Random item for today: it rains so much around Tully (highest rainfall in Australia) that they mow their lawns every 10 days. Imagine being a mower repair man up here. You’d be taking holidays in Monte Carlo.
It certainly is lush and green around these parts and it was bumper to bumper crops of bananas and sugar cane today. We decided to have an educational (no historical displays !!) morning at the Tully Sugar Mill. From the beginnings of the harvested cane…
Sugarcane!
all the way through the process of extracting the sugar and filling up the big B Doubles with the finished product. This place is like being on a movie set – from the 50s.
Tully Sugar Mill
See the steam rising out of the grates over the drains? I kept expecting Marilyn Monroe to pop around the corner. I think it was built in the 20s, and not much seems to have changed.
Inside the refinery
I keep hearing that Midnight Oil song going round in my head – the sugar refining company won’t help you – but I’m sure it’s all happy days here. The mill works for 24 weeks a year from June to December, then shuts down and does maintenance. The smell is an unmistakable sugar kind of smell. Sort of. Or maybe just a weird smell. I could still smell it the next day in different clothes and after a shower. Once the sugarcane is harvested, they have to extract the sugar within 8-12 hours before the content starts to decrease. I never knew that. The mill works 24 hours a day ploughing through the stream of cages full of freshly harvested cane.
Sugarcane on its way to our table
They are very environmentally friendly. The huge plumes that puff out of the chimney stacks aren’t icky polluting gases. It’s actually steam. They burn some of the waste product and produce enough power to supply the entire mill, plus put some back in the grid that powers about 5000 homes.
Furnace at Tully Sugar Mill burning at 500 degrees
Pretty impressive. They reckon that sugarcane puts more carbon back in to our world than trees. Maybe one day we will have sugar cane forests everywhere!