By Yvette Aubusson-Foley

Twenty-nine-year-old Carol Chen is a forklift driver at the Fletcher International Exports Dubbo wool store and is pictured here with the tool of her trade in an area at Fletchers few people get to see.

“I’ve been driving a forklift for over a year and got my licence in Victoria where I was working before moving to Dubbo. It’s a great skill to have, and I have my truck licence too, so I can drive the heavy rigid trucks,” Carol told Dubbo Photo News.

“Fletchers is helping me to get the HR licence and it means I can transport the wool and bales to the store, I’m very lucky to be able to learn those skills, and it’s a pretty nice job I have. I have two brothers in Taiwan, and one is also driving a HR truck, but I’ve never had this experience myself before now.”

Carol assists the testing of wool from both Fletchers Dubbo and West Australian plant in Albany using the forklift and trucks to receive wool that arrives on road trains from Western Australia, as well as packing and unpacking containers of wool bales.

“I’ve learned so much since coming here, even about selling the wool to China,” said.

Carol comes from Taipei City in the north of Taiwan and started at Fletchers in July last year, after travelling around the country for three years on a working holiday visa and has ended up staying in Dubbo for almost six months.

“Dubbo is very different to Taipei, which is a city more like Melbourne or Sydney, but it’s very ‘chill’ here in Dubbo, and after work you can do anything you want. In our country it’s stressful all the time, all the jobs have a lot of overtime, but here it’s beautiful and the people are just so lovely.

“Taiwan is about half the size of Tasmania, but we have almost the same population as Australia in that small space so it’s very crowded and when I came to Australia everywhere felt so huge and open and so fresh and everything for me was so new, and I didn’t have very good English, but I love to talk to people, so I learned very quickly,” she said.

“I find even though I’m not speaking English very well, Australian’s listen and try to understand me, which is so sweet, and here at Fletchers there’s a lot of people from a lot of countries too and we talk and get to know about each other’s cultures, it’s amazing.”

Back home, Carol worked in environmental protection after studying food science and spent time working in a food laboratory so driving a forklift is like nothing she’s ever done before.

“I never thought I’d be a forklift driver but it’s a very good job, it’s so different and the people here at Fletchers are really great, they really respect the people working here, they care about your feelings and if you’re not feeling good, they look out for you.

“I see Roger Fletcher all the time, because Roger always checks around the whole factory, he’s a very nice person, he’s “my best man”, and he always asks around to see if we have any problems and says to just let him know and he’ll get things sorted out.”