Assuming you haven’t opted to loop around the short cut through Marian that rejoins the main highway just south of the school at Hampden, your run out of Mackay will take you past the new shopping complexes on the north side of the Pioneer and over the first hill at Mount Pleasant and Glenella before you hit Farleigh, the first of a string of small settlements that would appear to owe their existence to the cane growing practices that prevailed in the era before mechanical harvesting.
Farleigh dates back to the early 1880s, when an English agricultural investor, Sir John Lawes, acquired a number of properties that were merged to form a larger sugar estate, back in the era when the cane fields were worked by kanaka (South Sea Islander) labour, and large estates were the standard practice. Farleigh Mill started up in 1883, absorbed the nearby Ashburton mill and closed in 1900, a victim of the combined impact of the introduction of the White Australia Policy after Federation, which removed the old the work force and declining fertility in the hilly country that supplied the mill..
The old estate was sold off, fresh lands cleared and the mill reopened in 1904 as the cane industry moved from estate farming to smaller leasehold farms. The pattern was probably repeated at each of the other townships you’ll run across along the highway, resulting in much closer settlement, with each township gradually acquiring schools, hotels, post offices and small businesses that supported the cane growers.
Farleigh, however, was one of the mills that prospered, absorbing a number of smaller operations including mills at The Cedars, Coningsby, Pioneer, Richmond, Nindaroo, Habana and Dumbleton, and by 1921 was crushing cane from across the Pioneer River after the CSR Company closed down the Homebush Mill. That arrangement didn’t last, and the Homebush growers ended up sending their cane to the Racecourse mill after 1926, when Farleigh was forced into liquidation after a number of poor seasons. It reopened shortly thereafter as a co-operative run by its growers and stayed that way until the growers voted to merge with other mills to form the Mackay Sugar Co-operative in the late 1980s.
Farleigh is also the point where the old road into Mackay doglegged away around the uplands around Habana on the way into North Mackay, crossing the Pioneer and running down Sydney Street back when the old Mackay Central Business District was a thriving commercial operation.
Farleigh’s prosperity was based around the expansion of sugar cultivation through the string of townships you’ll pass on the run through to Kolijo and Calen, with their cane originally hauled down to the mill on the main railway line, though the mill started work on its own tram line in 1956 and had the network up and running five years later.
The first of those smaller townships is just over the ridge at the foot of Mt Mandurana, (formerly as Mt Johansburgh). The mountain, more commonly known as The Leap or Blackgin's Leap, and the town it overlooks acquired their names after a Native Mounted Police detachment, engaged in dispersing the indigenous people on the north side of the Pioneer after the spearing of John Greenwood Barnes early in 1867 pursued an Aboriginal woman who chose to leap off escarpment of Mt. Mandurana, her baby in her arms, rather than face the pursuit.
Barnes, who lived at Cremorne, across the river from the main settlement of Mackay, was occupying a ceremonial ground for the Juipera people, was therefore trespassing on sacred ground and probably asking for trouble, though one doubts anyone had bothered to take such concerns into consideration at the time. Barnes was repeatedly harassed prior to the attack, and the fact he reprisals extended as far as twenty kilometres away from the scene of the attack probably says more than enough about the state of affairs on the frontier.