Callum Hutchinson’s thirty now, and he lives in Balaclava, in Melbourne’s inner eastern suburbs. But his accent tells another story: he grew up tough in Sheffield, England, until at seventeen he decided to leave home. ‘I didn’t want to be living there through a recession,’ he says. ‘So in 2009 I saved £1000 and travelled to London.’

Callum had a plan in mind. His mates had pointed out that he had a talent for cooking: he googled Ten best restaurants in London and up came a name – Tom Aikens, the youngest-ever Michelin two-star chef. When Callum rang him, he said ‘You can have a trial tomorrow.’

So Callum went off to London that day, a four-hour trip, and worked a shift in the Michelin-starred restaurant. ‘It was high intensity,’ he remembers. ‘Everything had to be perfect. At the end of the night, I said “I have to go now. I have to get home.” They said “Why? Where do you live?” I told them Sheffield. They said “You’re crazy. Go home, you’re hired.” ’

The chef soon put Callum up in another worker’s house, where he wound up sleeping on the floor for a couple of months until he found his feet.

London became Callum’s home for the next few years, and he worked for Gordon Ramsey, Michel Roux at Le Gavroche, and Adam Simmons in Danesfield. All of the restaurants were Michelin-starred, all of the bosses perfectionists. It took its toll, and eventually Callum told a close mate he was done with the kitchen life. The mate had an uncle living in Australia. ‘Let’s go there,’ he said. So they did.

Things were unclear when they landed in Sydney – there wasn’t much work at first, so they bought a 4x4 and travelled all over Australia for two years. ‘We had all these amazing experiences,’ Callum says. ‘We needed to do farm work to extend our visas, so we found a town in Queensland called Innisfail, where there were heaps of Poms doing banana work. I did “banana humping”, where the picker dumps bunches of bananas on your shoulders and you have to carry them to the tractor. Then one day the tractor driver says to me “Hey, you wanna drive the tractor?” I said I had no experience with tractors. He said, “Can you drive a manual car?” And I said yes, so he said, “Well, it’s the same.” Turns out it’s nothing like a car! I had to do the whole thing in first gear.’

Eventually Callum discovered he wasn’t quite done with kitchens. He started working for Circa in Melbourne, and over time became good friends with the head chef there. Circa led to two years at the Stokehouse in St Kilda, around 2018, and introductions to ‘Melbourne people who were big in the hospitality industry, like Frank van Handel – a very tight-knit community of people.’

By 2019, Callum had permanent residency and was at the top of his cooking career, but again he began to ask himself questions: was this really what he wanted? ‘Because I also had a passion for building things. Food, as a product, is so short-lived, but built things last forever.’

‘Now I’m in a piling crew as a dogman’

Before he knew it, the banana-humping chef was bricklaying with a small company: he did his dogging and rigging tickets and studied civil construction. ‘Now I’m in a piling crew as a dogman, working on Glen Huntly with the Enteco 9080 rig alongside Semesi and the two Jacko’s [Paul Jackson and Jackson Liversidge]. They’re a really open crew, really welcomed me in. They’re always there for you.’

Given the range of his life experiences, it’s no small thing for Callum to say ‘I can’t be any happier than I am now.’ He readily concedes he was a wandering soul, but he’s been in a relationship for five years now, and there’s talk of children, a house. ‘So I want to stay with the company,’ he says, ‘learn heaps more and be a rig operator. I want to know everything about piling. Before, it was do this for a while, do that. Now it’s hey! I want to stay here. The people are so nice. It’s the kind of dream job I never thought I’d fall into.’

Callum went home to Sheffield for his thirtieth birthday, and was surprised by his reaction to being there again. ‘I felt like I definitely wanted to live in Australia,’ he recalls. ‘It  was nice to see the family, but when you’ve been away for so long, and you know the life you can have in Australia – here is always gonna win.’

***

Working alongside Callum on the Glen Huntly level crossing removal, sometimes only metres away, is a man who’s banged many of the same pots.

Jordano ‘Jordi’ Merlo is half-Brazilian (his mum’s from Barra de Sao Francisco – ES, outside Rio), and half-Italian (his dad’s from Milan). He was born in Brazil, but grew up in Italy, and developed a passion for cooking from watching his nonna. ‘After Mass on Sundays, we’d all get together as a family – it was all very Catholic – and she’d cook for us. It was the most amazing thing – the feeling of seeing everyone enjoying the food, bringing the family together – the beauty I saw in the cooking.’

