Choosing a career is no simple task. If you’re lucky, a job can align well with your values; but then there are the usual trade-offs between pay and work-life balance and considerations about how work shapes our lives and identities.
There are many ways to earn a crust beyond the humdrum of a nine-to-five office role – including jobs you might not know even existed. Here, five Australians share the unusual ways they have made a living.
Professional sewage diver
“If it’s liquid, we end up diving in it,” says Malcolm Venturoni, the managing director and joint partner of Professional Diving Services. “I can be one day in a sewage treatment plant, to a methane reactor, to working within a port under a ship, to in a reservoir on top of a lake.”
“We do work with the zoos and diving with penguins and seals … we might find ourselves somewhere in the Pacific doing some archaeology and marine science work.”
Some dives are not for the faint of heart. “When we’re working in contaminated environments, it’s generally black, it’s thick, it can be hot. Everything’s tactile, everything you’re doing is by feel,” Venturoni says. “We dive into chemical plants, oil facilities, waste food, reactors.”
Venturoni has been working as a professional diver for over 30 years. “My first contamination dive was in a methane reactor,” he recalls – a routine inspection in a vat of waste dairy product.
“It was hot … 38C. It was thick – the material was like cottage cheese. You couldn’t swim … all you could do was drag yourself around through it on piping and structures. But it was really enjoyable.”
“Often on those jobs, it’s better to be the diver than anyone else on site because you’re the one inside that contamination suit and protected from everything – you’re not standing around on the outside smelling it.”
The contamination suit includes a lock-on helmet and completely isolates a diver from the environment they’re being submerged in.
“Everything is supplied from the surface, so as a diver you’re connected to air and communications to the surface … you’re in voice communications with the diving supervisor on top.”
Frog sniffer and biologist
These days, most of the work Prof Craig Williams does involves tracking mozzies and mosquito-borne diseases. But as a young scientist, he was paid to sniff frogs.
In 2005, Williams and his colleagues won an Ignobel prize in biology “for painstakingly smelling and cataloguing the peculiar odours produced by 131 different species of frogs when the frogs were feeling stressed”.
The research, Williams explains, stemmed from a commercial interest in looking for new insect repellents. “There had been a few reports that frogs had interesting skin chemicals that would repel insects, including mosquitoes.”
The project took Williams far into rural areas. “We would go to people’s houses in the outback and say, ‘Hi, do you have any frogs?’” he says. “We found that if you just met the families and spoke to the kids, they knew.” Particularly in dry regions, the amphibians were often to be found in people’s toilet cisterns.
“The sniffing was literally the sniffing,” William says. “You would pick it up, and it often released this rapid sort of odour response [to being stressed]. You’d sniff it and then you’d pass it to a colleague.”
Though the process seemed unscientific, Williams says they characterised the odours by likening them to common smells – similar to how sommeliers note the aromas of wines.
Green tree frogs, Williams said, released a smell akin to roasting cashew nuts. “It was definitely cashews. And it was definitely roasting.” The odour released by brown tree frogs, meanwhile, resembled freshly cut grass.
“There was another one – this was probably the craziest: we would describe it as winter green, or menthol. It had a pungency, it smelled like deep menthol, but it also had other qualities that made your eyes water, it would cause nasal congestion.” The team believed it was a defensive smell that might deter predators such as cats or quolls.
While the scientists did find repellent chemicals released by certain frog species, unfortunately they were not particularly pleasant-smelling, and nor were they new to science. One of Williams’ co-authors on the paper, however, went on to work at a perfume company in Switzerland.
Prosthetic eye maker
“What I want is that people see what I’ve done, but they don’t notice it,” says Camille Loyer. She works as an ocularist – a maker of prosthetic eyes. For the last decade, she has been working with her father, Patrick, at Loyer Artificial Eyes in Melbourne.
“Because it takes a long time to teach somebody, it has to be apprenticeship-based,” she says of the occupation. “There are probably only about 15 of us in Australia.”
“Before someone sees us they might have had an accident or cancer or some sort of eye disease,” she explains, “and it can have been for many, many years before they eventually had their eye removed.”
