The Big Cane Cutters

Before that, the industry ran on South Sea Islander labour: tens of thousands of people brought to Queensland cane fields from the Pacific between the 1860s and 1900s, many by deception or force, and most deported after Federation under the White Australia policy. Their Australian South Sea Islander descendants remain a recognised community in these districts. A monument to the cultures of the sugar industry sits on top of that history.

The work itself was brutal. Cutting by hand with a cane knife, in tropical heat, through burnt fields, at piece rates – and with Weil's disease carried in rat urine a genuine and sometimes fatal hazard. Mechanical harvesters replaced the gangs from the 1960s, and within about fifteen years the trade had effectively ended.

So this is a monument to a job nobody does any more, put up by the district that job built.

Home Hill sits across the Burdekin River from Ayr.As for its size, the fabric of it, a date and the maker's identity – nothing.