Jobs are booming but labour drought’s a bust

There are days when Amanda Stevens can’t find help for love or money to look after the twins and her customers at Gravel & Grace in Julia Creek.

Employees ‘could basically work their own hours’, says Amanda Stevens, mother of twins Lawson and Staaten White and proprietor of fashion store Gravel & Grace in Julia Creek. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

It’s supposed to take a village, but there are days when Amanda Stevens can’t find help for love or money to look after the twins and her customers at Gravel & Grace in Julia Creek.

A lot more days than there used to be.

This is what life in the Australian bush has come to: too many hours of work, too few days off, so many unfilled jobs that the locals roll their tired eyes at the un­employment rate in the city. ­Making do is what they do. Ms Stevens, 42, is expert at juggling the noisy demands of tearaway twin toddlers Staaten and Lawson, 22 months, with her successful clothing and homeware business.

Gravel & Grace has brought high-street glamour to dusty Burke St, Julia Creek, and don’t the locals appreciate it.

The nearest department store is in seaside Townsville, a seven-hour drive across the baking plains of northwest Queensland.

Or you could try Mt Isa, three hours in the opposite direction.

But what she could do with the business with extra staff. Ms Stevens has been looking to hire a permanent shop assistant for three years. The salary is competitive, the conditions ideal.

“If I could get someone, they could basically work their own hours. I would fit in with what they wanted,” she says, keeping a wary eye on the boys.

“But it is just so difficult to entice people to come out here, and everyone in town is absolutely full up with commitments. So you mix it up, get someone in for a few hours in the morning, someone else in the afternoon after school. It’s not ideal.”

She taps family and friends, but there’s a limit. Her mother, Anne Stevens, 74, who lives outside the township of 511, makes it in at least three times a week to give her daughter a spell from the twins. “I will be full-time soon,” she laughs.

Tammy Gordon, 26, who arrived for a 10-week relief stint to teach dance and stayed, puts in four mornings at Gravel & Grace. It’s all she can manage between dance classes in Julia Creek and Cloncurry, work as a teacher’s aide with the School of the Air and her own online clothing business.

With more work on offer than people to do it, the young woman is busy by necessity. “If someone asks ‘Can you do this?’, my answer is yes,” Ms Gordon says.

“You have to because everyone is struggling … what’s the use of having four hours a morning spare when you can be helping?”

The pandemic didn’t make things any easier. International backpackers who do everything from picking fruit to packing shelves and pouring beer were for a long time locked out, compounding the labour shortages.

Andrew Lawrenson, of the Mt Isa-based AWX recruitment service, has 170 vacancies on the books for cleaners, tradies and both entry-level and skilled mining industry personnel.

Mt Isa Mines operator Glencore is looking for 300 people.

“The market is the worst I have seen it in terms of being able to fill job vacancies,” Mr Lawrenson says. “You will find that across the board in regional Australia.”

At Bambino Espresso Cafe, proprietor Annika Roberts has had to shut on Sunday because she can’t staff the shift. She would add another five people to her 22-strong staff if she could find them in Mt Isa.

Ms Stevens says her store’s name was inspired by her late father, Bob, and “depicts what it takes to live out here … You have to have guts and grit, the gravel, to deal with the conditions and isolation, and the grace to make the most of the lifestyle, which is very special. I just wish we could find more people to enjoy it.”