Australia was once the highest per capita consumer of tea in the world, but we barely rate a mention as growers. Here I trace the secret history of growing tea in Australia.
Many of Australia’s First Nations people were ‘tea’ drinkers before the British colonised Australia in the 18th century. Among the native infusions favoured by Indigenous people were species of the genera Melaleuca and Leptospermum, commonly referred to as ‘tea trees’, as well as Smilax, often known as native sarsaparilla.
On board the First Fleet, however, was a quantity of tea we know and love from the camellia plant. With colonisation came a taste for a British-style cuppa, which led to Australians consuming the largest quantity of tea per capita in the world during the 19th century, largely sourced from China, with some from India and Indonesia, which was then controlled by the Dutch.
Despite this voracious thirst for tea, 19th century Australians did not attempt to grown their own supply at a commercial level until the 1880s, when four brothers — James, Herbert, Leonard and Sidney Cutten — landed at Bingil Bay in North Queensland and decided it would make a great site for a tea plantation. Unfortunately, thanks to a series of cyclones and a tidal wave that visited the region in the subsequent years, this did not work out for the four and the site was virtually abandoned as a tea-growing area until the mid-20th century.
By Federation, English immigrant James Griffiths had established himself as a successful purveyor of tea, coffee and chocolate through his brand Griffiths Brothers Tea and Coffee, which he ran with his brother John. He started growing tea at a farm in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne and first marketed the Australian-grown crop in the Traralgon Record newspaper on 15th January 1901: “… the broken Orange Pekoe was very choice, fresh and flavory; the Pekoe and Souchong also being of a good useful character.”
The high cost of labour soon saw the end of his commercial farm, however, and then two World Wars brought tea-growing experimentation in Australia to a standstill until the 1950s.
Modern tea
It was by chance that a botany enthusiast, Dr Allan Maruff, happened upon the legend of Bingil Bay. Maruff had migrated from India to Innisfail, Queensland, and found the climate akin to that of the tea-growing regions in his home country. After learning of the Cutten brothers’ pursuit, he set off in search of the lost tea plantation, discovering a swathe of half-wild plants thriving in the rainforest. He collected seeds and seedlings from the site and started a tea nursery, convinced of the viability of a tea plantation in Queensland.
Maruff purchased land in the Nerada Valley, at the foothills of the Atherton Tablelands, and started re-establishing the plantation. Dogged by the same issue as Griffiths – the high cost of labour – he developed a mechanical harvester with the help of local engineers and sought investment from Burns Philp to form a joint venture. Unfortunately he was unable to make a satisfactory return on investment, so ended up selling to a conglomerate known collectively as the Tea Estates of Australia (TEA), which had purchased land for tea nearby.
TEA combined the estates and experienced commercial success – you will know this today as the current site of Nerada Tea’s plantation.
Today, tea is still grown in Far North Queensland and, in fact, across Australia. Tasmania’s Tassie-T, run by Dr Gordon Brown and his wife Jane, has the honour of being the southernmost tea plantation in the world, while Madura Tea Estates in northern NSW marks the easternmost farm in Australia and Southern Forest Green Tea in Northcliffe, Western Australia, the furthest west.
In this new era, Australian tea growers have harnessed the ideas and technology of other tea-producing nations in the world to make harvest and production more efficient, with substantial investment from Japan and techniques acquired from established masters in India, China and Taiwan.
Read more in The Lost Plantation by RJ Taylor (1982).
This article originally appeared in AUSTCS enews 18 August 2020. Mailchimp no longer allows external links to the original newsletter.