Part One The Early Bundaberg Pioneers and Their Plantations

Chapter 7

The Royal Commission of 1889

The holding of such an enquiry as this Royal Commission was very much in the tradition set following the English public’s ready acceptance of the philosophies of Jeremy Bentham as detailed more fully in England – Not so Merry . At the time of the Royal Commission, England was considered to be the sugar market of the world, and to compete with the British colonies, including the colony of Queensland, the countries of France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Holland and the U.S.A. had all introduced bounties ranging from £3 to £8 per ton on sugar produced. Then, as now, subsidies to Australian farmers were relatively small, or non-existent, and bounties were not available to the Queensland planters who had to compete on the world stage. It should also be remembered that there was no free trade between the Australian colonies at this time.

Other factors, suggested to the Royal Commission as possible causes of considerable angst to planters in the sugar industry over this period were:

• mismanagement, extravagance and inexperience of early planters;
• financial embarrassment owing to working with capital borrowed when much higher sugar prices prevailed;
• loss through the drought of 1887;
• disease;
• exhaustion of the soil at Maryborough [This was long before the introduction of superphosphates; the ploughing in of legumes such as cow-pea would later be used to reintroduce nitrogen and humus to the soil – R. L. C.]; and
• loss of confidence in the industry.

However the Commission was eventually to conclude that:

• Instead of the depression in the sugar industry being attributable to the ignorance and incapacity of the planters as a body, they had, on the contrary, shown great enterprise, directed by a careful study of their work;
• The inability to pay on borrowed capital was an effect, rather than the cause, of the depression in the industry;
• The main cause of the difficulty in obtaining the necessary advances from the banks to carry the planters on was the potential for abolition of black labour that, it was thought, would occur in the near future. [That was anticipated to occur by the 31st December 1890 by then current Queensland Government legislation. This was later amended to 1904. R. L. C.]

In his submission to the Royal Commission into the sugar industry, which reported to Parliament in 1889, John Henry Edma Bertheau gave witness to the following:

Sommerville, (Walter Adams, owner) has had eight years’ experience in the cultivation of sugar cane; total area of estate, 240 acres; 120 acres under cane, and 2 acres under bananas; 110 acres crushed last season; made 165 tons of sugar, and 1,800 gallons of molasses, the latter thrown away; capital invested in estate, £10,401, which returned no interest in 1888; working expenses for 1888, £2,774; employed 8 Europeans and 30 Kanakas; paid on an average £15-12-00 per annum to coloured labour; total wages paid in 1888 to Europeans and coloured labour, £933-13-00; considers Kanaka labour most suitable for field work; Europeans employed in field work are not willing to do it when horses cannot be worked; when the land is perfectly free from stumps Europeans working horses and machinery will be able to do some of the work now done by black labour but not cutting or trashing; cultivates four acres for each black labourer employed; Europeans, if able to use plough, horse, and hoe, could cultivate no land profitably; blacks employed in field work do not suffer in health, but Europeans do; cost of felling and burning-off scrub, £5 an acre; cost of stumping it to make it fit for the plough, £12 an acre; cane has not suffered from disease or vermin – crop of 1888 suffered to a very trifling extent; cost of machinery, £5,219 17s. 6d.; part made in Glasgow, and part in Maryborough; cost of annual overhaul and repairs, £100; has grown no other tropical productions in addition to sugar cane but bananas*; considers the causes which have depressed the sugar are:

– first, Government interference with Kanaka labour, causing capitalists to hold aloof;

– second, beet and bounty-fed sugars in competition; and

– suggests, as a remedy for the depression, repealing or extending the Act re Kanaka labour, and endeavouring to bring about reciprocity with the Australasian colonies; suggests for the promotion of other tropical agriculture, a system of irrigation.

*(NOTE: This banana crop was probably for local consumption, not export, as the 1889 Royal Commission had been told:

When the banana fruit has been, with trouble and expense, brought to the port of shipment, the exporter has a serious difficulty to contend with in getting it to market. The grower secures on an average 1 shilling per bunch for bananas, the freight to Melbourne is 1 shilling a bunch payable in advance, and the Customs duty on them in Melbourne is 4 pence a bunch, or 33 per cent of the price received by the grower. But this might be borne if he could get his fruit safely and properly carried. Unfortunately for the settlers, only one line of steamers is at present trading to the Northern ports that of the A.U.S.N. Co., which therefore, has a monopoly of the trade, and this company has adopted a form for their bills of lading which practically exonerates them from all responsibility whatever for the cargo shipped. Shippers have no choice but to accept the terms offered by the company or not to ship. More than half of the bananas shipped have to be carted to the manure depot when they arrived at Melbourne. It should be mentioned too that whilst, the distance from Fiji to Sydney is 1,872 miles, the Fiji bananas are landed there in seven days, whilst the transit from Port Douglas to Melbourne, a distance of 2,017 miles, takes fourteen days. This requires Queensland growers to cut the fruit green, which gives the Fiji fruit a better reputation. To compound the problem fruit from Queensland, but not from Fiji, is regularly plundered in transit to such an extent that consignees frequently refuse to continue to deal with the growers.

On the production of cane sugar the Royal Commission recommended that:

After full consideration of the subject, therefore, we have the honour to submit the following recommendations for the improvement of the condition of the sugar industry: 1. We recommend that the Government should make inquiry in Java and Borneo about the qualities of the cane of which small quantities were imported by the Colonial Sugar Refining Co. and the Mourilyan Sugar Co., and if satisfied that it is as valuable as it is represented to be, should procure a shipment of plants sufficient to plant twenty or thirty acres of land in a nursery which, to avoid all danger of importing any disease, should be established on one of the islands on our Northern coast – say one of the Palm Islands or Fitzroy or Dunk Island.

2. We recommend that your Excellency’s advisers should open negotiations with the colonies of Victoria and South Australia, for the purpose of ascertaining on what terms and conditions (if any) those colonies could admit Queensland sugars duty-free.

3. We recommend that assistance should be given either to public bodies or to individuals to enable them to provide means of irrigating all cultivated lands in localities where a sufficient supply of water can be obtained.

4. We declare it to be our opinion that, if all coloured labour be withdrawn from the plantations, the extinction of the sugar industry must speedily follow and we therefore recommend that the introduction of Polynesian labour be permitted to continue, at all events for some years longer than the period now limited.

NOTES:

(1) In its summation the Royal Commission was to concur with all three of the Sommerville suggestions; and

(2) The return of islanders under the act was effectively suspended until 1904 at which time remaining islanders were given the option of staying in the new country of Australia, following the merging of the colonies, or returning to their islands of origin.

The following table gives the official figures of kanaka labour importation numbers into all Queensland ports for the years 1880-85. Of these numbers, about one-fourth would have been assigned to the Maryborough and Bundaberg districts. It will be noted that, although Kanakas had been brought into the country on a limited basis prior to 1880, it was considered there was no organized immigration before that year.

COMPARISON OF SUGAR MILLS IN THE BUNDABERG DISTRICT

Utilizing data provided to the Royal

Commission by the Bundaberg Planters

Commission, and complete to the end of 1888,

the following table gives a comparison of the size and value of those Bundaberg District plantations that possessed their own sugar mills.

BUNDABERG THE BRAVE

A footnote to the Reports and Minutes of Evidence of the Sugar Commission presented to the Queensland Parliament in 1889 for the district of Bundaberg states with reference to the Bundaberg district and its then 86 farms and/or plantations:

This appears to be the most flourishing district in the colony. A large number of planters and farmers simply crush the cane and send the juice to the refinery .

7 Buss & Davidson Pemberton 380 - £30,000