Harvesting had to be done by hand, with the block burnt before harvest to rid the cane of snakes and vermin and take out as much of the extraneous vegetation as possible. That, in turn, meant people living in cane growing areas were familiar with black snow, ash lifted out of the fires, carried by the breeze and deposited on people’s washing (among other places).
Cutting cane was hard manual labour, and provided an avenue for immigrants from southern Europe who took the South Sea Islanders’ place to build up the capital to buy into the industry themselves.
These matters, of course, deserve a more detailed treatment than is possible here, and I’ve pencilled in a section provisionally called The Sweet North for that purpose.
Replacing those gangs of itinerant cane cutters with machines had significant political and economic implications in the sugar growing districts, but also opened up possibilities for expansion in the Burdekin, where a weir at the Burdekin Gorge (completed in 1953) provided water for 7,500 hectares at Dalbeg, Millaroo and Clare. Water from Eungella Dam behind Mackay was added to the scheme in the 1970s, and water from the Haughton also helped propel massive expansion that would not have been possible without mechanical harvesting.
Similar examples of the impact of machinery could be cited from the mining industry, which was on the cusp of its own massive expansion through extensive open cut coal mining.
Modern machinery also made formerly uneconomic gold deposits viable, and accounted for the disappearance of the mullock heaps that formed the strongest memories of my first visit to Charters Towers.
Mechanised harvesting of sugar cane was reflected in other aspects of the sugar industry. Where cane growing areas were formerly closely settled districts with townships scattered across the river flats, such settlements became less viable once machines replaced manual labour and motor vehicles made residents more likely to buy their groceries in the supermarket at a major centre rather than the local store.
With mechanisation came a tendency to amalgamate and consolidate, which saw a significant reduction in the number of mills around Mackay, Tully and Innisfail, and the emergence of national and multinational players into an environment where, in many cases, local growers had been shareholders in their own central mill.