CSR Limited

A collection of hundreds of black-and-white photographs documenting the history of the Colonial Sugar Refining Company's involvement in the sugar industry from the 1870's to the 1970's.

Founded in Sydney in 1855, the Colonial Sugar Refining Company (CSR) first began refining imported raw sugar, expanding into the Melbourne market in the 1870s. Over the next two decades, mills were established in Queensland and Fiji, which began to process domestically-grown sugar. In 1923, the Queensland state government signed an agreement with CSR to refine all of that state's sugar production, a monopoly that was to continue until 1989. Mills outside Queensland were sold in the 1970s.

Until 2010, the refined sugar products for the retail market were produced in a joint venture with Mackay Sugar Co-Operative (75% controlled by CSR), who operate refineries in Mackay (Queensland), and Melbourne. The CSR brand is used on most of the retail sugar products produced. CSR began to diversify into building products in 1942. It also distills ethanol using the molasses by-product from the sugar mills. Its corporate headquarters are in North Ryde (Triniti 3 Building), a suburb of Sydney. In December 2010, CSR sold its sugar and ethanol business, Sucrogen, to the Singaporean company Wilmar.

This photo collection constitutes a fascinating and historically significant record of CSR and the sugar industry. It depicts various sugar industry practices such as plant breeding, cane cultivation, cane cutting and refining. It also contains many historical images of CSR facilities, as well as images of rural locations in Fiji and Queensland depicting the living conditions, lesuire activities and community life of company employees. The collection also consititutes an important documentation of the early history of the Indo-Fijian people, who were taken from India to Fiji as contract laborers following the British subjugation of the islands in 1874.

The photos have been made available in TIFF format by the Archives Program of the Australian National University.