7 days till shoot!!!

Hello friends,

So we're looking at just ONE WEEK till we shoot. This time next week we'll be on set! The dream came true and now we just gotta make it special. More crew arrive everyday and quickly our little Melrose Place is filling. Loving it here.

Alex arrived and it feels great to have our leading man in town. A nice dinner, a few laughs and we're right on track. Today I'll take him to meet some rather extraordinary 3rd generation citrus farmers. They're keen to teach him a thing or too and Alex is keen to learn: The history of irrigation in the region, what gets farmed and when, costs and sale price, what's changed over the years, and how the drought has effected the price of water.

Might not sound riveting, but in order to develop character you gotta have a knowledge base. May never be used, but you're gonna feel a whole lot more comfortable in someone else's skin.

So today it's TRACTOR TIME. Oh yeah. Alex needs to look pro at driving a tractor that hauls the oranges as well as a Transformer-like tractor that has a fork lift on the end of it! The forklift picks up the orange bins (400 kg) from the fruit pickers, takes them to a trailer where the other tractor returns the fruit back to the sheds for packing. I'm feeling so country I'm gonna have to plant some seeds in my little concrete courtyard in Fitzroy! Yeeeehaaaa!

Did you know that wine grapes up here were once sold for almost $4,000 a ton. Now many producers are struggling to sell for $200 a ton, even though the cost to produce a ton is around $400. They're selling their grapes at a $200 a ton loss. Unbelievable and very sad. There's just such a glut in the region.

In happier news, we're doing our best to consume lots of local wine. Just doing our bit.

Ricky : )