03/04/2019

GREG JOHNSTON, SWEET BITTER CANE - THE UNCERTAINTY OF MIGRANTS



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.