Museum opened to show old tobacco growing industry

A museum to the now defunct tobacco growing industry has opened at Mareeba on Queensland’s Atherton Tablelands.
It’s now illegal to grow tobacco in Australia, after the Government elected to buyout and shut down the declining industry in 2006.
For decades tobacco was the main produce grown on the tablelands, and at its peak was worth $50 million dollars a year.
Ex-tobacco farmer Remzi Muller says it was hard to grow tobacco.
“In the 1930s, 1933 there were about 4,000 people here growing small plots of tobacco,” he says.
“In that year, 3,000 went bankrupt. Because it was dry farmed, you put the crop in, you watered it with a cup until the rain came. If the rains didn’t come, you didn’t get a crop,”