Go Qld: Regional Queenslanders are a remarkable breed

A ROAD trip of Queensland reveals Australia’s most genuinely decentralised state is well served by a resilient, self-reliant people, often dealing with extraordinary challenges.

• Queensland economy: Bernard Salt’s report on the state

THEY are selling mung beans to Beijing, chilli to India and, in the Burdekin where sugar still reigns supreme, they’re filleting fibre out of cane stalks to make New York hamburgers just that little bit juicier.

These people could soon be selling rice to China, helping cure the ailments of an ageing world and finally giving graziers a break from homicidal livestock by engineering a bull without horns.

What ideas and projects do you think will drive jobs and economic activity in Queensland? Comment below, tweet using #GoQld or email [e-mail].

Queensland economy: Bernard Salt’s report on the Queensland economy

Regional Queenslanders, the people who built this state and who keep its engine of growth fuelled with their energy and innovation, have always been a remarkable breed.

They built the state, from the Gympie gold miners reputed to have saved us from bankruptcy in the 19th century to the sheep cockies and shearers who brought up riches in the 20th.

The regions gave us our first state premiers and lured our first immigrants, from the Chinese of the northern gold fields to the Italians of the sugar cane fields, many of whom kicked off family fortunes by swinging a cane knife through blackened paddocks in the December heat.

In the decade ahead it will be the indefatigable Queensland grazier who will deliver a hit of financial adrenaline to the state economy as they shepherd a 150-year-old beef industry into a lucrative new chapter, feeding Asia’s hunger.

Today thousands of regional dwellers will set off to work, quietly taking on the complex challenges of a sophisticated 21st century without the encouragement of a public round of applause, while the sprawling metropolis of the southeast hogs the limelight.

But they still occasionally like to remind the state they are the majority, with more outside the capital than in, and their needs along with their achievements should be recognised and valued.

A road trip of the regions reveals Australia’s most genuinely decentralised state is well served by a resilient, self-reliant regional people, often dealing with extraordinary challenges.

Outside Toowoomba the Wagner family have provided the Darling Downs with a golden key to the Asian export trade by building an international airport in a cow pasture.

The Wagners, who made their fortune supplying the concrete to build Queensland, had few supporters in 2012 when they announced their outrageous plan in a nation which had not built a major airport on a greenfield site since Sir Robert Menzies was prime minister.

The family built Toowoomba West Wellcamp Airport in 19 months and 11 days, and last November waved off a Cathay Pacific jumbo jet to China loaded with beef, nuts, mangoes, organic chicken and lettuce, marking a new chapter in the Queensland export story.

What ideas and projects do you think will drive jobs and economic activity in Queensland? Comment below, tweet using #GoQld or email [e-mail].

While the Wagners make aviation history, 900km to the north Belfast-born Colm Friel oversees a strange alchemy as he extracts exotic new products from sugar cane not dreamt of when the Burdekin Delta Sugar Company was created in 1878.

Colm, the manufacturing manager at KFSU Ltd at Brandon just north of Ayr, extracts a dietary fibre from fresh sugar cane marketed globally by a distributor network in Japan, the US, Australia, Canada, Mexico, South America, and New Zealand.

A natural, additive-free food, it not only assists with digestive health and other ailments often associated with ageing, such as diverticulitis, it could soon be used by bakers across the world to augment breads while binding hamburger patties together without absorbing moisture, making them juicier.

A few kilometres south of the factory Phil Marano, whose family have farmed sugar cane in the district for generations, is growing mung beans consumed by Beijing residents who have a voracious appetite for a food containing so many vitamins it’s known as the “cure-the-sick-grain’’ across China.

Westward to Longreach in the heart of beef country one of Australia’s most remote tertiary institutions is welcoming another group of Indonesians eager to learn about the Australian cattle industry.

Longreach Pastoral College director Karen Smith is overseeing an innovative six-week course which not only instructs the youthful Indonesians but plays a critical role in diplomatic relations with a critical trading partner expected to be reliant on our exports in the decades ahead.

Queensland economy: Bernard Salt’s report on the Queensland economy

In Bundaberg a farmer creates a chill puree which will flavour foods that will find their way to the sub continent; at Gatton, University of Queensland scientists conduct genetic tests with the now achievable aim of creating a hornless herd of cattle; back in the Burdekin SunRice is helping sugar growers to alternate sugar with rice crops as the innovative company produces so much product it might soon look at rice exports to China.

Regional Queenslanders, energetic and positive as they are, also have their complaints as their grand ambitions fail to materialise.

In the Central Highlands teenagers are splashing about in a dam with a freshwater capacity four times that of Sydney Harbour and a shore line stretching 200km.

Emerald’s Fairbairn Dam is a roaring regional success story as it irrigates a food bowl annually sending off millions of dollars of agriculture around the globe, including thousands of bales of world-class cotton.

But to the regional “fathers,’’ such as retired LNP MP Vaughan Johnson and Bob Katter Snr, Fairbairn is also a standing rebuke to a state which has been criminally negligent on regional water infrastructure for decades.

“North Queensland has been stifled by government of both colours in their refusal to invest in water infrastructure,’’ says Johnson, who held the seat of Warrego for more than two decades, and who personally witnessed Emerald blossom over the 40 years as its soils thrived on the waters of the Fairbairn.

In the view of Katter, the federal Member for Kennedy vigorously pursuing the “Hells Gates’’ dam proposal on the Burdekin River, a vast land mass in north and central Queensland is being stripped of its productive worth because of the absence of water.

“And in Brisbane they spend billions building tunnels to get you home three minutes earlier,’’ he said.

In Brisbane, a prominent Queenslander with an intimate understanding of regional Queensland believes the state owes a debt to the people of the regions who go on underwriting economic and cultural development.

To Darling Downs-born Greg Hallam, chief executive of the Local Government Association of Queensland and with 30 years of experience in local government, regional dwellers are the antipodean version of the hardy pioneers who settled the American west and mid-west.

What ideas and projects do you think will drive jobs and economic activity in Queensland? Comment below, tweet using #GoQld or email [e-mail].

It was their agrarian energy which laid the foundations of our economy, and their leadership and vision which gave up our first state leaders who shaped the cultural and political contours of the state.

“They were the people who herded the first cattle,’’ Hallam says.

“They were the ones who swung the first pick.

“These are the people who built Queensland.’’