Cane Farming - Work in the Cane Fields
The Immigration Restriction and Pacific Islanders Acts, both passed in 1901, were introduced as part of the White Australia Policy, and essentially put an end to the practice of bringing contract labour (either legal or illegal) into Australia from the Pacific to work on the cane plantations, and by 1908 most of the Islanders in Australia had been deported back to their homes. Farmers in the Tweed still required workers for their plantations, and newly-arrived immigrants fulfilled this need, especially after World War II when refugees from European countries devastated by war received financial assistance from the Australian Government to immigrate to Australia provided they work for two years to repay the debt.
Work on the cane fields was hard and physically demanding, and not all the men who presented themselves at the mills for work were able to remain in the job. The cane was cut by hand with crude, often handmade knives. The cane cutters worked in gangs of seven or eight, some of the gangs also had a cook who would provide all their meals. Some of the cane cutters lived in tents, others travelled from their homes to the plantations. The Ganger would lead the gang and determine how fast the men had to work. Cane cutters worked from dawn until it was too dark to see, encountered rats and snakes in the cane and often suffered cuts, blisters and boils.
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Ernie's Story
”The cane was cut off at ground level and topped, then put into rows of heaps, so the farmer could haul in field trucks for us to load – you could load up to three tons per truck per man but when trucks were short it was possible to load four tons. The farmer would then tie the cane down, haul the field trucks out to the main line by horses where a small locomotive would haul them to Crabbes Creek Railway station for loading onto rail trucks and taken to the Condong mill for crushing.”
“…so five of us came to the Tweed to help out …The cutting was the same but loading of the punts [flat bottomed boats] was quite different as we had to use a shin stick, which was a stick about 2 foot 6 inches long. When the farmer brought the cane to the river bank you would put the shin stick under a bundle, what you could carry on your thigh, and walk along a plank to the punt. The plank was only twelve inches wide. If the tide was out you would have to walk along two planks which was fair way with a bundle of cane. The planks were 20 feet in length, so if you lost your balance you’d end up in the mud.”
Ernie Cobb, recalled in 2008
Tweed River Regional Museum Research Collection
Mechanical harvester at work on Quirk’s farm, near Stotts Island.
Photo courtesy Louise Devine, 2000.
Compare and Contrast
Sugar cane farmers started to make the change to mechanical harvesting in the 1960s. Using harvesting machines and transporting cane from the farms to the mill by semi-trailers greatly expanded the sugar industry in the Tweed.
Look closely at this image of a mechanical harvester at work and read Ernie Cobb’s descriptions of cane cutting by hand (in the Oral History tab) and list three differences between cane harvesting and transportation in the first half of the 20th century and the mechanised harvesting and more sophisticated transportation of today.
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