bananas

The tropical banana-growing regions of northern Queensland, mainly around Tully and Innisfail, produce more than 90% of Australia’s bananas Banana plants first arrived in Australia in the 1800s. The original bananas from south-east Asia were small, about as long as an adult’s finger. This led to Arabian traders giving them their name, based on the Arabic word for finger, “banan”. True story! We have the Chinese migrant communities to thank for introducing bananas to Australia way back in the mid 1800s. The lucky citizens of Carnarvon in Western Australia were first to taste bananas before the good folk of north Queensland were fortunate enough to experience its delights. It wasn’t until the 1880s, however, that Chinese workers from the goldfields established banana plantations in the Queensland tropics around Cooktown, Port Douglas, Cairns, Innisfail and Tully. In the 1890s, plantations were started in the Coffs Harbour area of New South Wales and around Mullumbimby. Next time you grab a banana, consider the fact you’re about to devour the world’s very first fruit. Originally from the region that includes the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia, the Philippines and New Guinea, traders took bananas with them as they travelled to India, Africa and Polynesia. These bananas, however, barely resembled the fruit we know today. They contained many large, hard seeds and minimal pulp and were considered to be a strange and exotic alien fruit. Cross-breeding of two varieties of wild bananas, the Musa Acuminata and the Musa Baalbisiana, in Africa in about 650 AD, resulted in bananas becoming seedless and more like the delicious fruit we enjoy today. Source: australianbananas.com.au/Pages/all-about-bananas/the-bana...

It must be so beautiful walking through the banana palm woods.

Many Chinese migrating to Australia in the 1800s came from rural backgrounds and brought with them agriculture and water management skills. As a result, considerable numbers of immigrants later took up market gardening and wider vegetable and fruit production. This was one of the few industries where little competition, and hence little friction, existed with European workers. From the second half of the nineteenth century, Chinese market gardens became a mainstay of the urban food supply and were found in most cities and towns. Most gardens were leased by groups of five to 10 people, allowing individuals to visit China for a year or two at intervals without closing the garden. After 1878, many Chinese left Queensland’s Palmer goldfield and moved to the nearby ports of Cooktown, Port Douglas, Cairns and Geraldton (later Innisfail), where they established tropical agricultural industries. Chinese farmers cleared Atherton Tableland rainforest to grow maize,and the Hop Wah Company founded the Cairns sugar industry in 1881. Others cleared scrub along the hot, wet, coastal plain to grow sugar cane, bananas, pineapples and mangoes throughout the 1880s. They established an industry that today supplies Australia’s major cities with tropical fruit. Source: laperousemarketgardens.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/tracki...