Obituaries Australia

The Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR), founded by Edward Knox in 1855, was built into a giant Australian enterprise by his son Edward William during his 40-year reign as general manager beginning in 1880. The company started with refineries but in the 1860s began to produce raw sugar, building three large and profitable mills in 1869 in northern New South Wales. Ten years later, it began exploring expansion into Queensland and Fiji. In 1880 the CSR reached an agreement with the Fiji government to extend its operations to the colony. The government promised to sell it 1000 acres of land on the Rewa at £2 an acre, and reserve another 1000 acres in Savusavu Bay. In return, the CSR agreed to erect a mill on the Rewa by the start of the 1882 crushing season. The first mill was built at Viria that year, followed by one at Rarawai in 1886, Labasa in 1894, and Lautoka in 1903. Penang, the fifth mill to be operated by the CSR, was bought by the company from a rival in 1926. From then until it withdrew in 1973, the CSR was the sole miller of sugarcane in Fiji, buying cane from mostly Indian small farmers, processing it into raw sugar and exporting it for refining overseas.

At first, the CSR had produced practically all of its sugarcane with Indian indentured labour. In 1909 it began leasing some plantations to independent contractors, mostly former company officers, a practice that collapsed with the labour shortage caused by the end of indentured immigration in 1916 and of the indentured labour system itself in 1920. Faced with this situation, the company decided to get out of cane cultivation. From the 1920s onwards, it began dividing its extensive holdings—132,886 acres of fee simple and lease land—into 10-acre parcels, leased out to Indo-Fijian tenants. By 1941, 97 per cent of all cane acreage was in smallholdings, with CSR tenants accounting for 52 per cent of the total, and independent contractors 45 per cent. The company’s fee simple land was converted to Crown fee simple at the time of its departure from Fiji.

The CSR ran the sugar industry with a firm hand, and its dominant place in the economy ensured its broader influence on colonial policy. Close supervision of the growers and tight control over their labour remained the hallmarks of the smallholding system, which periodically plunged the industry into industrial strife. The first of the major strikes took place in 1921, followed by one in 1943 and another in 1960. Reforms recommended by various commissions of inquiry improved relations between the growers and the company, though many sources of friction remained. In 1969 an independent inquiry into the sugar industry headed by Lord Denning, Britain’s Master of the Roll, made far-reaching recommendations for profit sharing between growers and millers, long a major bone of contention. Unable to accept the terms of the contract recommended by Denning, the CSR withdrew from Fiji. For more than 100 years, sugar remained the mainstay of Fiji’s economy. It accounted for over—usually well over—half of the total exports each year. It provided direct employment for about 30 per cent of the economically active population outside subsistence agriculture in 1966, and nearly one-fifth of the gross domestic product each year. The sugar industry under the CSR played a central role in shaping the history of modern Fiji.