When he finished school, Jordi set out to learn as much as he could about the craft, doing four years at a cooking school that arranged six-month placements in different countries. ‘It wasn’t paid work,’ he says, ‘but they did pay the cost of getting you to Spain, Germany, England, places like that. So you got to learn about different food and different cultures. Being in Europe, everything’s so close together, and it’s a great way to gain experience.’

When he finished cooking school, around 2007, Europe seemed to be ‘in a bad state, coming apart. I couldn’t even find a job washing dishes in Italy. But I really liked working in the UK – the money was good, and it was so much fun. I decided that this was the place I wanted to be. There was this guy I really wanted to work for, named Tom Aikens. He took me on even though I didn’t speak a word of English because there was a shortage of chefs in the UK.’

Yes, that’s the same Tom Aikens. Jordi and Callum missed each other narrowly at the time – they’ve talked about it on site.

‘The Chilli Peppers saved me a few thousand in language classes!’

Jordi admits that, working for Aikens, language was an issue for him at first. ‘Tom’d say “go get a plate” and I’d come back with a chopping board.’ And the hours were insane: 7am to 3pm work, then off to language school, then back for another shift at the restaurant from 5pm to 11pm. ‘In the end, I just went to the park on my break and read the paper or listened to the Chilli Peppers and translated the lyrics. I saved a few thousand in language classes!’

But like Callum, Jordi enjoyed cooking for Aikens. ‘The environment in the kitchen was crazy busy,’ he says. ‘The business was getting bigger and bigger, and Tom and I became good friends. He was on the lookout for more staff, and I said “Tom, I want a shot at this – I reckon I’ve got it” and he promoted me to junior sous chef.’

Tom Aikens sold his name to a Turkish business called the Istanbul Doors restaurant group, further expanding the franchise. He trusted Jordi to open a new brasserie called Tom’s Kitchen Canary Wharf, as head chef. ‘I had 36 chefs working for me, four deli guys and a number of dish-pigs. We were doing 300 people for lunch, all these banks and offices. It was madness – it lasted three years. I loved it. The buzz of the kitchen, the pace, it makes you a good worker.’ There were plenty of workers in those kitchens who were older than Jordi (he was around 25), but it was him in charge: ‘I had to maintain confidence and authority with them.’

Inevitably, Jordi started thinking of doing his own thing. ‘I dreamed of having a food truck,’ he says. After a brief stint running pubs, he came up with a business he called ‘Deli’s Seasons,’ based around a red 1967 Citroen truck. ‘Fully retro: it was beautiful.’

Now Jordi was making £1000 profit a day, but working from 3am to 11pm. ‘Then one day some lowlife broke in and stole my £8000 generator. So I bought another one, and a week later I shut down after a quiet day, parked the van in the garage at my place and went upstairs and had a shower. When I got out, the van was gone, stolen. Thankfully I had a GPS tracker on it, and I found it parked, open, a few blocks away. They’d taken everything – fridges, the new generator, the lot. £36,000 worth.’

It was a mortal blow. ‘I couldn’t come back after that. I was going through a divorce at the same time. So I had to go get a job in a pub. The pub guys gave me a job and a room for free, but the job only really filled part-time hours, and I was bored. I rang the agency again: they said “we’ve got a job for a night, but you need to have a clean shave” (I had a beard at that stage). So I shaved, they sent me an address, which was a house behind Buckingham Palace. I rocked up, not thinking much of it, and there was all this security…’

The house was an entrance to a tunnel that led to the kitchens inside Buckingham Palace. Jordi gets goosebumps explaining the drama of that first night: ‘The security people went over me thoroughly before I was allowed in – went through my backpack, everything. Throughout the shift, I couldn’t believe what I was doing. After the food service, the head chef asked me about my history. I told him I’d worked for Tom Aikens for eight years and he asked me “You want a full-time job here? You’ve really got the skills.” ’

‘So I did a lot of royal parties at The Fishmongers, owned by Princess Anne (full name – The Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, incorporated in the 1200s). I met lots of the other royals, including the Queen, Prince Phillip, Harry, William, Kate, Pippa – they used to come into the kitchen all the time. Harry was fun – he was always up for a party, and he was always the one who thanked you for the food.’

