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3 unusual facts about The Pea-Pickers


The Pea-Pickers

It is a first person, semi-autobiographical narrative about two sisters who travel in the 1920s to Gippsland, and other rural areas, to work as agricultural labourers.

Not quite a critical response, but in his autobiography Flaws in the Glass, Australian Nobel Laureate Patrick White, writing of his experience of the Second World War says "Otherwise I had dried up. There were stirrings of what I had it in me to write if there were ever a peace, but that didn't seem likely. So I read. I read The Bible, literally from cover to cover. I read The peapickers and was filled with a longing for Australia, a country I saw through a childhood glow".

The novel has a thin plot: two sisters, dressed as men and taking men's names, Steve and Blue, decide to work as agricultural labourers in Gippsland, the place their mother has told them about throughout their childhood and with which they feel they have a "spiritual link".


Bodiam railway station

It was surrounded by hop fields, mainly owned by Guinness, and helped to serve the industry in the area, bringing hop-pickers to and from the fields and transporting hops to the breweries.

Dave Wilborn

He played with Cecil and Lloyd Scott in 1922, then joined William McKinney's Synco Septet, which became the Cotton Pickers soon after.

Escogedoras de café

Escogedoras de café (Coffee Pickers) (1939) is a painting by the Ecuadorian social realist artist Alba Calderón.

Gerry Wood

The same month, in response to a severe shortage of fruit pickers in the Territory, Wood wandered around the Mindil Beach Markets, a popular tourist attraction, dressed as a mango tree.

In Dubious Battle

The central figure of the story is an activist for "the Party" (possibly the American Communist Party or the Industrial Workers of the World, although it is never specifically named in the novel) who is organizing a major strike by fruit pickers, seeking thus to attract followers to his cause.

International Fairtrade Certification Mark

The label, launched by Nico Roozen and Dutch missionary Frans van der Hoff, was then called Max Havelaar after a fictional Dutch character who opposed the exploitation of coffee pickers in Dutch colonies.

Jan-Olof Strandberg

He appeared in Erland Josephsons play Blomsterplockarna ("The Flower Pickers") at Dramaten in 2006-2007, and he is currently performing the part of Andrew in A.R. Gurneys play Kärleksbrev (Love Letters) at Dramaten, opposite Anita Björk (Lilla scenen; March–April 2009).

Miff Mole

In addition to the groups under his own name, Mole was prominently identified from 1925 to 1929 with various recording bands led by cornetist Red Nichols: The Red Heads, The Hottentots, The Charleston Chasers, The Six Hottentots, The Cotton Pickers, Red and Miff’s Stompers, and especially Red Nichols and His Five Pennies.

River Medway

The Hartlake disaster of 1853 saw the deaths of 30 hop-pickers when a wagon carrying them crashed through the side of a rotten wooden bridge in Golden Green near Hadlow, throwing its passengers into the flood swollen river.

Sydney Monorail

On 24 September 2012 just before 14:00, an Ausgrid failure in a local underground cable led to a complete shutdown of the system resulting in the need for cherry-pickers to come to rescue approximately 100 stranded passengers, a process which took several hours.

The Pick

The episode alludes to Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice in Jerry's monologue defending nose-pickers: "If we pick, do we not bleed?"

The Wilson Pickers

The Wilson Pickers is an country blues band formed in 2008 and comprises three Queenslanders, Ben Salter, Danny Widdicombe, Andrew Morris, and two Victorians, Sime Nugent and John Bedggood.


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