Canambie Homestead is a heritage-listed plantation at 12 Dixon Road, Buderim, Sunshine Coast Region, Queensland, Australia. It was built . It is also known as Joseph Dixon's House. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 22 October 2000.
History
Canambie Homestead was erected probably in the early 1880s for Buderim Mountain sugar planter and sugar mill owner Joseph Chapman Dixon, his wife Elizabeth Alice Fielding, and family. The name "canambie" reputedly is an indigenous word meaning "black plum". The place is still utilised as a residence, and remains one of the earliest surviving sawn-timber houses on the plateau.
JC Dixon emigrated from Liverpool to Melbourne in mid-1864, when in his early twenties. He moved almost immediately to Sydney, where he worked in a variety of occupations for several years. In 1868, lured by reports of the success of the sugar industry in Queensland, Dixon and two fellow members of the Society of Friends visited the Moreton Bay district. The party was guided by timbergetter William Grigor to the Mooloolah Plains, as yet unselected, then returned to Sydney. In 1869 JC Dixon returned to Queensland with four other Friends, all of whom selected land on the Mooloolah River, and commenced sugar cane cultivation. Dixon in partnership with Herbert Everett selected land downstream, which proved a poor choice - their sugar crop was badly damaged by floods. They abandoned the selection and moved to a sugar plantation on Doughboy Creek, near Brisbane. When at Mooloolah, Dixon had heard from a timbergetter about Buderim Mountain. Selling his interest in the Doughboy Creek property to Everett, Dixon made the first application to select land on Buderim Mountain, in June 1870.
From the early 1860s, Buderim Mountain had been extensively logged, principally for the fine stands of red cedar and white beech, which was shipped to Brisbane via William Pettigrew's wharf on the Mooloolah River. In mid-1870 the plateau was opened for selection. Dixon took up adjoining portions 44 () and 53 (), parish of Mooloolah, in June and August 1870 respectively, erecting as his first residence a slab hut on portion 44. Many of the first selections were taken up for their timber resources (e.g. Pettigrew's and Grigor's selections), and early agriculturalists made an income from timber while clearing the land. Dixon also ran cattle on the plateau, which he slaughtered and sold to his neighbours in return for their labour, and hired a teamster to drive a bullock team hauling timber to the coast. At the Queensland census of 1 September 1871, the farming district of Mount Buderan contained only 3 inhabited houses. Within a few years more land had been selected, and from 1 April 1874 Thomas Ridley, who had selected portion 45 within a day of Dixon's first selection in June 1870, operated the Buderim Mountain postal receiving office.
In 1873, Joseph Chapman Dixon married Elizabeth Alice Fielding of Eagle Farm, near Brisbane, returning with his bride to the slab hut on Buderim Mountain. By August 1874, Dixon was cultivating principally maize and sugar cane, with some coffee. By the mid-1870s, sugar cane was grown extensively on Buderim Mountain, with planters utilising South Sea Islander labour. In 1875, JC Dixon and his father-in-law John Fielding went into partnership to established the mountain's first sugar mill, which was erected on part of portion 47 (Mill Road is indicative of the site). Fielding and Dixon purchased an evaporating-pan sugar plant from Fountains of Burpengary, who had imported it from Scotland. The site was surveyed and burnt off in late 1875, the sheds and chimney were erected through early and mid-1876, Fountains dismantled the plant and sent it by steamboat to the Maroochy River in July, in August the plant was brought by bullock wagon up the mountain, and the first cane was crushed in October 1876. In the early 1880s, Dixon and Fielding converted to the vacuum pan system of sugar production, to increase efficiency.
By 1881, JC Dixon was one of the largest landholders on Buderim Mountain, having acquired the freehold of nearly and the leasehold of another , and was in partnership with John Fielding in the freehold of another and the mill site. By the mid-1880s he had acquired another of scrub land running down the southeast side of the mountain to Mountain Creek.