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Queensland's roads, including the highway, is criss-crossed with narrow gauge railway tracks and fringed with ten foot high grasses. Sugar cane.

At first I took this for granted, but a thousand kilometres down the coast and the cane fields still stretch as far as the eye can see - this is obviously a big business. So we decide to make a few detours, and put a microscope on the industry... 

A visit to the seaside town of Lucinda increases the interest - here we find a six kilometre jetty (the longest in the southern hemisphere of course) which carries a railway over the shallow sands to a container ship station.  

At Lucinda, giant ships fill up with unprocessed sugar, some 60 thousand tons at a time and transport it around the world to be stirred into a billion cups of tea (or half a dozen cups if you're a bricklayer). It amazed us to learn that no less than 60 million tons can be stored at a facility here!

We trace the processing of cane to sugar in the town of Ingham - with a fascinating visit to the Victoria Sugar Mill.  

Beginning with the cane trains, which converge on Ingham from miles around, the cut cane in 4 ton bins is weighed in less than 17 hours after cutting.  The trucks are rolled in two by two into a huge roller which tips them up and drops the cane onto a salter bathroom scale below.

The cane is then pulped in the jaws of massive medieval rolling pins and the sugar syrup and mud steamed out before moving into large partial vacuum vats. Here the syrup is separated from the mud and then crystallised through the introduction of molasses and ethanol. The crystals are then sucked through a rolling steel filter which separates a huge amount of mud.  Finally, a series of dryers, like massive spin and tumble dryers finish the job. 

Apparently the spinning of the raw crystals is where brown sugar and white sugar are created - white being spun longer, presumably the longer spin removes more mud.  Give me processed sugar anytime from hereon in...

As a souvenir we were each presented a plastic cup of unprocessed sugar each. So now you know who'd make great neighbours should you ever run out.

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