Sarina to Broken River, Eungella NP, QLD

Sunday 27th August 2023

Today we are suffering from a disturbed night’s sleep again. David is feeling jinxed as yet again there is a party across the road and our neighbours stayed up until 11.30pm. There is a motor bike race today, so the caravan park is fully booked.

We headed off at 9am to the Sugar Shed at Sarina where we were going on the Sugar Production Tour. As we have been driving through sugar cane fields since we arrived in northern Queensland, it was good to finally learn all the details of its production. Here goes with a little information. Sugar cane needs 1.5m of annual rainfall to grow successfully. Under these conditions the growth time is 12 months, if there is less rain it can take between 18 months and 2 years for the sugar cane to grow to maturity. The cane is harvested by machine now and needs to be at the mill for processing in 24 hours. After this time the cane starts to degrade and then ferment making it unviable for making sugar, it would then end up at the distillery. They no longer need to burn the fields before harvest as this was only to kill the snakes before hand harvesting. We saw some retired harvesters and learned about their uses. A new harvester can cost up from $750,000 to $1.3 million.

There are about 8 steps of production once the cane arrives at the mill. Some of these are:

  1. Crushing/Hammering the cane to remove the juice.
  2. Separating the dirt from the juice
  3. Adjusting the PH levels
  4. Removing the molasses
 

In Australia, all sugar sold in the supermarket is white sugar. Raw and brown sugar are just white sugar coloured with molasses.

The Sugar Shed produce their own alcohol at the distillery and chutneys, relishes, sauces and lollies, here as well.

Fairy floss has 1.5 teaspoons of sugar per stick which is 1/4 of the amount of a can of soft drink.

After our tour, we headed to Mackay but unfortunately the Art Gallery was closed. We then drove back to Broken River, Eungella National Park as David found a mountain to climb that he hadn’t seen. It is the highest mountain in Central Queensland – Mt Dalrymple. 1227m high. We will be doing this tomorrow. After we arrived we spent another couple of hours watching platypuses. Only the little ones were out tonight and a little later a bigger one appeared.