Tim: Pepper in Braidwood

Jeremy talks to a former colleague, news photographer Tim Wimborne, who gave up the media life to realise a long held dream of running his own pepper farm in Australia. Little did he know what was coming.

You can visit Tim's pepper farm business at https://www.mountain-pepper.com.

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Life in a Pandemic is produced by Jeremy Wagstaff and Sari Sudarsono for CleftStick.com. 

Transcript

Jeremy:   0:00
Hi. My name is Jeremy Wagstaff. You're listening to Living in a Pandemic. It's March 30th 2020. This is The first podcast of the series. As of today, there are 715,660 COVID-19 cases in the world. 4,093 of them in Australia. 33,529 people have died. We start the series with Tim, who lives in New South Wales, Australia. I knew Tim when we both worked at Reuters in Singapore about five years ago. He made me feel fat and slug when he arrived in the office in bicycle gear, barely breaking a sweat despite the humidity. Our friendship didn't extend much beyond the occasional chat and one day he told me he was leaving to grow pepper back in Australia. I've sort of kept up with his efforts via Facebook. And last time I looked, things seemed to be going well. Him being in New South Wales and not posting much on Facebook in recent months, should have been a warning.  

Jeremy:   1:04
Hi, Tim.

Tim:   1:06
Hello. How are you?

Jeremy:   1:07
I'm good. How are you?

Tim:   1:09
I'm... I'm faring quite well.

Jeremy:   1:12
Yeah, I'm looking at your profile picture is what looked like black peppers.

Tim:   1:18
That their native, native pepper. Yes, that's right. 

Jeremy:   1:20
Okay, excellent. And are they thriving?

Tim:   1:23
They're all burned at the moment.  

Jeremy:   1:25
Really?  

Tim:   1:26
Yes. We've got wiped out of the fire's and burnt the whole farms. We're in the process of reassessing Plan B and working out what we're going to do. It'll be a slightly modified version of... maybe considerably a modified version of Plan A.

Jeremy:   1:41
I'm really sorry to hear that. I thought that you might have been, been spared.

Tim:   1:47
No, it was a hell of a summer, actually. It's been... It's interesting because I was talking to my wife. A lot of her colleagues are, you know, we're a locked up at home with this COVID-19 and they're sort of going through a grieving process because everything's changing the world upside down. And she says, "I went through all these three month ago, I feel fine." It was, it was a really crazy summer. We had the worst drought on record, the worst fires on record, and as soon as the fires have finished. We had the heaviest rain in 40 years, which washed all the topsoil away and flooded the rivers. Now, this, this virus. So it's just rolling from one thing to the next, really? So we're in the group.

Jeremy:   2:28
Wow, that's really heavy. Because you had got it looking so nice. Everything was working well, right? Good crops. So the fires were what about two months ago? Was it?

Tim:   2:39
The fire started late November that affected us.  

Jeremy:   2:43
Okay.

Tim:   2:44
And then, we were first burn in early December. It would come back again and again and we were burned seven times in one month and then last burn was in the early, early January. It's all very strange.

Jeremy:   3:01
Yeah. No, that must be really difficult. So and then, the rains after that, does that, are you already kind of there's not much left to affect, or  did that affect you as well?

Tim:   3:10
It was such heavy rain because the forests had all burned. There was no leaf litter to hold the soil in place. So huge... hundreds of thousand and thousand tonnes of topsoil that's washed out of the forests, which is just bizarre. We had 600mm of rain in three days here. It's bizarre weather, bizarre season, and and now we have we have COVID 19 just to top things off. It's a bit of a different town. Most Australian town of this size wouldn't have the... this is the cultural, the facilities here. But we're on the main road between Canberra and the Coast, and a lot of Canberrans travel through here up until this year, anyway. That makes the town quite different. So it's interesting. I think a lot of people... and, and it's changed quite a bit because of the virus. People stay home. A lot of businesses are shut. There's other people that for other people it's business as usual. They've been no cases reported in our community yet, but it's only a matter of time, really.

Jeremy:   4:13
How long have people being kind of conscious of it and taking steps? Is this relatively recent, or has it been going on for a while?

