There were already changes in the way the output of the mills was exported. Before the development of bulk handling techniques, the sugar went into sacks, which had to be stacked onto the trains that would carry it to the nearest port.
At the port, the sacks needed to be physically hauled and stacked in the hold of the ship that would carry it to its destination, where a similar operation would be carried out in reverse.
The preponderance of manual labour in the cane fields, on the wharves and out among the timber getters meant there were plenty of big beefy blokes around the back blocks. That fed, predictably, a fairly robust competition on the sporting fields, where Rugby League was the dominant sporting code.
There were probably a number of actors that accounted for the dominance of Rugby League, and those matters will probably be more thoroughly explored in The Sporting North. One of them would have been the presence of numbers of big blokes accustomed to hard physical labour to fill out the forward pack.
The fact that games didn’t need specialised equipment or dedicated surfaces would have helped.
Cricket and tennis were popular but needed wickets, bats, stumps, and courts.
Concrete cricket pitches weren’t exactly footy-friendly either.
Then there was the predictable inter-town rivalry and the fact it was possible to have a local player go on to national representative honours. It usually happened in reverse, with former representative players spending the twilight years of a lengthy career as captain-coach of a team somewhere out in the back blocks, but that wasn’t an exclusively Northern situation.
A well defined process lead through zone and regional selection towards State and, possibly, national honours followed by the Foley Shield competition through the rest of the season, there was plenty of representative football action.
North Queensland provided a tough encounter for visiting Rugby League teams, and local matches were broadcast on both commercial radio stations. With the Townsville football on 4TO, games from Rugby Park in Ayr on 4AY and the game of the day in Brisbane or Sydney on the ABC there wasn’t much joy on the radio if you weren’t a League fan.