Media Release

Editorial piece for Mareeba Advertiser 50th Birthday series

There will be 200,000 people living in the hinterland, which will be producing some 3,000 million litres of ethanol that runs our motor cars.

In Mareeba, a town of 70,000 people, there will be electric cars run off electricity turbines in the giant sugar mills producing the ethanol; and electric 4WD station/farm runabouts built in another giant factory.

There will be a lot of rich cattlemen, First Australian descendants from places such as Kowanyama, Pormpuraaw and Aurukun, who will finally be able to own their own land the same as other Australians.

There will be a lot of European, Sikh and Russian Baltic-Black Sea migrants enriching our Australian culture, and there will be problems of assimilation – for which our community has set probably the best example of anyone in the world.

We have been as good as any town in the world in giving others a fair go and making us into one Australian community.

There will be a silicone upgrading plant producing optical fibre and employing 2000 people.

The silicone will come from the area’s richest silicone reserves in the world, Cape York, through the port of Cairns and up through the tunnel in the ranges, which comes out just north of Yungaburra, to go to the big processing plants on the Tableland.

There will be a 25-minute access to Cairns from Mareeba and the southern Tableland with high-speed divided highways.

A lot of our sons and daughters will be commuting down to Cairns, where they will be working in some of the biggest small shipyards in the Southern Hemisphere.

Being one of the bigger cattle centres in Australia, there will be two big meatworks utilising distillers’ grain, a by-product of grain ethanol.

Stretching across the banks of the Barron River in the centre of Mareeba will be the biggest botanic gardens in the world.

And the forestry environmental division of James Cook University will be based here, with some of the world’s leading scientists extracting tannic acid from trees and creating paper, timber, and the best education in trees in the world, producing new strains to improve on the Brazilian F1 hybrid developed from Australian gum trees

Eucalyptus camaldulensis (river red gum) and Eucalyptus grandis (rose gum).

In Tolga, where there will be 2000 small 10-acre holdings, life will be very tranquil and civilised.

There will be a small aircraft factory making a new generation of aeroplane that will have gliding capabilities, making it the safest light aircraft ever built.

Our fruit and vegetable growers will have arbitrated prices for their product and will enjoy a moderate prosperity, if not a comfortable wealth.