Tim:   4:18
No, like three weeks ago? Three weeks ago people started to really take it seriously. China and Singapore, Japan were very early to act. But there wasn't much notice taken of it. And then, of course, when things fell apart in Italy, events here has picked up and they thought "we need to be paying attention to this."

Jeremy:   4:41
You said that for many people, life is normal. Does that mean people walking around without masks and not trying to maintain social distancing or sort of mix?

Tim:   4:52
It's a mix. I mean, you do see people here and there with masks. It's not like being in Singapore where every flu season, lots of people would wear masks on the public transport. In Australia, people don't. And it's a cultural change for them to shift that time, some people maybe are not comfortable with. So I mean in the town that I live in, it's a really interesting little town. It's got a great main street, lots of interesting places to eat and so on and all the cafes and so on. They're all open still. But you can't sit there, you can only have takeaway coffees and things like that. Normally, my wife and I would go out for a walk early in the morning, and we have a coffee at a cafe on our way back home and we don't do that, of course. So you get people going in there with takeaway coffees and all the chairs and tables are folded up in the back of the restaurant because they're not allowed to trade as a restaurant. And they then stand around outside drinking their coffee in paper cups. But you mean, but usually respecting healthy distance. People stand three or four metres apart and talk more loudly and have a chat. But they'll still go out there and socialise because this town is really built around that, for a lot of people, that sort of, main street interaction is people's daily information feed, really, and they want to know about what other people are doing with regard to the virus and what's happening with businesses  and what other people are doing. That's probably a good way for them to do it, but it is a little, a little strange. People out on the main street at eight in the morning with takeaway coffee cups standing on the sidewalk.

Jeremy:   6:31
How about your kids? I mean, you said that your daughter wasn't particularly excited about being pulled out of school. But this sort of onslaught of crisis in your life does it make them more resilient, do you find? Or they kind of able to shrug this sort of stuff off? Or do you sort of see an impact that beneath the surface?

Tim:   6:49
I think that's a question I could answer in a couple of years time if how resilient they are. It's been a very trying summer for them. They're young. They're eight and 12. My son just turned 12. He was 11 during the summer. And they have not really experienced anything like that in the past. So it was all new to them. And it was quite relentless. It wasn't like a big fire came through one week and the next week, we had to re-start repairing the fences. It went on for months and was really it was very drawn out and  long. And I don't know if we're going to see how resilient they are for a little while. They're definitely, you could see there were, there was evidence of trauma for them. That's a given. How they respond to that over longer run, we'll see how good parents we are.

Jeremy:   7:41
Right? I guess at this point it's worth saying that we met because we were colleagues at Reuters. But whereas I would sort of take a taxi for a five minute drive, you would always come in and having just get off your bike and you showed me pictures of you going on biking holidays with your family to Korea,  I think was one of them, right?

Tim:   8:00
Yes, that's correct. Yes.

Jeremy:   8:02
So there was already some sense of family unity and adventurous spirit in there that presumably will, lay at least some foundation for their mental toughness

Tim:   8:16
Going back through the summer and the trauma experience in the fires and so on and the things to do to sort of deal with the stresses on mental health and those concerns, which are really were very evident in the whole of the community. It was very evident to see the strain on people under. And some of those things that we do, I think our textbook treatments for that experience. So that makes, gives me confidence. You know, we eat well. We exercise regularly,  we are very social as a family, you know, we don't have TV. We all sit around the table and talk every evening. We do spend a lot of time with our children and try and limit their device time and that sort of thing. And also try and give them some outlets and skills that aren't, you know, just, you know, playing games online with their friends. We go and get them out to build things outside or would have you. And all of those things combined, you're right, probably can can help someone become more resilient. But there's a whole range of variables in there as well that we'll see what effects they have that we may or may not not have taken those things into account.

Jeremy:   9:25
Right. How about yourself? I mean, obviously, I love the plan, Plan A and Plan B to sort of spread the risk around and sort of make the most of the other skills and interests you have. That makes a lot of sense, but I can imagine mentally it took quite a toll because I remember, you know, you set this. You set this farm up. What was it about four years ago? Five years ago. Now you started it?

