm.

While young, fanciful, hitch-hiking layabouts like Glen and myself only played at it, to many it was a way of life, their only means of income and they travelled thousands of miles each year, returning season after season to the same farm.

In many ways they were the Gypsies of Australia, often illiterate, working outside the law and general rules of society. Income tax, education for their children, pensions, health care, were not part of their daily lives.

They lived in picker's sheds and huts, or camped on the side of the road, carrying with them all their worldly possessions in beat up old utes and station wagons, tax and insurance not high on their list of priorities.

For the most part this trail of semi-illegal activity went on unchallenged. The Farmers, happy to have experienced pickers returning year after year, didn't ask questions. The local Police, fully aware of what was going on, didn't rock the boat unless the workers caused trouble in their town.

By the time Government Officials or the Tax Man got wind of them they'd have moved on to the next farm, or even State, not returning for a year.

In the fifties and early sixties there were also genuine Australian hobos still on the road, real 'Swagmen' straight out of Waltzing Matilda. Unshaven men with soiled hats and torn clothes, their rolled up swags strung over their shoulders, billy can swinging about as they plodded along. They rarely hitched these men, tending to travel and sleep off the road and in the bush. Not that many people ever gave them lifts, or if they did they certainly didn't do so again. Had a touch of the old Koala about them did Swagmen.

The work they sort out was also different, usually on small farms, working as odd job men, repairing fences, cutting firewood, sharpening tools. They were usually low key, introverted men, although it was not uncommon to come across them absolutely legless on the outskirts of a town where they'd been dumped by the Police.

For two years Glen and I followed this trail of wanderers around the Eastern States of Australia and although we were never really fully accepted, either by Swagmen or the genuine itinerant worker, we had some wonderful experiences and met some amazing people.

Strangely enough, given the dodgy nature of it all, it was the Police Station to which the itinerant worker first went when entering a town.

There, not only would he learn of any work going but as a bone-fide unemployed traveller he would receive a voucher for groceries. Only one voucher would be given each calendar month from any one town and only groceries could be obtained with it, no cigarettes or alcohol.

It wasn't of great value, enough for a few tins of beef stew, a packet of biscuits, loaf of bread and some sugar and tea, but the system did ensure two things. Firstly that nobody starved to death and secondly that the unemployed moved on if they couldn't find work in the town. So long as you kept travelling you could eat, stop and you either had to find work or go hungry. Quite clever really.

Where? I hear you ask, are the original Australian Gypsies in all this, the Aborigines. Sad to relate, they were rarely part of this vagabond train, preferring to work, when they worked at all, on the large stations away from the public eye.

Otherwise they tended to remain in their areas, often designated reserves just outside towns, where, too drunk to be employed by anybody, time passed them by in a fuzz of alcohol.

Not that the majority of farmers, or many other employers outside cattle stations, employed Aboriginals, even sober ones. Racial prejudice in Australia in those days was not just rife, it was virtually officially sanctioned.

The 'White Australian' policy was still in force and most people considered Aboriginals to not only be unruly, unemployable and unsociable but every other un you could think of as well. The only way to control them, many felt, was to keep them on their reserves and numb them with as much beer as they could drink.

Thus were Aboriginals, one of the original gypsy, nomadic, walkabout races on earth, confined to barracks, out of sight and out of mind and most Australians at the time, including me, didn't worry too much about it.

One of the first jobs Glen and I ever took was on a sugar cane plantation near the town we are now approaching, Ballina. I'm surprised we ever worked again after the experience.

Of all the seasonal work, shearing apart, cutting sugar cane was by far the most specialised, if only because it was so tough. It was also among the best-paid work, which is what attracted us, of course.

It is essential that cane gets to the refinery quickly after it's cut, left more than a day it will quickly dry out and become useless. Thus the pace, once harvest has begun, was relentless and if you couldn't keep up you were quickly shown the door.

Not just by the plantation's owner but by the other cutters, time and tonnage was what they were paid by and if you slowed them down, woe betide you. Being sent to Coventry took on a whole new meaning on a cane plantation.

Sugar plantations in those hand harvested days were made up of relatively small, two or three hundred yard, roughly square, individual fields, separated by tractor access roads which also acted as fire breaks.

On large plantations there could be up to fifty of these fields and a few days before each one was due to be harvested it was set alight, which meant a pall of thick, sweet smelling smoke hung over the area every day during harvest time.

The burn off was done principally to get rid of the mountains of dead leaves which accumulated over the two years it took the cane to grow to maturity and which made cutting impossible if they remained.

It was also done to flush out the snakes, nightmare inducing numbers of which, many of them highly poisonous, make their home in cane fields. The cane stalks themselves didn't burn, they did however become covered with the clinging, black soot which got everywhere. You only had to walk past a sugar field at harvest time to look like a coal miner.

Enormous cane toads were bought in from Asia last century to eat the snakes and other insects which attacked the cane. But, as ever with such things, they've ended up becoming almost as big a nuisance as the pests they were ineffectual at eradicating. Huge, revolting creatures they are, the size of rugby balls, slimy and incredibly heavy, treading on one, or cutting it in half with your slashing blade can be startling to put it mildly.

