MacKay

MacKay was becoming clearly less tropical than our adventurous top end of Australia. There were sugar mills everywhere and the smell of sugar in the air.

We could not resist the opportunity to go for a sugar mill tour and while there discovered a lot of things:

There are 24 Sugar Mills in QLD.

Fairy floss was invented in 1897 by dentist, William Morrison and confectioner John Wharton because they wanted to stop kids eating boiled hard candy that gets stuck in your teeth and causes cavities.

A serving of fairy floss the size of your head contains approximately 1.5 teaspoons of sugar, compared with a can of coke with 9 teaspoons of sugar!

Cane Toads were brought in to try and bring the rodent population down in the sugar cane fields.

Many workers would die from disease received from the cuts they would get in their arms from the sugar cane and then infection setting in from the rodent wee on the sugar cane.

There was much more information as well but that was a summary. We got to drink the fresh sugar cane juice and see the different stages of sugar cane production. Australia is the largest producer of Sugar in the world.

We also got to catch up with friends in MacKay and stay at the Adventist church there before moving on to Rockhampton the next day.