Tim:   9:50
We bought the farm. We've owned it for 20 odd years and it just sat there. And then when we left Singapore, move back to Australia at the end of '16, we started that business pretty much straight away. But it's interesting. So I spent many, many years working at Reuters. In what people will probably consider to be quite challenging and difficult stories and environments. Not only are you going to places, which in the news game are often either violent or tragic or what have you, but you have to deal with people who are experiencing those hardships, those tragedies and that they are your, the source of the story. So it's very quite taxing mentally, and I certainly found the summer that we just experienced here a lot more traumatic than any experience I had at Reuters. And, I guess, one of the reasons is that it's happening to me. I wasn't viewing the world through the lens of journalism. I was part of it, of myself. So I found it was certainly a lot more difficult to deal with mentally this summer than anything I had experience as a journalist.

Jeremy:   11:06
How did that manifest itself? Did you just find yourself overwhelmed by at some point?

Tim:   11:12
A few things. One was endlessly exhausted. You know, to go to bed and sleep a solid eight hours and wake up in the morning and just be completely exhausted. Meraiah, my wife and I both realised, what's happening. There was also plenty of poor quality sleep, and I lost weight, actually, over the course of the summer, and I don't have that much to lose, really. So I did lose some weight. But I got to a stage where, because I work as a professionally as a firefighter as well, and I found that I would really much, much rather go fight a fire in someone else's place than my own. And I feel a lot of days at my own farm, with neighbours and friends and and professional firefighters coming up there to work on those fires and trying to protect the property and got to the point where I would say to my wife, "you guys really I don't want to go out to the farm at the moment." I don't want to see it. I don't want to be there. I just don't want to experience it. And I would go for, you know, many days at a time without going out there, even though I could have been productive and done things out there to repair it or what have you. I spent a lot of times there not wanting to be anywhere near it because I had such a difficult and tiring time there. I was, I would rather turn my attention to something else.

Jeremy:   12:36
How did you, how do you overcome that?

Tim:   12:39
Well, I think I'm still dealing with it that at the moment. I think it takes quite a while. I mean, there were the very basic things that you learn, especially in the fire brigade. They're being quite proactive about mental health of firefighters in the last few years, which is, I think, really a great thing. Just having a basic checklist of making sure you eat well and you exercise and you see friends and you take some down time to not be working all the time or thinking about what you need to do and all those sort of regular things. Write down, not so much as a journal, but notes to keep your mind about things that are concerning you. I was writing down on on my computer a document of how, were my options were to deal with challenges facing me and what the pros and cons were of each option and all those sorts of things, which let help you to clear, clear your mind a bit and just work your way through it. And that's, you know, it's not the fastest process, but it really does make things a lot, a lot easier in the long run to get on top of those. Otherwise, I think there's a danger if you don't deal with those things, when they do appear that they just get worse. And then you might get to a stage where it really affects your health badly, and and it affects your family life and so on in a way that you really don't want to go to.

Jeremy:   14:02
Right. You do have people you can turn to, or are there facilities for that to try to lift some of that burden?

