Mackay
On Queensland's eastern coast, about 970 kilometres north of Brisbane, at the mouth of the Pioneer River in Yuwibara country, Mackay is the centre of Australia's sugar industry.
While the settlement was initially known as Alexandra, in honour of Princess Alexandra of Denmark, pressure from the early settlers saw the name changed to acknowledge John Mackay, who led the 1860 expedition that discovered the Pioneer Valley.
James Cook sailed past the area on 1 June 1770, naming several landmarks, including Cape Palmerston, Slade Point and Cape Hillsborough.
Members of Mackay's party suggested that the river should be named after their leader. However, Commodore William Farquharson Burnett's survey of the Queensland coastline already had a Mackay River flowing into Rockingham Bay. Burnett renamed the river after his vessel.
Mackay returned to the area in 1862 with a herd of cattle and established a settlement at Greenmount. By October, there was also a settlement close to the river's mouth. Commodore Burnett renamed the river on 27 December, and Thomas Henry Fitzgerald completed the first survey of the township he called Alexandra in May of the following year.
After Alexandra became Mackay, Fitzgerald recycled the name for the sugar cane plantation he established in 1866, as sugar cane became the district's crop of choice.
John Spiller planted the region's first cane in 1865, while Fitzgerald and John Ewen Davidson built the first sugar mill in 1868. By the mid-1880s, there were more than thirty sugar plantations worked by more than two thousand South Sea Islander labourers and twenty-six mills to process the crop.
However, after 1885, the industry changed, moving away from the plantation system to a network of co-operatively owned central mills financed by the government processing cane produced by small-holding selectors.
Federation brought a further change, as most South Sea Islanders were repatriated, with Mediterranean migrants from Italy and Malta taking their place.
Despite periodic setbacks — the city was devastated by a tropical cyclone with a significant storm surge in 1918 — Australia's 'Sugaropolis' enjoyed healthy growth through the 1920s and maintained it through the 1930s.
Coastal shipping services and railway connections to the north and south introduced tourism to the economic equation, with visitors travelling through Mackay to the Whitsunday Islands and the Eungella Ranges, west of the city.
After floods and cyclones brought significant changes to the Pioneer River's lower course, Mackay's riverside wharves were relocated to an outer harbour from the 1930s, with bulk loading facilities added in 1957, followed by bulk storages for fertilizers and chemicals in the 1960s, and a bulk grain silo in 1982. While coal from mines in the hinterland did not pass through Mackay's harbour, export facilities at Hay Point and Dalrymple Bay provided another economic bonus as the city became a base for DIDO (drive in/drive out) workers in the Central Queensland coalfields.
Links to add:
Cape Hillsborough
Cape Palmerston
Commodore Burnett
Dalrymple Bay
Greenmount
Hay Point
John Ewen Davidson
John Mackay
Pioneer River
Slade Point
Thomas Henry Fitzgerald
Yuwibara
