Nerada Tea

Australia's tea-growing history begins in 1882, when the Cutten brothers planted the country's first commercial tea at Bingil Bay in Far North Queensland, overlooking the Great Barrier Reef, an operation cyclones wiped out by the early 1900s. It was revived decades later by Dr. Allan Maruff, who migrated from India in the 1950s, found remnants of the abandoned Cutten plantation, propagated seedlings from them near Cairns, and then planted his own tea rows on land he bought in the Nerada Valley, in the foothills of the Atherton Tablelands.

Maruff partnered with the trading company Burns Philp in the 1960s to form Nerada Tea Estates and build Australia's first tea-processing factory; a rival venture, Tea Estates of Australia, later absorbed Nerada's assets and consolidated everything under the Nerada name by the 1970s. International growers J.A. Russell and James Finlay joined in the 1980s and 1990s, a modern processing facility opened in nearby Malanda in 1991, and the operation grew into what remains Australia's largest tea plantation, holding Rainforest Alliance certification since 2018 and producing more than 85 black, green, white and herbal products. The estate paused black tea harvesting in June 2023 as it shifts toward higher-value offerings, a notable pivot for a plantation built on more than a century of on-and-off Australian tea growing.