Tim:   14:09
It's through the fire brigade there's all sorts of resources available. It's really good, and I actually didn't use any of them. Partly because I think I have a great family life, which helps me and I talk to my wife about it a lot, and I used other online resources as well. I talked to friends, friends, you know who might be may or may not be facing similar challenges, but so many of us were affected by the season we've just had that it seems, in some ways is easier to connect with people if they're having similar experiences. I found my own path, which showed good results. I think our experience of being quite interesting, having a rolling series of crises, which has started October last year or even before, with the drought really getting bad. Like I mentioned before, that my wife has colleagues at the university in Sydney who are finding it quite stressful at the moment, being isolated, having to change the way they work, work online, lots of new things. Lots of experiences they weren't expecting to have happened and an increased workload. And they're suffering quite badly. And she was feeling she could really quite relate to them because she'd been through a different but similar set of anxieties earlier in the summer and could be quite sympathetic towards her colleagues who were going through all these different stages I guess people must go through facing challenging situations like this. For us, we both had a lot of stress during the summer, and it manifests itself particularly as anxiety and paining over what would otherwise be quite a small decision you might have to make about something and not wanting to make any decisions. And I think you mentioned, potentially isolating yourself from your social networks, who you would normally get every day support social support from. I think that the reason why the COVID-19 situation will compound that I mean, we went through this experience in the town where the community we live with the fires and lots of people were having those experiences. But we could still go. And if you wanted to go and see your friend and talk to your friend about it, you could. You can't do that as easily if you're isolated in your house. So I think that will compound people's access to resources, especially that informal resources and networks that people continued to rely on without even really realising it, perhaps, that that's essential part of their their mental health strategy? People don't don't think about it. If you don't find you suffering any any mental health ills at all, you probably don't consider that you're actually continually practising a solution to avoid future problems and using all your friends, you social networks and what have you. I think a lot of people will be challenged to find something to replace that in the current situation. And part of the problem would be, as an external viewer looking inside,  yes, there's the issue. But if it's you and you're looking up from the inside, you might not even recognise that as being an issue until things have taken a turn for the worst. It's a case of trying to be a self aware as you can and realising that social isolation is exactly that. The term gets thrown around so much at the moment. But it brings all sorts of challenges with it. Besides, just work and school.

Jeremy:   17:45
Yeah, as you say it's sort of informal setting. Most people, it's not the first thing that, it's not the explicit reason why they might hang out with somebody, have a drink with somebody, have a coffee with someone, somebody, but organically, the subject will come around and kind of healing process or at least cathartic process of sharing this will come about. But I suspect, especially among man, it's not the first thing they do. I  need to, need to talk about this. I need to get off my mind. Please, can we have a chat? It's sort of what you're doing and then rolling through a whole load of subjects before getting to the thing, which is probably weighing on them the most. It's hard to replicate that real world thing when you just go to a pub or whatever and have a beer with...

Tim:   18:29
Yes, yes, I think. I think completely. There's research that my wife has pointed out to me in the past, not because I'm a particularly heavy beer drinker or anything but in towns in Australia, where the population has shrunk due to urbanisation and, you know, large corporations take over farmland and so on, and communities probably shrunk. It was the moment when the pub closed that there was a spike in mental health issues among men in those communities. Not because beer supplies there, but because going and having a beer at the pub and seeing your mates there was what provided that essential mental health research, mental health resource. You know, sitting there over a beer, chatting to a bloke about the sheep price or something, whatever it is you're doing. Price of wool on the outset sounds pretty shallow and ordinary, but it's kind of essential part of that process for a lot of people. And now there's no pubs in Australia open at all, you know. And that's one outlet for a lot of people that they won't have access to. And working in for fire rescue as I do, last week two station officer came in to our fire station, we have a bit of a long chat about how we're going to deal with COVID-19 and how we're going to work on the ground together, coz we do actually work alongside them a lot. And one of the first things he pointed out was, expect to see a big, big spike in domestic violence. For that very reason. All this social isolation is putting stresses on people. The outlets they would normally have, all these informal resources people lean on, normally, a lot of them aren't available.

Jeremy:   20:11
Right? Yeah, that's worrying that this was a good sign that the emergency services recognise that this is likely to be one of the early sort of impact, early manifestations of issues behind this social isolation, behind the doors. All right, Tim. Well, best of luck. I hope everything goes OK and I'll catch up with you in a week or two.

Tim:   20:34
Lovely. Take care. Okay.

Jeremy:   20:40
That was Tim in Braidwood, Australia. We'll get back to him in a few days and see how he's coping.  

Jeremy:   20:46
You've been listening to Life in a Pandemic produced by myself, Jeremy Wagstaff, and Sari Sudarsono. If you're not already doing so, please subscribe so you can catch future episode and find old ones. And if you like it enough, make your feelings known on iTunes or whatever service you're listening to this on. If you'd like to comment or participate, please drop us a line at Pandemic@cleftstick.com My name is Jeremy Wagstaff. Goodbye for now. And stay well, wherever you are.