The process of making a prosthesis begins six to eight weeks after a client has had surgery. “We take a mould of the eye socket, paint the colour to match the other eye, and then we make up a shape in plastic that’s the same shape as the mould – that’s our prototype.”
The eye is made from medical-grade acrylic, the same material as hard contact lenses. The prosthesis is mostly hand-painted in front of the client. “You can use photos but they’re not as accurate in terms of the colours and they don’t really give depth … sometimes, photographed irises can look a little bit flat,” Loyer says.
Loyer paints an iris onto a button-like disc that gets embedded into the larger prosthesis, which she also paints to replicate the hue of the sclera – the white of the eye – and patterning of veins. She needs southern light – constant and not too bright – to mix the correct colours.
“When I’m painting, it probably takes me an hour,” she says. ““There are different challenges with different eyes.
“Some people have had massive traumas before they come and see us, and so the eye socket might not be very easy to work with. Sometimes you have a colour that’s really interesting, that changes with the light and it’s pretty tricky to get it right. Then you get children who don’t want to sit still and they don’t want to look at you.”
“We’re able to hopefully make the eye look natural enough that they can get back to doing everything they were before the eye loss.”
The most rewarding part of her job, she says, is “when you see a smile or somebody might say, ‘My friend only just found out I had a prosthesis and I’ve known them for 20 years.’ It’s what we’re aiming for: that you see it but you don’t notice it.”
Hand model
“Apparently my hands are perfect for hand modelling,” says Elesha Webber. From time to time Webber, who has been modelling for 12 years, receives requests for hand photoshoots.
She herself is unsure what clients are looking for: “For a perfect tan … [or] is it the nails? Is it the length of the actual hands?”
The jobs are usually well remunerated. “If you’re getting a hand modelling gig, you’re quite lucky if you get a good paying job that pays the same as one where you’ve got to get full hair and makeup, and you’re on set for the whole day.”
“It’s nothing less than $100 per hour.”
Shoots usually involve being photographed up to the forearms – focusing on the backs rather than the palms of the hands – while holding products with “gentle, soft hands”.
Webber, who also works as a fitness trainer, says she is mindful of any calluses on her palms. “I make sure that my hands are moisturised, and there’s no scars or any sores or anything.” She also ensures her nails are manicured or painted, depending on the client’s request.
“But for the most part, it’s literally you turn up, you don’t need to do anything else,” she says. “You could rock up in your pyjamas and they’ll just be taking photos of your hands.”
Rodeo DJ
Matt Kelly’s father was a successful bull and saddle bronc rider. In the early 2000s, he teamed up with some friends to run his own rodeos – so as an 18-year-old, Kelly found himself being paid to DJ at rodeos across Queensland.
“I’m sure most people will think you can just chuck on a Garth Brooks CD and job done,” Kelly says. “Rodeo events mostly involve a cowboy or cowgirl trying to stay on various animals for eight seconds … [followed] by a couple of minutes or so before the next rider comes out.”
“My job, as I saw it, was to keep the intensity during those eight seconds as high as possible, and I did that by spending way too many hours thinking about what was the best music to make that happen.
“My favourite songs for this were Dumb Things by Paul Kelly, Thunderstruck by AC/DC and The Fever by Garth Brooks. All three start off strong from the first second and matched the intensity of the rider as they came out of the chute,” Kelly says. “The cowboys loved this approach.”
In between rides, he turned to atmospheric stadium music: Queen, Tina Turner, Starship, “and of course plenty of country music [artists] like Brooks & Dunn, more Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, The Chicks and Chris Ledoux”.
“This was also before streaming, which would have really changed my life,” Kelly says. “I had to buy all the music I needed, so out of the $100 a night I got paid I probably spent $150 on music.”
“When I first started doing this I was just relying on CDs, two separate CD players …[and] keeping a huge list of the appropriate songs to play at the appropriate time. Thankfully, iPods came out right after I started.”
“It was fun, and meant I had a role in the family business.”
