No Medicare, no family, no visa — these are the babies Australia doesn't count
Key takeaways
- Sure, Priscilla could hide her growing belly from her supervisors on the grape farm.
- Priscilla's employers clocked her pregnancy soon enough.
- This was Priscilla's fourth pregnancy, and her first in Australia.
Why this matters: an international story with cross-border implications worth tracking.
Link copied Share Share article For the Pacific Islander women who harvest the fruit and vegetables that stock Australia's supermarket shelves, motherhood here can mean injury, debt, secrecy and fear.
Sure, Priscilla could hide her growing belly from her supervisors on the grape farm. But there was no disguising the way exhaustion crept through her limbs as she stripped leaves off vine after vine in the heat. She'd rest often. But her rate of work declined, and, as a result, so did her income.
Priscilla's employers clocked her pregnancy soon enough. The two men employed several Pacific Islanders, including Priscilla, under the table, as none of them had the correct immigration documents to work legally in Australia. They told her to lay down in the shed whenever her body felt weak; it wasn't good for the growing baby to spend so long in the sun.