Queensland Government Photo
Sugar Cane in Queensland
The cart is being loaded up to carry the canes to the factory, where it will be crushed by the latest and most perfect machinery.
One single potato was sold for £50 not very long ago.
The Potato, like the Indian corn, tobacco, and a few other plants, is an inhabitant of the New World. Of other cultivated plants the native country is not known. No one knows where, for instance, Sugar-cane was first cultivated, but it has nine Sanskrit names, one of which, khand, is, or has probably at one time been familiar to us as sugar-candy. It was well-known when the Institutes of Manu were written, but that may have been somewhere between 2000 B.C. and A.D. 20.
One of the Hindu Indian deities, Kámadeva, who corresponds to Cupid, the God of Love, carries a bow made of sugar-cane, with a string which is composed of bees.
"He bends the luscious cane and twists the string
With bees: how sweet! but ah! how keen their sting,
He with five flowerets tips the ruthless darts