Mareeba

It's the beautiful pineapples.

They're coming from three areas, Sunshine Coach, Caboolture and Mareeba.

And they are absolutely beautiful.

Nice and yellow inside.

Mm

... called Mareeba, and, um, her husband is a born and bred Londoner.

Mm-hmm.

They're very, it's Montano shit.

Now, we're going to head to the far north, where a very different kind of harvest is soon to start.

While harvest is wrapped up for most coffee producers near Mareeba, on the other side of the Atherton Tablelands at Millaa Millaa, it's still yet to begin.

Lucy Stocker from Cradle Mountain Coffee has been getting everything ready to pick those coffee cherries off her trees, and she says it's looking like it's going to be a big crop.

Well, we're, um, eagerly anticipating our 2026 harvest.

I think we're about two or three weeks off, and, uh, yeah, we can't wait to get into it.

Yeah.

You're a bit later than the folks growing coffee in Mareeba.

That-- I, I'd assume that they'd be probably done harvest now.

go.

Savannah in the round up in Mareeba.

I'm looking forward to that one up in Mareeba.

I've never done that big music

event.

Yeah, that's right.

So we got Coffs Harbour before that one.

So Dubbo Coffs and then from Coffs to Mareeba, 2,500 on the wheel.

And if they come the way through Europe and Asia and India and Southeast Asia, they get to Darwin.

We might tell them, rather than turning left at Darwin and heading towards Cairns and Mareeba, we say, well, would you turn right and just swing around the West Australian coast? Yeah.

Yeah, the separation of

communities.

yeah.

I haven't been to Mareeba.

All right.

Well, there you go.

I'm just skirting on memory here.

Let me.

When travelling around the Atherton Tablelands recently, a spy stopped at a relatively new Count X Roadhouse on the outskirts of Mareeba.

It's open.

So when you spend 12 years as the boss of the Augustinians, you get to visit almost every country on Earth, and you get to visit very ordinary people in their situations.

So, for example, Prevost had been to Australia several times, and had come to visit the Augustinians, like at their school here at Villanova in Brisbane, or to their parish up in Mareeba in far north Queensland.

I mean, a slightly irreverent story, but I don't think he'd mind my saying it.

We had Bishop James Foley was the Bishop of Cairns, And he said to me, he said, yeah, I met Prevost a couple of times when he came, but I must say I can't really much remember much about him.

And we went and rode it up there.

We did Greenvale, Mareeba, Charters Towers, Mount Isa.

I remember at the end of Mount Isa, I think there was five or six of us went up there.

And at the end of Mount Isa, on the Sunday, I had $43 left.