​Sustainable Ecology

Historic Tweed River Cane Knife.

Partridge Genealogy : Albert Henry Partridge, born at Nimbin 1929.

Albert is pictured on the far left hand side holding the Cane Knife.

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Albert Henry Partridge Cutting Cane in the Tweed River Region from 1955 to 1959.

In Commemoration of the Historic Tweed River Cane Knife and the men who laboured in the Cane Field cutting cane in the Harvesting Season.

 

Albert Henry Partridge : Genealogy.
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/…/partridg…

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Walter Henry & Helen Marshall lived on a Dairy Farm at Palm Vale N.S.W
http://www.whereis.com/nsw/palmvale-2484

Walter Henry married Helen Marshall Wilson on the 6 June 1928 at Murwillumbah, New South Wales. They had ten children.

1. Albert Henry.......................... [My Father]
2. Arthur Edward.
3. Phyllis Joyce.
4. Valerie May.
5. Daphne Helen.
6. Harold Keith.
7. Shirley.
8. Thelma Joy.
9. Neville John.
10. Walter Clyde.
Helen Marshall died on the 3 April 1955. Walter Henry died on the 13 June 1957. Both are buried at Kyogle, New South Wales. Walter was known as Jim.

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Collection
Tweed River Regional Museum, Murwillumbah, Australia.

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Object Name
Cane knife.

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Object Description
Cane knife with curved steel blade and wooden handle. The blade is attached to the handle with four nuts and bolts and washers, two at the widest part of the handle where it adjoins the blade and two below. The lowest nut and bolt is missing. The blade is straight sided on one edge, with a right angled hook at the end. The other edge of the blade is curved and sharpened; it shows signs of wear. The wooden handle is worn smooth from use. Dimensions: total length 690 mm with bent blade, 715 mm as originally manufactured with flat blade. Handle 445 mm long, tapering from a maximum width of 55 mm where it adjoins the blade at the end to 32 mm. The knob at the end of the handle is 52 mm wide. Blade 270 mm long, measured from the handle as if it was straight, maximum width is 150 mm, at the end across the hook.

This cane knife was donated to Tweed River Regional Museum by Len Brooks, who cut cane in the Condong area in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He recollects that it was given to him by a cane farmer he was working for. The first experiments in growing sugar cane in the Tweed Valley were carried out in the late 1860s by Joshua Bray at Kynnumboon near Murwillumbah and Michael Guilfoyle at Cudgen. A major factor in growing sugar cane is that it requires expensive machinery to crush and refine it, and to obtain the best sugar yields the cane must be crushed as soon as possible after harvesting. During the 1870s a number of individual farmers built small mills on their properties and produced sugar with varying degrees of success. Many of the small mills did not survive, hampered by inefficient production methods and the lack of a reliable supply of good quality cane and a ready market for the crude sugar they produced. In 1872, dissatisfied with the production of the small mills, sugar growers on the Tweed approached the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR) to build a mill on the Tweed River. After lengthy negotiations, the CSR mill at Condong was completed in 1880 and began crushing. The lush rainforests of the floodplain of the Tweed River were progressively cleared for cane, transforming the landscape.

Narrow metal blade with a right angled hook at the end, hafted on a round wooden handle. There is a metal band around the end of the handle where it is hafted onto the blade. The end of the blade is curved almost at a right angle, and has a blunt point. The wooden handle is smooth and polished from use and the blade is rusty. Dimensions: overall length 930 mm, handle 530 mm long and 35 mm in diameter, blade 400 mm long and 14 mm wide. The metal band around the end of the handle is 14 mm wide and 40 mm in diameter.

William Julius, who had considerable experience growing sugar cane in the West Indies, was one of the most successful independent sugar cane producers in the Tweed. He arrived in the Tweed Valley in 1875 and took up a large area of land at Cudgen, where he planted sugar cane and built a mill to process it. Most of the workers on Julius’ plantation and mill were South Sea Islanders or ‘Kanakas’, who had been lured from their homelands by the infamous ‘blackbirders’ as indentured labourers on the sugar cane plantations of north Queensland. Sugar cane production was both capital and labour intensive and a large cheap, unskilled labour force was needed as the industry developed in northern New South Wales in the 1870s and 1880s. Julius brought to the Tweed about 200 South Sea Islanders who had completed their contracts in Queensland and employed them to completely clear the land. Julius then leased lots of around ten acres to South Sea Islanders to grow sugar, while others worked in the mill. Despite the deportation of large numbers of South Sea Islanders under the White Australia Policy after Federation in 1901, some who had married in Australia or who had been in Australia for 20 years or more were able to remain. They intermarried with local Aboriginal people and their descendants live in the district today.

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During and immediately after the Second World War the cane farmers of the Tweed were desperately short of labour. European migrants played an important role in the survival of the industry. Refugees had to work for two years as a condition of their assisted passage to Australia and many were sent to work in the cane fields of northern New South Wales. Anton Potocnik came from Slovenia to Australia as a refugee in June 1951. He spent his first two weeks in Bonegilla migrant camp, before travelling to Murwillumbah by train to work cutting sugar cane with thirteen other Slovenians. He recalls that there were only three jobs going – cutting sugar cane, working on the railway out west, or working on the Snowy Mountains scheme.