Is Tea Grown in Australia? The Real Answer

Is Tea Actually Grown in Australia?

Yes. Tea has been grown commercially in Australia since the 1950s, almost all of it in Far North Queensland. But the amount is tiny, and most of the tea sitting in Australian pantries was grown somewhere else, even when the box has a kangaroo on it.

Here is what is actually happening.

Australia grows tea, just not much of it

Camellia sinensis, the plant every black, green, white and oolong tea comes from, needs heat, high rainfall and acidic well-drained soil. A handful of places in Australia deliver all three.

The biggest by a distance is Nerada, on the Atherton Tablelands near Malanda in Far North Queensland. The estate covers more than 1,100 acres and typically harvests over 6.6 million kilograms of fresh leaf, which is processed into around 1.5 million kilograms of black tea a year. Nerada accounts for roughly 95 per cent of all tea grown in Australia and was the first Australian agricultural business to earn Rainforest Alliance certification.

After that, the list gets short fast.

• Daintree Tea grows black tea on the Cubbagudta Plantation at Diwan, in the Daintree Rainforest. The plantation was established in 1978 by the Nicholas family, who still run it. Destinationdaintree
• Madura Tea Estates near Murwillumbah in northern New South Wales cultivates around 250,000 tea bushes, though the leaf is often blended with Sri Lankan tea before it reaches the shelf. Tea Journey
• Arakai Estate at Bellthorpe in Queensland uses Taiwanese processing methods to produce green and black teas. 
• Nucifora near Innisfail grows black tea across roughly 150 acres with no pesticides.
• In south-west Victoria, Two Rivers and the Alpine Tea Company grow green tea for the Japanese company ITO EN. Tea Journey

That is essentially the industry. A few thousand acres in a country of 7.7 million square kilometres.

The bit that trips everyone up

Walk down a supermarket tea aisle and you will see plenty of Australian branding. Very little of it means the leaf was grown here.

Australia has three different country of origin claims and they are not interchangeable:

• Product of Australia is the strongest. Each significant ingredient must be Australian and virtually all processing must happen here. Australian Made
• Australian Grown works similarly for the growing side.
• Made in Australia is the loose one. It only requires that the product underwent its last substantial transformation in Australia. The tea leaf itself can be grown anywhere. O F Packaging

So a tea blended and bagged in a factory in Melbourne, using leaf from Kenya, Sri Lanka and India, can legitimately be labelled Made in Australia. Nothing dodgy about it. It is just not the same claim as Australian grown, and most people read it as if it were.

The ACCC enforces these rules and it is illegal to mislead consumers about where food comes from, so the information is always on the pack. It is usually on the back, in small type, under the bar chart showing the percentage of Australian ingredients. industry

Why Australia never became a tea country

Two reasons, mostly.

Climate. Tea wants consistent tropical heat and heavy, evenly spread rainfall. Australia is largely dry. The pockets that work are in the wet tropics of Queensland and a few subtropical corners of northern New South Wales.

Labour. Tea is traditionally hand-picked, two leaves and a bud at a time. Australian wages make that unviable at commercial scale. The Australian industry only exists at all because of mechanical harvesting, which Dr Allan Maruff developed with local engineers in the 1960s after reviving tea growing in the Nerada Valley.

There is a nice bit of history here too. The Cutten brothers planted tea near Mission Beach in the 1880s, and the plantation was destroyed by a cyclone in 1918. Decades later Maruff went into the rainforest, found the surviving plants growing up to 15 metres tall, collected seeds and seedlings, and started a nursery behind his surgery. Almost every tea bush growing commercially in Australia today traces back to that expedition. World Tea NewsStraighttothesource

How to tell if your tea is actually Australian grown

1. Turn the box over. Front of pack is marketing. Back of pack is regulated.
2. Look for "grown" not "made". Made in Australia tells you where it was processed and packed, not where it was farmed.
3. Check the percentage bar. Priority foods carry a bar chart showing the proportion of Australian ingredients.
4. Look for a named estate. Australian-grown tea usually says so loudly, because it is rare and it is expensive.
5. Be careful with blends. A tea can contain some Australian leaf and still be mostly imported.

Where MOOD sits

Our English Breakfast, Jolly Good, is made with black tea grown in the Daintree in Far North Queensland. Not blended with imported leaf, not packed here from tea grown elsewhere. Grown here.

Our four herbal blends are a different story and we will not pretend otherwise. Ingredients like rooibos, hibiscus and ashwagandha do not grow commercially in Australia, so those are sourced internationally and blended and packed here. That is honest labelling rather than a marketing line.

If you want to taste what Australian-grown black tea actually tastes like, start here.