Our Story

Australia's tea story begins at Bingil Bay, a pocket of lush tropical rainforest looking out over the Great Barrier Reef in Far North Queensland. In 1882, the four Cutten brothers come ashore, see what this country could grow, and apply for a land grant.

Four years later they plant Australia's first commercial tea plantation, alongside coffee, spices and tropical fruit. For three decades it holds, through cyclone after cyclone.

Then in 1918 an enormous cyclone crosses the coast with a tidal wave behind it. Nearly forty years of work is swept away, and the Cutten brothers' empire with it.

Dr Allan Maruff arrives from India in the early 1950s and settles in Innisfail, near Cairns. The lush tropical country reminds him of the tea-growing regions he left behind, and the botanist in him can't let the thought go.

Then he hears about the Cuttens' lost plantation, and goes looking for it.

Deep in the rainforest he finds tea plants still standing, some fifteen metres tall, decades after the wave took everything around them. He gathers hundreds of seeds and seedlings from the undergrowth and takes them back to Innisfail to start a nursery.

With those seedlings he plants the first row of tea in the Nerada Valley, across 130 hectares in the foothills of the Atherton Tablelands.

Maruff unfortunately can't get the prices he needs to keep going, and the business closes.

In a fortunate turn, Tea Estates of Australia buys the Nerada Estate's assets, combines two plantations, and in the 1970s launches a new brand into the Queensland market. Nerada Tea.

Nerada quickly becomes a household staple, and advances in growing, processing and packing help drive the biggest boom Australian tea has ever seen, right through the 1980s.

Two internationally renowned growers, JA Russell and James Finlay, then establish a plantation on the Atherton Tablelands and enter a joint venture with TEA. Together they build a highly efficient processing factory at Malanda, opened in 1991 by Queensland Premier Wayne Goss. A Brisbane packing factory quickly follows.

Nerada launches Organics, a full range of certified organic teas and herbal infusions, at a time when organic is still a niche word on an Australian supermarket shelf and wellness tea barely exists as a category.

The idea is simple. Do it the natural way, and don't compromise the cup. Pure organic green and white teas sit alongside camomile, chai, peppermint and ginger, lemon and ginger, rooibos and vanilla, and rosehip, several of them Fairtrade certified, all built from the best organic leaf.

It finds its people quickly, and it keeps them. Thirty years on, Nerada Organics is still on shelves in every major retailer in the country.

The looking never really stopped. Where the Cuttens cleared rainforest and Maruff went hunting for what was left of it, we now go a long way in a different direction, through the handful of places in the world that get the altitude, the rainfall and the timing right, tasting a great deal more leaf than ever makes it into a tin.

What we bring home has grown from five teas to more than eighty-five, and it had to, because a morning cup and a nine o'clock cup were never the same thing and neither are any two households. Black, green and white, herbal infusions and rooibos, so the tin on your shelf is the one you actually wanted.

More than fifty years in Australian kitchens, voted Australia's favourite black tea seven years running as awarded by Canstar, and we're looking forward to what the next fifty years bring.