Bananas

But bananas travelled to Queensland via a very convoluted pathway. In 1828, two banana plants were taken from Mauritius and hand-delivered to Lord Cavendish. He grew some bananas from them in what became the current Kew Gardens in the UK. Missionaries took some of his banana plants to the South Pacific in 1840, where they flourished. Later, a missionary called Williams took some of these bananas to Fiji. In the 1870s, Queensland sugar cane plantation owners "drafted" sugar cane cutters from Fiji, and brought back some banana plants with them. In 1891, Herman Reich used these plants to start the Coffs Harbour plantations, which, after a century or so, had gone bananas.