Normally you worked in teams of four or six, each team being allocated a field which only they cut down, stacked in bundles, weighed, and loaded onto tractors. They were paid as a team, per ton, with bonuses for speed, the head cutter getting the most, the rest being paid equal amounts, swapping jobs around as the day went on.

For two hours you could be cutting, the next stacking and weighing, the next making tea that was drunk from large enamel mugs in copious, black, sweet gallons. Each team had it's own drum of water on a fire beside it's field and one member of the team was constantly running back and forth tending it and distributing tea.

There was an art to cutting cane, a sort of figure of eight rhythm you got into. Stooping down to grasp the stalk at its base you'd slash through it with the razor sharp machete, preferably in one cut. Then, standing up, you'd swivel the stalk round and lop off the top, tossing the five-foot length of cane to the side where it was gathered by your stacker. Ideally it was all done in one continuous, smooth movement. Stoop, slash, stand, swivel, lop, drop, stoop, slash, stand, swivel, lop.......

Good cutters could cut a ton of cane in less than half a day. I don't think Glen and I cut a ton between us in three.

Normally only two or three members of the team were cutting at any one time, mainly because the stackers following couldn't keep up and everybody would eventually get in each other's way. You worked in staggered rows, each man going non stop all the way down his row, the second not beginning until the first was a few yards into his, the third giving the second a similar distance start. The quickest cutters went first so each didn't catch the other and at the end of the row they rested until the last man arrived before heading back up the field in a similar way. If you were the last cutter in a fast cutting team, as Glen and I were, it was relentless torture. The quicker men raced ahead, getting a much longer break and setting off back up the field as soon as you arrived, often not leaving us enough time even for a swig of tea.

It was indescribably hard work, within minutes we were covered head to foot in sticky black soot, blisters the size of golf balls appeared on the palms of our hands and by the end of each two hour cutting shift we felt like we'd been working for a week. As early as eight o'clock on the first morning both Glen and I, and worse, the rest of the team, knew we were hopelessly out of our depth

We started at six and finished at six, with only three, forty minute breaks in between, breaks during which we dared not let go of our knives for fear of not being able to grasp them again. At each break we were fed massive chunks of bread covered in fresh honey, bought out to the fields by the lady of the Plantation and her Daughters. By the last break of the day we could barely pick the bread up.

Sugar cane is not a big industry in New South Wales, sub-tropical central Queensland is it's real heartland but in Ballina it is still obviously a vibrant business.

So different is the town and road layout now that I can't find the actual plantation we worked on as we drive through it but it was somewhere around here.

The owner of the plantation was a huge mountain of an individual called Samuel Butt, a cross between the Ogre in Billy Goat Gruff and the Giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. He had a voice like Paul Robeson, the personality of Stalin and skin like a Rhinoceros.

Advised by the Police that he was looking for workers we arrived at Mr Butt's house, full of youthful brashness and cocky assurance to which he listened for all of two seconds before silencing us with a dull roar.

"Ever Cut cane afore!"

"Well, not exactly, but we've seen.... .."

"Right! Go down the shed. See Charlie. Team pay. Five quid first ton of the day, eight quid every ton after that, meals in" and he slammed the door in our face leaving us standing on the doorstep.

The shed in question was about a mile away across the plantation, two miles via the road. It was a long, unlined, rusty corrugated iron building on a dirt floor, with a dozen metal bunk beds scattered about and a small office come storeroom at one end.

Half way there a man in a tractor swept passed us with no intention of offering us a lift and covering us with dust. He stopped outside the shed, leaving the engine running impatiently and went inside to await our arrival.

This was Charlie, the foreman, a slightly smaller version of Mr Butt but equally laconic. "Grab yaselves a bunk, here's a machete each, choose a pair of boots from over there, be down field nine at five thirty in the mornin', dinna's at six thirty in the mess hut behind the house"

"Where's field nine?" we asked as he climbed back onto the tractor.

"Yer've got the rest of the day to find it, ain't ya!?" and he roared off.

Cutting sugar cane today is done entirely by machines that can cut a ton in a minute, then it was done entirely by men and when I say men I mean men.

Hard, tough, unbelievably strong men who could work virtually non stop for twelve hours, get rolling drunk and do the same the next day, day in, day out, for weeks on end without batting an eyelid.

During the day we were pushed remorselessly by these men, who howled with laughter when Glen came screaming and running from the field, a huge carpet snake entwined round his ankle.

At night we were ridiculed remorselessly by them, a derision which turned to real abuse from a few when they came stumbling back to the cutters shed from the Hotel bars we were too young to enter.

For two nights we barely slept, in fear not only of the men but of snakes. On the first night a man returned from the bar and calmly removed a large King Brown snake, lethally poisonous, which had made it's home in his dirty clothes under his bunk The blisters on our hands throbbed continuously, despite urinating on them several times a day, as recommended by all the other cutters. Not that we ever saw any of them doing it.

"Don't need to no more Son. Our hands is toughened up" and despite all the others grinning at us we still didn't get it.

Lumpy straw mattresses, pillows that smelt of someone else's sweat and a leaking shed full of drunken men, farting and snoring their heads off in unison with the croaking toads.

We lasted three days and never went near a cane farm again.