Friday, 3 September 2021
Shopping local keeps your money in your community!
“Big Pineapple turns 50” In 1970 Bill and Lyn Taylor decided to build the Big Pineapple tourist attraction in Nambour. The Big Pineapple opened in 1971, as part of the Sunshine Plantation – an early example of agricultural tourism. Inspired by local farming practices. On August 15th the Big Pineapple turns 50. The area around Nambour had grown pineapples since the late 1940’s and they were sent to Northgate in Brisbane where they were canned by Golden Circle Cannery. This particular farm was a working pineapple farm.
The Big Pineapple tourist park included the 16m-high landmark breglass pineapple and was soon joined by the Plantation Train Ride, a one kilometre two-foot gauge track which still has the steepest incline and sharpest bend of any Queensland passenger rail track. This train was pulled by a former sugar cane train. The train ran through a train station/ machinery shed and then around a circuit of the pineapple plantation, the orchard, wild fowl lagoon, and animal nursery. Many families from our area have very fond memories of visiting the Big Pineapple to ride on the train and to feast on the ice cream sundaes. One of the big events at the Big Pineapple came In 1983 when Prince Charles and Princess Diana visited it.
In the 1980’s the Big Pineapple would see as many as 50 full tourist coaches a day visit apart from the hundreds of tourists travelling north and south along the Bruce Highway and day trippers from Brisbane and around the Sunshine Coast.
As a side note this was the day that Queensland Football icon, Mal Meninga worked one of his last shifts as a police constable in the Queensland Police Service before becoming a PE Instructor at the Queensland Police Academy with Wayne Bennett before embarking on a long career and distinguished as a professional footballer.
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