My First Job

The earliest memory I have is of the day Dad took delivery of a new grey Ferguson tractor. Mum was in hospital for the birth of my brother, but the tractor is the dominant memory, obviously the more significant one.

A largely unused road ran through my grandfather's farm. It was raised to allow use during floods. The tractor was unloaded from a truck that was backed up to the raised road. As far as I can remember Dad still had that tractor when he sold the farm around 40 years later. As the years passed he also purchased a couple of Massey Ferguson 135s.

There is another memory that is almost as old. That is of Dad harnessing horses to a trailer to carry harvested sugar cane to Palmers Channel where it was loaded onto a barge to take it to the sugar mill on Harwood Island.

Cane cutters at work

In those days cane harvesting was very labour intensive. The harvest was always preceded by the cane fire. Burning helped clear the outer leaves from the stalk, cleared some of the weeds from the field, and no doubt sent any vermin, including snakes, scurrying.

Cane was cut by a gang of cane cutters who moved from farm to farm during the harvest season. A good cutter could swing his knife through five or six stalks at a time. The cane was laid in rows behind the cutters. From there it was loaded onto the trailers for transport to the cane barge. Neighbouring farmers helped each other with this task and it continued this way for a while after tractors replaced the horses.

It was not only hard work, it was hot and dirty. The cane was covered in ash from the fire and this left the workers black by day’s end.

The next change came when Dad’s cousin Alvin, who lived on an adjoining farm, purchased a Fordson Major tractor fitted with a front-end loader. Working row by row, the loader would scoop up a load of cane, reverse, move behind the trailer in the next row, place the load on the trailer, and repeat the procedure until the trailer was full.

Toft loader fitter to a caterpillar tractor. This replaced the Fordson Major. 

The front-end loader gave way to a Toft loader made by the Toft Brothers of Bundaberg. At first this was also fitted to the Fordson Major but the tractor needed modification. The driving position was changed to allow operation by the driver facing what normally was the rear of the tractor. The advantage of the Toft was that it allowed the cane to be lifted and then swung to the side, allowing it to be loaded onto the trailer travelling alongside. The cane was still cut by hand and the farmers continued to help each other haul the cane to the river bank.

Transferring the cane to the barge

Now the full process is mechanised with the cane being loaded directly into trailerised bins and transported by road to the mill.

It was in the cane fields I had my first paid employment. Harvest time often involved Saturday work. I can’t remember if I was 13 or 14 at the time, but cousin Alvin hired me to work as his ‘stalky’ on Saturdays.The job description was simple. Walk behind the loader and pick up the cane stalks that had been missed or dropped by the loader and throw them onto the next row. I did this until I left to start my apprenticeship at Wagga Wagga.

I loved watching the derrick man. He maneuvered the load to where he
wanted it. Then he threw a cane stalk at the catch to release the load.

Alvin was a good boss and I really enjoyed the work. While I was only a boy I was treated and felt like one of the men. There was no Mr. Davidson or Mr. Ellis. It was George and Eric. I am relatively certain that for a Saturday’s work I was paid two pounds, but even if it was only one pound (two dollars decimal) it was good money for a kid in those days. As a benchmark, when I joined the RAAF my first weeks apprentice pay was something like $12 or six pounds