The Plantation - Di Morrissey [130]
‘You can come in here any time and it is always immaculate,’ Martine whispered to Julia. ‘It’s the same in the factories, too.’
The older woman had a big smile for Shane and Peter, and handed them both a warm curry puff. They introduced Julie to her as their cousin from Australia. She took both of Julie’s hands, in what was clearly a very warm welcome.
As they walked outside Shane told Julie, ‘Mrs Seeto’s family has been here since our grandfather’s time. Her mother suffered terribly under the Japanese, and we’ve always looked after her. Now her family works here too. She still likes to help out in the bakery. That’s her granddaughter behind the counter.’
Once again the mention of the war years brought back Marjorie’s story to Julie. She remarked, ‘Bette lived in Penang, and now Marjorie does. I suppose their time there didn’t overlap, but it’s very curious.’
Martine tucked her arm through Julie’s. ‘When you get to Penang you will see the old and the new, and understand its appeal. Now you have family connections in lots of parts of Malaysia!’
Julie had one more day at Utopia. She wanted to take photos for her mother who had lived here as a very young child, but now had so few memories of it. Peter drove her around the plantation, stopping by one of the long avenues of palms where the dried fronds were neatly cut and stacked, the harvested bunches of fruit on the ground in a neat circle at the base of each palm tree. Peter walked into the row and stopped at one of the trees pointing at the loose red fruit and seeds scattered at the base of the tree.
‘When the fruit starts dropping around the tree, we know that it’s time to pick the bunches. Every division has to be checked every day. There’s not a season for oil palms, they produce year round.’
‘Just as well with six thousand people working here. You can’t have them waiting for the crop,’ said Julie.
‘There’s always work. Shane and I come out every day, we walk around, meet the managers and assistants, and that’s how we get to know our people. Our father always said the best fertiliser is the boss’s footprints!’
‘So how many trees are on Utopia?’
‘Around five million. And each is numbered in its division, so if one develops a problem, or the R and D people pick something up, we can check the exact palm straight away.’
‘What’s this box?’ asked Julie. ‘It looks like a letterbox.’
Peter laughed. ‘It’s actually a pheromone trap. Our biggest pest on the plantation is the rhinoceros beetle. Here, see, an ugly brute.’ He picked a beetle off the ground. It was the length of his palm and had vicious pincers. ‘This box gives off the smell of a female beetle, and so the males are attracted to it. When the box is full we know there are too many beetles around this particular area and we spray. If they’re not constantly controlled these beetles can kill a full-grown palm pretty quickly.’
As they got back into the car, Julie pointed to some young palms in a field covered in a carpet of green growth. ‘And over there?’
‘Those palms are three years old, but we don’t let them bear fruit right away because we want them to grow strong first. There’s no rush for crops because a strong palm will yield for up to fifty years. We plant this ground-cover around the trees to hold in moisture and to stop erosion. And the flowers look pretty.’
From the bottling plant where the rich red oil was being bottled and labelled in spotless conditions, they went into the nursery where thousands of various types of palm seeds were being hybridised. In the hothouse, Julie looked at the racks of thousands of sprouting seeds and couldn’t help but be impressed by the innovative breeding program, which would produce dwarf varieties of oil and coconut palms for easier harvesting, while still ensuring that they bore quality fruit.
‘The operation is so huge, it’s hard to take it all in. I’d imagined a plantation being just rows of trees and that was all,’ said Julie.
‘That was pretty