Moreton Central Sugar Mill Worker's Housing is a heritage-listed group of houses at 17 &amp; 19 Mill Street, and 14 &amp; 16 Bury Street, Nambour, Sunshine Coast Region, Queensland, Australia. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 16 May 2008.
History.
The two timber cottages at 17 and 19 Mill Street, built sometime between 1897 and 1917, and the timber house with its extensive garden and mature trees on Bury Street, built between 1907 and 1911, provide rare surviving evidence of the sugar industry that powered the economy of Nambour and the Maroochy Shire from 1897 to 2003. The cottages on Mill Street are the former residences of senior staff of the Moreton Central Sugar Mill Company, and the house on Bury Street was formerly the residence of the mill's manager.
Although timber was a vital part of the early economy of the Sunshine Coast region, sugar eventually became the primary agricultural activity of the Maroochy Shire. However, efforts to grow sugar cane in the area were isolated and sporadic between 1865 and 1880. In 1880 sugar prices rose and this, along with speculation about a future North Coast railway line between Brisbane and Gympie, encouraged further selection and small scale sugar growing in Maroochy.
The best hope for cane growers in the Maroochy Shire was the establishment of a central sugar mill. Although the first half of the 1880s was a golden era for those Queensland sugar producers who operated by the plantation system, under which large areas of sugar cane were worked by South Sea Islander labourers, Queensland Premier Samuel Griffith sought to promote closer settlement via small-scale cane farming by white settlers. Small sugar mills on individual plantations would be superseded by a series of large central mills, each processing the sugar cane of a group of small farmers.
Queensland's first central mill opened at North Eton near Mackay in 1888, and in 1893 the Sugar Works Guarantee Act provided for government loans to local companies to build central mills, secured by mortgages over the lands of their shareholders (the cane farmers). Fifteen year loans would be made to incorporated companies where there was enough suitable land, already farmed by small canegrowers, to supply a mill. The company's freehold land (the mill site) would also be mortgaged to the government, and all building contracts would have to be approved by the Department of Public Works.
The Maroochy region was well suited for a central mill site as it was a region of small farms. By the mid 1880s there were 116 people employed in mixed farming, 70 in sugar, 52 in timber, and only 15 in grazing. The Maroochy Shire developed into Queensland's largest fruit growing area between the 1880s and 1915, with bananas being grown from the 1880s, and pineapples from the 1890s. Dairy farming would also play an important part in the local economy from the 1890s. However, after the early 1890s Depression, and the 1893 floods, many farmers were considering quitting the area, and sugar offered an alternative source of income to mixed food crops.
In early 1894 some farmers met at Rosemount School on Petrie Creek, to discuss a central sugar mill. A committee was formed and applied to have land in the area assessed by the government for its viability, and similar applications were made by farmers at Dulong and Yandina. In mid-1894 R.W. McCulloch, from the Department of Agriculture, assessed the potential sugar-growing land in the district, and concluded that there was sufficient acreage to support a mill. McCulloch also believed that Nambour would be the best site for a central mill, with its site on the railway, and cane-growing land to its east and west.
The town of Nambour had begun with the building of a hotel by Mathew Carroll in the 1880s, and had developed in anticipation of the arrival of the North Coast Railway. After the Brisbane to Yandina section of the railway opened in January 1891, the town of Petrie's Creek (formed by the subdivision of freehold land, rather than by Lands Department survey) was renamed Nambour. Sugar became the sole crop of most farms in the Nambour district, and the mill ensured that Nambour became the commercial centre of the Shire.
The Moreton Central Sugar Mill Company was registered on 21 December 1894, the first meeting of the mill's board of directors took place in January 1895, and tenders for the mill were called in February. In December 1895 eight acres of Lawrence Cusack's estate, being liquidated by the South Australian Land Mortgage and Agency Company, was transferred to the company at the site of the future mill and its housing. By this time the population of Nambour was about 150 people. During 1896 the mill was constructed, and a low dam wall was built at a waterhole on Petrie Creek, with a pump mounted on the bank to supply water to the mill. The first season's crush took place in 1897, when of sugar was produced from of sugar cane. Pipes from the dam to the mill had been laid under the railway tracks that year, with the water being pumped into elevated tanks at the mill. To increase the volume of water, a series of sandbag weirs were also built across the creek.
The mill's finances were not in good shape in its early years, due to problems with maintaining a steady supply of sugar cane to the mill. Firstly, these problems were linked to the tramway system, and a tendency to prioritise the building of tramline routes on the basis of the self-interest of the mill directors, rather than the most cost- effective ratio of tramline mileage to acreage of sugar cane accessed. Speed of delivery was another issue. Until the purchase of a Krauss engine in 1904, the cane trucks were towed by horses, due to the government's reluctance to authorise the purchase of locomotives. The Federation drought which culminated in 1902 also reduced the supply of cane available for crushing.
