Latest news with #Mossman
ABC News
2 days ago
- Business
- ABC News
Mossman growers experiment with new industries as sugarcane future remains uncertain
For more than 125 years Mossman's cane growers have delivered a crop to the mill for crushing, but for some this year will be the last. Since the closure last year of their local factory near Port Douglas in Queensland's far north, farmers have been experimenting with other crops, as the future of their multi-generational industry is still uncertain. Their current harvest is trucked 100 kilometres to Mulgrave for crushing, but this subsidised short-term solution may not be sustainable long term. The Queensland government has put together a $12.5 million package announced in the budget to support Mossman cane growers with the loss of the sugar mill. About $6m of those funds will fully subsidise the cost of transporting this season's cane harvest from Mossman to Mulgrave Mill, which is critical for growers to make a profit. The other $6m will be used to work towards long term solutions and projects beyond 2025. Discussions between stakeholders are taking place about how this money is best spent. Determined to stay on the land, growers say they have no choice but to try growing crops other than cane. Fourth-generation Mossman farmer Don Murday is the deputy chair of Queensland Cane, Agriculture and Renewables, a group that advocates for sugar growers. He believes making fuel from plants is the future for Mossman, and has been trialling bana grass, a crop similar to sugarcane but without the sucrose content, used to create biofuels. He said the results had been great so far and this would most likely be his last year growing sugarcane. "The leading projects I believe in this transition are bana grass for renewable energy," he said. "I'm going to transition into bana grass with maybe a few other crops in the interim, but I won't be planning any more sugarcane. "I may well be taking the sugarcane out after this harvest." From a financial perspective, Mr Murday said using the grass to produce biomass — organic material that can be converted into a renewable energy source — was a viable option. "With the predicted tonnages of the bana grass and the price that's being offered, we're looking at gross value of between $4,000 and $5,000 per hectare with lower growing cost than sugarcane," he said. "So I believe growing the bana grass will compare very favourably to growing the sugarcane at the current prices." Matthew Watson also farms in Mossman and has been trialling different crops including coffee, cocoa, corn and sorghum. He also sees potential in bana grass, which he said was practical to grow in the district. "Bana grass is a grass the same as cane … it grows the same, you can plant it the same, cut it the same [and] we've got all the machinery to do that," Mr Watson said. "It seems to be growing really well in the trial patches that they've got around the district at the moment. Growing anything without a local processor would be challenging, and Mr Murday and Mr Watson are both apprehensive about what will become of the Mossman factory. Mr Murday said he hoped it could be turned into a biomass processing facility. "It's probably 12 to 18 months before we're going to have any commercial quantities [of bana grass] available, and one of the processes that we're looking at is could effectively be operating within 12 months from the time they're given the go-ahead," he said. For now, Mr Murday is only growing bana grass for propagation — experimenting with reproducing the plants — and not for commercial processing. Mr Watson said it would be hard to see a clear future for his farm until more decisions about ownership of the mills or new processing facilities were made. "We really just don't know, unfortunately," he said. "The killer is the not knowing what you're doing from day to day, trying not to get stuck in the negatives."
The Guardian
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Men of a Certain Age by Kate Mossman review – close encounters with charismatic male rockers
When the journalist Kate Mossman was a child, she developed an obsession with the rock band Queen. Mossman came of age in the 1990s, but the irony and snark of that decade left her cold. Instead, she lived for the 'middle-aged musicians from the 80s in jacket and jeans, and for the open-hearted, non-cynical pop times that had come before'. Watching Queen's posthumous single These Are the Days of Our Lives on Top of the Pops in 1991, she 'felt something within myself ignite'. Though she was captivated by the strange longing of a monochrome Freddie Mercury, who had died weeks earlier, it was drummer Roger Taylor who became the focus of her obsession. On the mantelpiece of her childhood home sat a holy relic: a beer glass he had drunk from during a solo gig. Twenty years later, while on her way to interview Taylor and Queen guitarist Brian May for a magazine profile, Mossman confesses: 'I think I'm going to black out.' Her sharp yet heartfelt interviews with Taylor and May – which took place separately – appear in Men of a Certain Age, a compendium of Mossman's work previously published in the Word, the now defunct music magazine, and in political weekly the New Statesman. The book features 19 encounters with ageing male musicians including Shaun Ryder, Bruce Hornsby, Jeff Beck, Ray Davies, Sting, Dave Gahan, Jon Bon Jovi, Nick Cave and Terence Trent D'Arby. Mossman tops and tails the articles with present-day thoughts, reflecting on her expectations, the preparation, the long journeys to far-flung homes, and the peculiar and sometimes fraught dynamic between interviewer and interviewee. When Mossman was starting out, music journalism was still dominated by male writers and older musicians were accustomed to being interviewed by men their own age. The presence of Mossman, a young woman who wears her musical passions on her sleeve, is distracting for some but for others it is an invitation to unburden themselves. 'The older man often ends up being vulnerable because he feels he is safe: it's just a pretty lady!' Few of her interviewees could be classed as hip. Yet their respective career arcs mean they've experienced it all: fame, wealth, adoration, loss, disdain and, in some cases, addiction. In Mossman's bleak yet fascinating interview with the Soft Machine co-founder at his home in France, Kevin Ayers drinks two bottles of wine, plays some songs in the street outside his house and then, shockingly, tries to sleep with her. This prompts an altercation between Ayers and his manager, with the latter shouting: 'It's not 1967, Kevin!' Paul O'Neill, the man behind the madly successful prog rock act Trans-Siberian Orchestra, takes Mossman's hand, puts it inside his leather jacket and 'press[es] my fingers around the thick, bobbly grip of a Glock semi-automatic pistol'. In Moscow, Kiss's Paul Stanley throws plectrums at her face. Mossman's writing is terrific: curious, bracingly honest and brimming with smart turns of phrase. Books by music journalists documenting their rock'n'roll adventures tend to be gonzo in spirit, full of bad behaviour and knowing irreverence. This isn't one of those. Men of a Certain Age instead captures the strange, often solitary and frequently mortifying life of an interviewer whose aim is to make a connection with a stranger, to get to the human being behind the entertainer; success is by no means guaranteed. Nowadays, Mossman's writing assignments go beyond rock's elders: she profiles politicians, scientists and philosophers, too. It's with characteristic candour that she reveals how, when considering the life of an interviewee in the days before an interview, she feels, 'like I'm standing at the foot of a mountain, and I get miserable with the expectation. But I still get that strange vibration, every so often, that we are going to get on.' Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters With Rock Royalty by Kate Mossman is published by Bonnier (£22). To support the Guardian order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
