The sugar industry was not something I thought about a lot growing up, yet it was ever-present. Looking back, the sugar industry influenced everything from our economy to the landscape to many of the personal friendships people formed. By the 1970s the industry was transitioning to green harvesting, but cane fires were still commonplace. In decades past cane had been cut by hand and burning helped to rid the fields of snakes and rats which carried the dreaded Weil’s disease. Many of the cane cutters, who harvested the cane back then were migrants from Italy and the Baltic States.
The burning of sugar cane continued on many farms throughout my childhood. This was helpful for harvesters, particularly where fields had large rocks or other hazards that may otherwise have been hidden by the weeds and other vegetation known commonly as ‘trash’. In such situations burning lessened the wear and tear on the harvester machines that had replaced the old cane cutter.
Despite the absence of cane cutting by hand when I was growing up, old cane knives could still be found in the sheds of most people. I can well remember making a mess of the vegetation along our creek with grandad’s cane knife. It easily slipped through any green vegetation as slashing a trail I imagined myself a colonial explorer in darkest Africa.
During the cane fires small particles of ash around ten centimetres long and roughly a centimetre in width would float from the cane fields and blow whichever way the wind sent them, which was usually towards the nearest houses, to the distress of the women folk of the town who had to clean after the ash floated through their windows and settled on newly swept floors. One of my first childhood memories is of running in our yard, trying to catch as many pieces of ash as I could, before they hit the ground, only to have them dissolve in my palm and later return home with hands more black than white.
In Edmonton the hub of the sugar industry was the Hambledon Mill, lying to the west of the township. Located next to the mill where houses for mill staff, all owned and paid for by the mighty Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR). This mill community, while owned by CSR was what the staff made of it, with CSR employees building their own swimming pool and tennis courts to enhance the area. ‘Mill houses’ were overwhelmingly occupied by white collar staff such as accountants, chemists and managers. My parents formed close bonds with several members of the CSR community, to the extent that my school vacations often consisted of travelling down the Queensland coast to catch up with former Hambledon Mill employees who had moved on to other locations for CSR. This included people like Allan and Carol Hughes who moved to Ingham. Don and Vai Hamilton who moved to Mackay and David and Jill Sanders who moved to Brisbane.
While the CSR mill community consisted of white collar workers, blue collar workers, including labourers, boilermakers, fitters and turners and the like lived in the town proper. I can’t remember any class distinctions or petty snobbery between the two groups, though it no doubt existed in some form. One of my early memories as a small child was working on the ‘mill float’ for our local parade called ‘Fun in The Sun’. The float consisted of not much more than a flatbed truck with sugar cane woven into circles and decorative patterns. Returning to this area today one finds a water slide theme park known as SugarWorld. It is hard to recognise much at all from my bygone youth. Our memories are not the most reliable of tools at the best of times, but my lack of familiarity with much of the landscape today tells me that our experience of growing up, is more a product of a time in history, than it is a geographical location.
