Anzac Day on 25 April wouldn’t be the same without NZ, and Aotearoa New Zealand wouldn’t be the same without a cuppa.
It’s fitting that you can’t spell Aotearoa without ‘tea’ – in the 19th century, New Zealand once rivalled Australia as the highest per capita consumer of tea in the world. But while Australia inherited its tea culture from the British when they made it a penal colony, New Zealand owes its tea-drinking habits to British whalers, sealers and missionaries who found themselves in the country in the late 18th and early 19th century.
Tea was also an accidental icon of World War I. New Zealanders discovered that the one-pound tin of Bell Tea, a NZ brand established in 1898, was exactly the right dimensions to be sent to troops overseas at a special postal rate. Emptied out and stuffed with food and other items, the tins became the symbol of NZ care packages.
Importantly, the troops did enjoy the odd cuppa on the front lines. A journal entry by Norman Gray, who fought on the Western Front over 1916-17, indicates how fortifying tea could be:
We were drenched to the bone, utterly fagged after sixty hours of almost continuous work… Just on the ridge, before we reached our site, we were greeted by the YMCA canteen, a cup of tea and two packets of biscuits ready for every man.
Throughout the 20th century, New Zealand flirted with commercial tea crops – at one stage, the New Zealand Tea Company represented a co-operative of about 100 farmers – but high UV levels and severe frosts led to a failed attempt to grow the Yabukita varietal for the Japanese tea market.
However, in 1996 Hamilton resident Vincent Chen noticed that camellias grew well in the area. He hand-selected and imported 1,500 Camellia sinensis plants from Taiwan to find out if growing tea there would be viable. Famously, just 130 plants survived quarantine. Those strong specimens are now the forebears of the 1.2 million plants that make up the Zealong estate (pictured), NZ’s first commercial tea plantation, and the brand’s award-winning tea.
So this Anzac Day, don’t forget the NZ when you nibble your biscuits and sink that bracing cup of tea.
Resources:
- New Zealand Geographic
- New Zealand History
- The Great Adventure: New Zealand Soldiers Describe the First World War edited by Jock Phillips et al (Allen and Unwin, 1988)
This article originally appeared in AUSTCS enews 23 April 2024.