Small Farmers, Their Association, and the Transformation of the Australian Sugar Industry

Abstract

In the late nineteenth century in a tropical region of Australia, sugar plantations disappeared. This progression from plantation production to widespread sugar cane cultivation by independent small growers occurred nowhere else in the sugar-growing world. In north Queensland small sugar cane farmers provide an audacious example of rural agency. The Herbert River Farmers’ Association contributed to a significant and unprecedented change in production methods and demonstrated the potential for grass roots farmer organisation to overcome institutionalized planter dominance of politics, society, and economy of tropical sugar districts.