Lifetime of lessons For the women and men who pioneered Australia’s sugar industry, hard times such as those being amid the COVID-19 pandemic are not new. On a recent visit to the Australian Sugar Heritage Centre in Mourilyan, Australian Canegrower sat down for afternoon tea with a group of cane farming elders from the Innisfail district … and listened … as lessons about resilience and respect were shared. BY JOHN FLYNN
“It was a hard life, but it was a happy life. There was something about it… everybody was the same,” Mary Marano recalled of her earliest years growing up in the cane fields of the Innisfail district. It was a childhood filled with oldfashioned hard yakka for the mother of CANEGROWERS Innisfail Chairman Joe Marano. In the season, days would begin with cane knife in hand slicing ‘chop-chop’ or cane leaves to feed the horses. It was dangerous work, especially for children who could easily slice a toe while working
“It was a hard life but it was a happy life.”
their way along the rows of hand-cut sticks, or lose a finger feeding cane trash into a chaff cutter. That was before heading to school for the day, then returning home to a fresh round of chores in the evening. “I don’t know how we didn’t chop our feet while chopping the cane,” Mary recalled. “Honestly, I reckon the good Lord must have been looking after us.” In her youngest years, when the family lived at the foot of the Basilisk Range, Mrs Marano remembers heading up into
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