In 1899 the government took over the mill's management and its financial liabilities, at the suggestion of the mill's directors, but by 1904 the mill was still a "non-earning enterprise", unable to repay its government loan. Rather than foreclose on the mill, the State Treasurer took over the company's affairs and worked on increasing the supply of cane to the mill. In 1906, to forestall foreclosure, money was borrowed from the London Bank of Australia to pay off the government, with the growers' land once more used as security. In January 1907, the Moreton Central Sugar Mill Company was handed back as a private enterprise.
The London Bank was paid off by 1914, due to the sale of the mill's western tramline to the Maroochy Shire Council after cold weather had convinced cane farmers to the west of Nambour to convert to dairy farming. Experiments in 1909 by the Moreton mill had shown that cane tramlines could be used for public transport, and the Shire Council extended the two foot gauge tramline to Mapleton in 1914.
From this time forward the mill's fortunes improved. In 1915 the Sugar Cane Prices Act, and the Commonwealth War Precautions Act effectively nationalised the sugar industry, and the 1923 Commonwealth-State sugar agreement guaranteed a market for sugar. There were bumper sugar crops in Maroochy in 1924 and 1925, and the mill was expanded and electrified in the mid 1920s. Around 1934 to 1935 a weir was built on Petrie Creek, and in 1935 a new tank was built in the mill yard. The sewer that was constructed for the Nambour CBD in 1912 was flushed out daily with of water from the mill's tanks, through a filter bed of sand and ashes, and water was supplied to both hotels in Nambour by 1937. From 1962 the water supply of the town was supplemented from Wappa Dam. In 1969 the level of weir was raised , and in the 1980s the weir wall was again raised.
Soil erosion had pushed sugar off the Blackall Range by the early 1950s, but sugar boomed in this period. By the 1970s sugar was Maroochy's biggest industry, and the mill was purchased by Howard Smith in 1976. Depression hit the sugar industry in 1984, thanks to competition from European beet sugar, and by 1985 tourism had overtaken sugar as Maroochy's largest industry. In addition, between 1980 and 2003 more than of sugar land in the Maroochy Shire was lost to urban development and other uses. The mill was sold to Bundaberg Sugar in 1987, which was taken over by the British company Tate and Lyle in 1991. The Belgian company Finasucre acquired the mill in 2000, and it was closed in December 2003, after over 100 years of operation. Although the mill was demolished in 2004, tram tracks along Mill Street and Howard Street, the staff houses next to the mill site, and the weir on Petrie Creek still exist as reminders of the industry that was once the economic lifeblood of Nambour and the Maroochy Shire.
From the outset of the Central Mill system, it was usual for the company to provide accommodation for senior staff and for some mill workers, since many mills were in isolated areas or in new towns that were short of accommodation. At a meeting of the mill directors on 14 May 1897 it was proposed that tenders be called for two buildings to accommodate senior mill staff - the manager (1896 to 1900), John A Malcolm, and the secretary (1896 to 1904), John R Isgar. The houses were to comprise four rooms, with a hipped roof, the two front rooms of each to be ceiled, with studds (sic) outside. Their size would be , with front verandahs. They were to have an iron chimney, and an iron roof, and would be built with hoop pine boards. A tender was also called for bachelors' quarters, sized . At the meeting of directors on 11 June 1897 the tender of Thomas Cusack for the cottages was accepted, at £125/18/0 each, with six weeks to complete the contract.
It has been claimed that the two dwellings at 17 and 19 Mill Street are the cottages constructed for the manager and secretary in 1897, but there is insufficient evidence to substantiate this claim. Cusack was contracted to build two identical structures, and although the two Mill Street cottages were originally similar in size and plan, with four room cores and L-shaped verandahs, they may have been built as late as 1917. By 1926 a line of staff residences faced Mill Street.
Documentary evidence indicates that the chief engineer from 1911 to 1913, Sam Baildon, was refused a company house in 1912, which means that there was no dedicated chief engineer's cottage before that time. However, in 1914 Samuel Glass, cane inspector, was living in a cottage of four rooms and a kitchen in Mill Street, and in 1917 Albert Shearer, a locomotive driver, requested a company house, and a cottage was erected for him "to the same plans as the chief engineer's cottage". In addition two residences were moved to Mill Street, from close to the mill, during the 1925 and 1926 mill expansion. In 1926 the cottages in Mill Street used by the chief engineer, secretary, and second engineer were extended and painted. In 2003 one of the authors of the book Moreton Sugar Mill: Sweet Heart of Nambour stated that 17 Mill Street was the chief engineer's cottage (pre-1915), that 19 Mill Street was the cane inspector's cottage (1914), and that a house at 21 Mill Street (demolished some time after 1966) had been the chemist's cottage (1917).
Regardless of the actual build dates of the surviving two cottages, and which staff member lived in them at any particular time, it is clear that they are surviving examples of the houses erected for senior staff by the Moreton Central Sugar Mill Company between 1897 and the late 1930s. The Mill Street cottages stand on part of the Moreton Central Sugar Mill's original 1895 land purchase, and although they have been extended and modified since their construction they have been an integral part of the mill site and the mill's operations.
The cottage at 19 Mill Street was constructed as a modest timber cottage of a lesser scale than the manager's residence in Bury Street. Changes have been made, but the