Mackay

Mackay is a city on the central coast of Queensland, Australia, on the Pioneer River between the Clarke Range and the Coral Sea. Sugar cane covers the flat land around it, and the city calls itself the sugar capital of Australia.

The Yuwibara people are the traditional owners of the river valley. John Mackay, a Scottish explorer, led a party into the valley in 1860, and the town laid out at the mouth of the river took his name. The valley was cleared for sugar cane from the 1860s, and mills were built along the river and its creeks. After a cyclone in 1918, much of the center was rebuilt, and the Art Deco shops and offices of Victoria Street date from those years.

Mackay Sugar runs mills that crush cane from the farms of the Pioneer Valley and ships raw sugar from a terminal at the harbor. Beef cattle graze on the ranges inland from the coast. Coal from the mines of the Bowen Basin is loaded onto ships at the terminals of Hay Point and Dalrymple Bay south of the city.

The Bluewater Lagoon, a free swimming lagoon on the riverbank, has pools and waterfalls beside a cafe. Eungella National Park, in the hills to the west, has rainforest where platypus feed in the creeks at dawn. At Cape Hillsborough, north of the city, kangaroos and wallabies feed on the beach at sunrise, beside rocks of old volcanic stone. The Mackay Regional Botanic Gardens, beside a lagoon, keep plants of central Queensland.