Meanwhile, Jordi was still working his part-time pub gig, and he’d formed a new relationship, with an Australian girl. One thing led to another, and he found himself here.

‘Turns out it’s a one-of-a-kind lifestyle,’ he says. ‘I loved it straight away. But when I came to Australia, the money for working in kitchens was really bad. But I knew a guy who offered me jackhammer work – I did a week, and he said “you like the pay?” and I said “Mate, where do I sign?”

‘Now, I don’t think I could ever go back to kitchens. As a chef in Europe, it’s not much of a lifestyle – you’re always working, and when you aren’t, it’s raining anyway. I lost a lot of my youth that way. Then I came to Australia, and I saw the sun.’

‘I can’t begin to say how much this job has changed my life.’

Jordi started with Geotech the weekend after the Grand Final in 2019. ‘I love being on the tools, being with the lads, never the same from day to day. I can’t begin to say how much this job has changed my life.’

Like Callum, the work has inspired him to put some big plans in place. He’s building a house, and going on holiday back to Brazil in a few weeks to see his mum, who has some health issues. He wasn’t able to see her through the Covid years, but now he’s saved up the money and he can finally do it. After that, he’s off to the UK to see his ten-year-old daughter. ‘She’s in London – she’s full-on English. Her mum’s Albanian, so at first it was quite hard to speak with her in this blend of Portuguese/Italian/Albanian/English. Now she speaks all four fluently. She’s amazing.’

***

Listening to Callum and Jordi, it’s striking how transferable their cooking careers have been into construction. ‘I was in charge of whole restaurants,’ Callum says. ‘Costing, food, problem solving – all that has led me into this position now. I can communicate, address problems – in a kitchen there’s so many personalities, so much pressure. It comes down to treating people equally.’

It’s clear that both men like working. ‘In a kitchen, there’s no rest time,’ Callum says. ‘There’s always something you can do.’ He thinks people from kitchens, even from good positions like head chefs, move into construction and trades because as they get older, it’s a better lifestyle. ‘Kitchens are 24/7. In construction, you’ve got time for family, and time at home.’

About the author

Jock Serong grew up in the suburbs of Melbourne, and like a poorly-tied dinghy, he’s been drifting away ever since. As a student and young lawyer he volunteered with the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service on the Bringing Them Home inquiry, and did a stint in the Western Desert building a native title claim with the Martu people.

He drove a ‘73 HQ panel van around the country, spent some time sorting frozen prawns in Carnarvon and changed lightbulbs in Darwin Casino for seven bucks an hour. He fetched up on Victoria’s west coast in the mid-nineties, then left again and became a criminal barrister. He worked with asylum seekers back when detention centres were onshore.

And he never wrote a word of it.

As Senior Grump in a young family he moved back to the coast, and something about the kelp and the storms and the long nights kicked him into gear: writing for Surfing World and other publications, he began trying to tell stories that weren’t sports-writing so much as people and place writing. Environments, First Australians, mental health, forgotten histories, the tiny miracles of life on a reef. As surfing itself expanded beyond 20th century stereotypes, Jock's writing kept pushing into new corners of the experience.

Alongside Mick Sowry and Mark Willett, Jock edited and published Great Ocean Quarterly for two fraught and wonderful years, and has produced six novels: Quota (2014), The Rules of Backyard Cricket (2016), On the Java Ridge (2017) and the Bass Strait historical novels Preservation (2018), The Burning Island (2020) and The Settlement (2022).

He divides his time between Port Fairy in western Victoria and Flinders Island in Bass Strait’s Furneaux Island group. On 22 October 2021, Jock took out the $50,000 ARA Historical Novel Prize 2021 (Adult category) for The Burning Island, presented by the Historical Novel Society of Australasia. “The winning novel demonstrates the irresistible prose, unforgettable characters, meticulous research, and epic storytelling for which historical fiction is known. The ARA Historical Novel Prize is a true celebration of the genre,” said Elisabeth Storrs, Chair & Program Director.