Ingham. Tropical sugar town with a big Italian community. …

Posted on by Vaseline


100 kms north of Townsville near the Herbert River is a large plain enclosed by steep ranges. Every decade or so the Herbert River floods the plain providing rich soils for the district. Ingham is about 25 kms from the Hinchinbrook Channel and coast. Prior to the arrival of white settlers the area was inhabited by the Girramay and Warakamai Aboriginal people. The first English settler in the Ingham district was Henry Stone in 1865 who eschewed a cattle property and set about growing sugar. In 1872 the first sugar mill was built and in 1874 William Ingham came to the Herbert River district buying 700 acres on which to grow sugar. He came from a wealthy English family and his tutor as a boy was the famous writer Anne Brontë. The flat terrain between the mountains was ideal for sugar cropping. William Ingham arrived with plenty of money and used Kanaka indentured labour, as did others, to establish his plantation. In 1876 he helped establish the port at Cairns. When the government surveyed a town in 1878 they named it after this pioneer in response to a petition from local land owners to do so. William Ingham had just been killed in New Guinea where he was a Queensland government agent trying to find gold mines and control white miners in New Guinea. In 1880 the Colonial Sugar refinery company built a sugar mill near Ingham. The CSR Victoria sugar mill still operates today. In the early years the refinery owned hundreds of acres which they leased to small cane growers who had to supply cane on contract to CSR. By 1903 many plantations were large ones owned by companies and run by managers. One of the biggest sugar plantations was Gairloch Plantation which comprised 5,000 acres of sugar cane. They also subleased some land to small sugar cane growers who had to sell to them under contract as did the owners of Hamleigh Plantation with 4,600 acres and Ripple Creek Plantation with about 1,000 acres. The biggest plantation near Ingham in 1903 was MacKnade Plantation covering 7,194 acres! MacKnade plantation had their own sugar mill. The Macknade sugar mill began operating in 1873 and is still producing and is the oldest sugar mill in Queensland. For many years the Victoria Mill at Ingham had the highest output of any sugar mill in Queensland. The cut sugar cane has always had to be carted to the nearest sugar mill for processing. Horse and carts were usually initially but later the Ingham district became criss-crossed with small railway lines owned by the sugar mills. This is still the form of transportation used today but with diesel engines not steam engines of 100 years ago. The processed sugar is bulk handled and export from Lucinda on the coast 22 kms away. Owners of Gairloch plantation and Macknade plantation used Kanaka indentured laborers but they also imported Chinese laborers directly from China.

The town was surveyed in 1878 and town lots sold in 1879. The town soon had a general store, two hotels and a post and telegraph office. There was a telegraph line between Townsville and Cardwell that passed through the settlement. Sugar was the raison d’être of the town. As a British colony Queensland had good intentions to care for and protect the rights of South Sea Islanders but as the world is an imperfect place these rights were not always well protected. The 1868 Polynesian Laborers Act mainly tried to prevent “blackbirding” or kidnapping of South Sea Islanders after the first ship loads arrived in Queensland in 1863. Captains of ships were prosecuted or jailed for kidnapping. Protectors of South Sea Islanders were employed by the government to check on health and accommodation and food issues. They visited plantations and spoke to Islanders. This prevented much abuse but not all. Conditions were harsh and difficult for the South Sea Islanders but then it was also harsh for some poor white laborers and their families in the late 19th century. In 1895 the Reverend William Gray wrote a book about the conditions endured by the Kanakas. He was born near Gawler in SA and trained at the University of Adelaide before traveling to the New Hebrides as a missionary. He was the first Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Queensland and saw the trade as immoral just as the Abolitionists in the northern half of the United States saw slavery in the South as immoral in the 1850s. The Queensland Kanaka Mission wrote an annual report on issues and Gray used this in part for his sources. He found that South Sea Islanders were treated more harshly in courts for their crimes than whites for similar offences. But he also noted that most Kanakas were as law abiding as white settlers. Gray died at Westbourne Park in 1937 after doing missionary work with Jean Flynn in the outback.

Hawaiians still refer to themselves as Kanakas and a local term for the Islanders of New Hebrides was Kanak. Thus Kanakas sent to Australia came not from Hawaii but from Melanesia – the New Hebrides and the Solomon Islands. Kanakas were also taken to Canada, Chile, Fiji, Oregon and California in the USA. Although descendants of the South Sea Islanders like to refer to themselves as the Sugar Slaves this term would be highly offensive to all descendants of African slaves of the Americas and Caribbean. Indentured labor was a common labor system in the 19th century and continued into the 20th century. In Australia the Commonwealth government ran a similar indentured labor scheme in the 1920s for young British men who wanted to be farm labourers. They served a three year term, with no pay until they had completed their indenture, and they needed government permission to buy work boots or any other item. In SA this scheme was known as the Barwell Boys (Barwell was the SA Premier at the time) scheme but it operated in WA and other states too. This indentured labor system ended in 1925. The boys on this scheme were paid £30 for the three year contract.

The employment of Kanakas in Queensland was covered by legislation and they were contract laborers known as indentured labourers. But in the early years many Islanders were kidnapped (black birding) and bought to Queensland without contracts. Some ship captains were sometimes murderously cruel to the Islanders they were transporting including killing and throwing overboard rebellious Islanders. The Islanders received less pay than white workers receiving just £18 for a three year contract compared to £30 per annum for white rural workers at that time. They got their pay at the end of their contract. But they were housed and fed and clothed. Government officials checked labor conditions but some unscrupulous plantations owners maltreated the Islanders. Compared with slaves the Islanders had much better conditions; they had their freedom and they fared reasonably well in the legal system. Slaves had no legal rights at all. Indentured workers could leave at the end of their term and most did. Their children were not automatically indentured laborers as was the case of children born of slaves who remained slaves for the rest of their lives. Between 1863 and 1904 some 62,000 Kanakas were brought to Queensland. Many landed at ports between Townsville and Cairns for work in the sugar industry. The labor system was outlawed by the new Australian federal government in 1904 after it had introduced the White Australia Policy. At that time the Islander population in Queensland was at its peak with around 9,000 Islanders. Commonwealth legislation banned recruitment from 1904 and started deportation in 1906. By 1908 7,000 Islanders had been deported and about 2,000 were allowed to stay on in Australia because of marriage or land ownership or health issues.

After the Federal government’s legislation the Queensland government enticed Italian immigrants to Ingham and elsewhere to work on cane plantations or farms. So today around half of Ingham’s inhabitants are of Italian origin. The town has an Italian Fest once a year. The Italian community ran their own hospital between 1929 and 1945 and the Italians have their own distinctive section of the Ingham cemetery with their family mausoleums. In the 1930s the Italian community was extorted by a handful of their own in a mafia style protection racket. This was the Black Hand Threat. Although the Queensland government acted to squash it a number of locals were murdered for failing to pay extortion money. During the ten years from 1931 to 1941 eleven Italians in the Ingham to Innisfail region were murdered and thirty bomb attacks were perpetrated by the Black Hand Threat. Today Ingham is known for its TYTO (a type of barn owl) wetlands, its Information centre, lookouts and walkways. The TYTO 110 hectare wetland area has around 240 species of bird and three labeled walkways. Jabiru and Crimson Finches are often seen. One special feature is the Sugar Tracks walk with 18 pieces of historic sugar mill production machinery. All are clearly labeled for you. Although Ingham is not known for its historic buildings you can see the old Courthouse in the Main Street. It was only built in 1948 but it was designed to suit the tropical climate with special ventilation equipment and metal sun shades etc.