Sweet Bitter Cane
is a story of Italian migrants who travelled to Australia to work on the
sugarcane fields of Far North Queensland.
The first arrived in Townsville in December 1891, the result of an Italian immigration agent with the venerable
name Chiaffredo
Venerano Fraire. These immigrants came
mainly from Italy’s north, from the Veneto but by the 1920s, a mass migration
of Italian workers to the Queensland cane fields had begun.