a centre of the sugar-growing industry, and there are plantations on the slopes of the hills and the banks of the rivers. Two hundred and eighty tons a day are crushed at the Moreton Sugar Mills just outside the town. Its neighbourhood is pervaded by the peculiar sweet, thick, cloying smell of the canes, a smell that can never be forgotten; we recognised cargoes of raw sugar afar off on every wharf and landing-stage and railway station on which we encountered it, during the remainder of our stay in Australia.
The history of sugar-growing here is very interesting. It was started originally on the system of large plantations worked by coloured labour. No other system of working sugar plantations in the tropics was known. Natives were imported from the Pacific Islands. Planters erected their own mills, and conducted their business through managers and overseers. In the early seventies the industry was rapidly developing, but two circumstances intervened to hamper it. The price of cane sugar fell owing to the great increase in the manufacture of beet sugar in Europe; the Government prohibited the employment of coloured labour. These circumstances revolutionised the industry. The large plantations gave place to smaller farms worked by white labour; the farmers received
