If you've lived on Queensland's Sunshine Coast long enough you'll remember watching pillars of smoke rising from the cane fires around Yandina and Bli-Bli on clear winter nights. Once a defining feature of this patch of countryside, the canefields have mostly gone fallow or been diverted to other crops since the Moreton Mill closed in 2003.
Some cane is still grown for mulch, a few farms truck it to the sugar mill at Maryborough, and there has been talk of an ethanol plant one day (too late for Moreton Mill, its site is now a Coles supermarket).
With the canefields gone there is that feeling of being between times. The fertile volcanic plains lie open, ready for whatever comes next, which hopefully isn't rampant urban development - the idyllic rural scenery tends to attract 'tree-changers' to the district.
Impressions of Yandina town: Compact, laid-back, a main street with shops and cafes, a railway station, pub, produce merchants, low-key tourism centred around the ginger and macadamia factories and the coffee roastery.
In its early days the town saw an influx of timbergetters chasing the cedar ('red gold'), beech and pine in the surrounding forests. Much of the timber was rafted from Dunethin to Maroochydore, dragged by bullocks to Mooloolaba and shipped to Brisbane.
Rafting gradually diminished as the railways took more of the timber and the characters that worked the rafts drifted away, as did the remaining timbergetters once the forests' prized trees had been culled.
The succession of pubs that had served their needs dwindled until only the Yandina Hotel remained, having been moved on rollers from uptown to its current location near the railway station whilst trading all the while.
Book references: A Flight of Dolphins, Part 1: Ambition, Part 2: Ruthlessness, Part 3: Insight
See the Sunshine Coast Library's Yandina Town History, Bli-Bli Town History and Nambour Town History
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