Introduction..
I suppose this is a history book written by a gardener/florist, so I make no excuses for the deviations, the flowery side~tracks; they were bound to happen. So in the end it is a gardening book. It must start with history because this came first, at least the red soil came first, the history just happened to happen upon this Eden of red soil so they are inevitably bound up together in book form. Take any book dealing with the early history of Queensland, flip a page or two, and you are likely to come upon a paragraph beginning something like this: Sugar was first grown in Queensland by Captain Louis Hope @ Ormiston some 20 miles from Brisbane in the year 1865 . To find your way to Ormiston you must travel a road out of Brisbane in a southerly direction. However as we are not particularly concerned with Captain Louis Hope enterprising as he undoubtedly was, we are concerned with the fact that in pursuing his ideas with his diverse moods, he found himself in a predicamen