Tuesday the 15th of September 2020 – Cowley Beach, Queensland

Posted on by bebraveontour

Travelled a bit around the local area today, mainly the coastal beaches that are famous in this region.

I have mentioned Sugarcane in past blogs but I haven’t really explained the extant of the industry here in Queensland, although it does extend into the northern part of NSW but in a small way. The sugarcane industry is huge in QLD & NSW, combined it makes Australia the second largest producer of raw sugar in the world, just behind Brazil. When I was growing up its was the legends of the cane cutters in the north and shearer’s in the southern areas of Australia that was the “true Australia”, how things have changed since then. Now its mining that holds that status!

Sugarcane in QLD extends from Mossman (just north of Port Douglas) to the QLD/NSW border. We have spent the last few weeks driving thru continual fields of sugarcane which is being harvested now. There is over 4,000 k’s of rail track specifically for transporting sugarcane from the farms to the mills. Sugarcane has to be processed in the mills within 16 hours of harvesting, so its a just in time effort, not unlike the car plants requiring the vehicle components on the line at a certain or the line would stop.

Nowadays its all mechanical harvesting but it wasn’t all that long ago that is was manual work and the “canecutters” had a very hard job, no wonder their life expectancy was the early 40’s. Also I can remember the films of the cane fields being burnt before harvesting but that is now a thing of the past.

The main street of Tully a “sugarcane” town with a mill right in the middle of town.
Tully has the highest average rainfall of any town in Australia of approx. 4 1/2 metres per year. So what else would Tully have as its moniker that a good old fashion Aussie “Gumboot”!
Now days its small Diesel engines pulling large cars of harvested sugarcane but it the old days it was horse drawn carts with manually cut cane. This statue is outside the Tully Sugar Mill.
One of the current diesel engines pulling the cars full of harvested cane, known as “billets”.
One of the old steam engines used to pull the cane cars to the mills. Diesel replaced steam completely by the late 60’s early 70’s.
Mission Beach. The weather was not all that good at the time of the photo, I’m sure its much better than this.
Bingil Bay, it was a lovely beach, better than Mission beach which is more famous. The Bingil bay cafe was suburb, very eclectic but the food and drink was great. If your up this way I highly recommend the Bingil Bay cafe!
Cowley beach. This is the view about 20 metres to the rear of our Caravan. Unfortunately our time here has been in the worst weather here for a couple of months. Whilst the temperature is still in the high 20’s it’s been very windy and up to 25 mm of rain each day that we have been here. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised re the rain, with Tully only 30 k’s south of us.

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