From left, Canefarmer-turned pineapple farmer Gordon Oakes, Mill fitter and turner Greg Rigbye, TramCo chair Greg Rogerson, Don Fewquandi, and Peter Jones from Nambour Crushers.
by Janine Hill
THE phone rang. Someone rattled the front door. It was 3am on 1 September, 1981.
Moreton Mill chief engineer Graham Williams had been asleep at home when workers scrambled to alert him to a calamity.
“They said there was a problem with the boiler. Could I come in?”
Graham lived with his wife, Helen, and children in a mill house a minute-and-half from work and was there as soon as he could put his overalls on.
“I went and had a look. We didn’t know what had caused it.”
The boiler had blown up and they had to wait for it to cool down to diagnose the problem. “A tube had let go. The system couldn’t keep the water up to it.”
Without a boiler, the mill could not crush and a solution needed to be found.
Graham said another mill was under construction elsewhere and the tubes on the way to that site were diverted to Nambour for an emergency rebuild of the boiler.
By 22 September, the mill was up and running again.
As chief engineer, Graham was ultimately responsible for keeping the mill machinery running but he said the mill workers pulled together whenever there was a problem.
“It didn’t matter who you were. Carpenter, fitter and turner, you pitched in,” he said.
He said any issues were not only fixed but usually produced an improvement at the mill.
“We fixed it but we fixed it better.”
The mill was “a good little factory,” said Graham, who paid tribute to mill manager Graham Coleman, an advocate for building sugar production in the area.
Graham Williams said the annual sugar crop of about 300,000 tonne reached a record of 500,000 tonne in 1991 and that was beaten with a crop of 650,000 tonne in 1997, six years before the mill closure. “Six years later, it was all over Red Rover.”
Closure was sad, but town coped
Graham said it was sad when the mill closed but both the workers and Nambour seemed to cope.
“Everyone seemed to do all right after it. Some people had worked there all their lives and were still there when it closed but everyone seemed to get by.
“With the town, it might have had an impact when it happened but everybody moves on.”
Graham stayed with Bundaberg Sugar and worked at other mills in Australia and overseas before retiring.
He has remained in contact with some other mill workers and will be attending the get-together on Saturday, 2 December to mark the 20th anniversary of the mill’s closure.
The anniversary event will be held at the Nambour tram terminus from 3pm and is open to mill workers, cane growers and anyone interested in the mill days and the sugar cane in that era of the Sunshine Coast’s history.
Bitter-sweet memories revived for sugar workers
THIS year marks 20 years since the Moreton Mill closed but those days of rattling cane trains and puffing smoke stacks live on in the memories of former mill workers and cane growers.
To acknowledge the anniversary, men and women of the mill and cane farms will get together on Saturday, 2 December, from 3pm to share recollections and catch up on each other’s lives.
The anniversary get-together will be held at the TramCo terminus in Mill Street, just a spit from where the mill once stood.
Don Fewquandie, 71, who was an engineer at the mill, can remember when a double storey barracks for mill workers stood roughly across the road from the terminus.
He and Greg Rigbye, 69, who was a fitter and turner at the mill, tell how a steam whistle blew to signal a change of shift three times a day: twice half an hour before and once on the turnover.
“A lot of men in the day lived in the barracks and a lot of men and women in town didn’t have alarms or clocks,” Don said.
The whistle was so loud that it could be heard at Dulong, according to Greg, who has built a replica that will be sounded, not quite so loudly, at the anniversary get-together.
Valdora canefarmer-turned pineapple farmer Gordon Oakes remembers visiting the mill as a kid with his father, Wensley.
“The old man used to go and have a drink and get the sugar test results and I’d get left the barracks. I was a kid and just sat there and watched them,” he said.
“Later in life, I could get a ride home on the cane train.”
Don worked at the mill from 1974-1985 but it meant enough to him that he returned to watch the last cane bin being emptied.
“After that, I went back to Bob Lister’s place and we opened a six-pack. That was about 2.30am,” he said.
A movie about the final days of the mill, The Last Crush, will be screened at 6.30pm at the anniversary get-together.
There will be music by guitarist-vocalist Ashley Williamson, who long-time Coast locals might know from the band, Cougar.
Nambour Crushers under 13s will handle the catering as a fundraiser.
Anyone genuinely interested in the mill and cane farming is welcome to attend and learn more from those who lived and breathed it.
RSVPs to Rossy Boyle on 5448 6398 are appreciated for catering purposes.