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Clip description
This actuality footage from 1899 shows a horse-drawn load of cane arriving at a conveyor belt at a sugar mill in Nambour, Queensland. The cane is trimmed and carried by conveyor belt into the mill for crushing.
Curator’s notes
Wills and Mobsby from the Queensland Department of Agriculture shot over 30 short films like this one on a hand-cranked Lumière Cinematographe camera. Despite the films each being less than a minute long, Wills sometimes used simple edits to construct a narrative, making his footage relatively innovative for the time. In this clip, a jump cut connects two steps of the process carried out at the sugar mill.
Nambour is situated in south-east Queensland on the Sunshine Coast, 100 kilometres north of Brisbane. The town’s Moreton Central Sugar Mill commenced operation in 1897, two years prior to this clip being filmed, and closed in 2003.
