Cairns Post Friday 24 December 1923

A SUGAR PIONEER -Veteran Mackay Farmer's Death in UK-

"News drifted through recently of the death at the advanced age of 85 of John Ewen Davidson, one of the earliest pioneers of the Mackay district, and, up to the time of his departure some 23 years ago general manager of the Melbourne-Mackay Sugar Company, which acquired his original holdings in Mackay. The late Mr Davidson came to Mackay in the early sixties (1860s), and was one of those who took up land under what were known as sugar and coffee regulations. These may not have been perfect from the viewpoint of those who never pioneered, but they certainly went far to starting the sugar industry which is now of such overwhelming importance to Queensland. It has been asserted that Davidson, at that time testing various tropical products, wisely saw possibilities in sugar. He was generally accepted as an authority, and his example was followed by others, some trying to produce arrowroot, others tobacco, indigo, and so forth.

It was probably due to John Ewen Davidson that rather vague and discursive tropical agriculture took definite form. He was not a man of dreams, but one of a single idea (with a single exception). He believed in sugar, the sugar of the West Indies from which he derived his inspiration. He thought in terms of the good old fashioned plantation, and held himself responsible for the parental care of his employees. He was a mathematician, and could prove to the few admiring settlers around him that what the Radicals dared to say concerning large sugar mills - already in existence in Dairah Sanieh, Egypt, and elsewhere - was a physical impossibility and an engineering absurdity.

Of course he was wrong - utterly wrong - as most didacticians of prejudice must be. He helped to create a public opinion, and a fount of energy. One may recall the time when the Mackay district agitated for a railway. With boldness, which we cannot admire too much, he declared:- "All we planters want is a road, and a wharf from which we can ship our sugar." He had no interest in the middleman, nor any other of the thousand and one things which enable a pioneering business to carry on and succeed. One admires the man, just as we admire the cavaliers of Charles or the Puritans of the Mayflower. John Ewen Davidson was really not of this generation, though he had the fortitude, and may we say, the obstinancy of half a dozen generations earlier.

He went to Queensland, when the tropical coastline was little more than an undrained swamp, where the white man's grave was dug for him ere ever he arrived writes the Melbourne representative of the "Sugar Journal". His particular part of the coastal swamp was afterwards called by Lady Frederick Lugard (writing to the Times, London, as Flora Shaw) "the centre of intellect of the sugar industry," and of that reputation Davidson laid some of the foundation stones, even assuming that later on he hesitated to build colums and architraves. If personal experience may be quoted, I recall Davidson driving along the dusty highways, in a long dogcart, himself the whip, a companion by his side, and a tiger on the let-down back seat. One remembers three and four course dinners, with every virtue of cut glass, silent service and excellent cookery, to say nothing of the inimitable wines, cigars and stories in the verandah lounge chair, with a westerning moon sinking to rest, and possibly the chatter or monotonous sing-song of the South Sea Islanders away in the "native" quarters.

And then Davidson would say to one or two of his favored guests, "come along to my telescope." He had quite a good instrument of which he was justifiably proud. At that time there was no better in Queensland, or, probably, in Australia. Nothing more striking emphasises the great changes since the sixties, when we think that the Scotchman, planted in the middle of the pioneer swamp, fighting nature and making a white man's heritance, had yet time to study the heavens not as an astrologer for guidance, but for some additional information for all mankind. Davidson's telescope was, of course, a joke to most local people, and even when he found a new comet, which the scientists named after him, he gained only as much honor as the Biblical prophet received in his own country. I know nothing of the Davidson comet, but at least this must be added to the story of the activities of one our very earliest sugar pioneers. I have said that he was a man with a single idea - that was to make Australia produce sugar, the one exception to which I refer was his eternal belief that the white man could not work work in the tropics. He believed that, certainly up to the last moment of his management; probably up to the last moment of his life. He was bred in the Cobdenist theory that no white child can be reared anywhere near the equator. He believed that the relations between white and colored persons should be strictly paternal - with the white man as father. He controlled many plantations, each one of which had its own sugar mill, and the suggestion that all the mills should be rolled into one, and all the fields connected up by tramlines savoured of the iconoclastic.