Young backpackers being lured to Australia for mining jobs

Ms Janne D'Huyvetter's TikTok account used to look like those of a lot of other travel influencers: full of dreamy sunsets and surf breaks, coffee-shop reviews and tips for backpacking abroad.

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To replenish her funds in 2023, the 30-year-old Belgian got a work visa in Australia and picked up a job cleaning dorms and kitchens in an isolated mining camp in one of the country's deserts. Her content took a surprising turn.

"Day in the life: FIFO Housekeeper," she wrote in one of her first posts about her fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) job, where workers are flown to remote sites, often for weeks at a time.

In an 18-second video from January 2024, Ms D'Huyvetter showed snippets of her day: putting on a bright yellow uniform with fluorescent banding, pushing a cleaning trolley and eating in the company commissary.

The video drew almost 950,000 views, far more than any of her previous creations, prompting her to post regularly about her life at the mine since.

She is now one of TikTok's leading FIFO influencers, offering advice to her 83,000 followers about how to follow in her footsteps.

Her account is part of what appears to be an expanding worker pipeline connecting social media to the metal and mineral mines of Western Australia. The hashtag #fifo has appeared in hundreds of TikTok videos since 2023, many of them posted by Europeans in their 20s and 30s.