Tucked away in the middle of a rainforest timber plantation on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast hinterland lies a thriving tea estate.
Father and son Brendon and Darryl Collins produce about one tonne of tea annually on their farm about 20 kilometres south-west of Maleny.
Arakai estate is made up of 12,000 tea bushes, grown in 5km of hedgerows.
“We went into the tea-making thing fairly — well very — naively thinking, ‘Oh this will be easy’. It certainly isn’t,” Darryl Collins said.
“We’re aiming to produce a very high quality, whole-leaf tea. I think we’re probably the only producers in Australia that do it.”
From trees to tea
Long before they began producing tea, the family grew trees.
Husband and wife Darryl and Lorraine Collins bought the 140-hectare property in 1999.
“I ran a cabinet timber business, and we bought this place primarily to establish plantations,” Darryl Collins said.
“Mostly local or north Queensland rainforest species like silver quandong, silky oaks, Queensland maple, white beech — all of the timbers that are traditionally used for fine furniture, or for boat building or for joinery work.”
“Basically what we’re doing is reproducing a rainforest, except that when you look at it, everything’s in rows. It won’t end up looking like that, by the time we’ve finished it will look like a rainforest.”
But when Mr Collins sold his timber business in 2004, he no longer had a need for the property.
“We were actually going to sell this place,” he said.
“And he [Brendon] very rightly said, ‘You’ll never get it again’. So, you know, we decided … we’ll keep it and we’ll see how we go.”
With time and space, on their hands — the father and son went searching for something else.
“We had … open paddocks and basically I had the desire to stay here and do something here,” Brendon Collins said.
“So we were looking for something different and something unique.”
Why tea?
Darryl Collins credits a Landline program he saw featuring a plantation in Western Australia with sparking an interest in pursuing tea.
The pair embarked on a fact-finding mission which took them to China and later Taiwan, to source machinery and share ideas with master tea producers.
“We sat down with them and told them what we wanted to do, and they basically shook their head and said that’s not how you do it,” Brendon Collins said.
“We went ahead anyway.
“You’re supposed to know what you’re going to grow before you plant but we did everything backwards.”
The plantation was built in three stages and took years of tending to before becoming productive.
“It took about five years of growing and pruning, and pruning, and pruning to get a really nice branching structure,” Brendon Collins said.
“After about five years we were able to do our first commercial harvest.”
To make harvesting easier, the pair came up with a contraption they’ve affectionately dubbed “the mighty bike harvester”.
“We’ve pushed that thing well over 1,000km up and down the rows,” Brendon Collins said.
“It would do the harvesting and the pruning, but yeah we’re glad to have upgraded a bit since then.”
Award-winning tea
Their very first commercial harvest back in 2015 took out the major prize at the Golden Leaf Awards — a national competition ranking the best in the business.
“Our teas are based on the oolong processing,” Brendon Collins said.
“What we’re after is a much more floral and sweet kind of tea than what most people are used to here in Australia.
“It’ll essentially wither for about 20 hours before we do any processing, and that’s just wilting the leaf and losing moisture.”
Despite only growing tea on their 160ha property, they’re able to produce one tonne of tea a year.
“We’ve sent tea all over the world,” Brendon Collins said.
“We’ve sent tea to Kazakhstan, sent tea to the Channel Islands, we’ve had some big customers through Europe and Canada, the US.”
The tea plantation keeps the pair busy day to day, and there are big plans for harnessing the value of the timber plantation into the future.
“I’m really just looking after the trees, to a certain degree,” Mr Collins said.
“There’ll be things that my kids might not ever even see harvested.”
Darryl Collins hopes he has created something that will last generations.
“The trend in farming these days is to give it to your next generation better than what you had, and that’s what we aim for,” he said.
“Having Brendon here as the next generation, it makes it even more important.
“We’re hopefully the first generation of a multi-generation farm.”
Watch ABC TV’s Landline at 12:30pm on Sunday or on ABC iview.
Stories from farms and country towns across Australia, delivered each Friday.
Posted , updated
