HOW the oil from the humble native tea tree became a world-wide natural remedy used the world over, and how the northern NSW-born label became an iconic name, is one of Australian agribusiness’ most colourful success stories.
Now the Thursday Plantation label is as successful as ever – opening and dominating new global markets as well as launching cutting-edge products.
At the same time its founders, who sold their NSW-born company in 2007 for $40 million, continue to break new ground in the natural health game, this time in India working with thousands of farmers to cultivate organic farmland.
Christopher and Lynda Dean say the company, Organic India, offers true wellness solutions in all forms – herbs, organic foods, advice on healthy living and detoxing practices.
The backbone is tulsi tea made from a basil considered the Queen of Herbs in India, with properties that boost immunity and reduce stress.
If anybody can recognise a crop with potential, and bring it to the people, it is Christopher Dean.
It was close to 40 years ago when he decided to grow and market tea tree oil, based on the case of his infected toenail, contracted while trekking in Africa, which doctors from around the world couldn’t heal.
It is now folklore how a few drops of tea tree oil, produced by his stepfather Eric White in Australia, cured it.
Mr White had his own tea tree oil story, which centres around a funnel web spider bite.
When he arrived in Sydney as a new migrant in 1961, he lived next door to a research chemist Brian Small, who rushed him to hospital with the bite, telling him along the way about how tea tree oil neutralised venom.
Both men wished they had some on hand that day and a seed was planted in their minds.
Mr Small did the chemistry and research and Mr White developed the practical field work and farming techniques.
He chose wetlands at Bungawalbyn in the Northern Rivers for his first crops of Melaleuca alternifolia.
The name tea tree came from early British explorers who brewed the plant for a cuppa when they ran out of rations.
After four years of painstaking research and lobbying, a crown lease was granted at Bungalwyn.
It arrived on a Thursday in 1976, and Thursday Plantation was born.
Mr Dean took the reigns by the 1980s, producing from a traditional bush cutting method on a farm with no power or running water that was regularly cut off by floods for weeks at a time.
The Deans sold their tea tree oil at local markets where phenomenal feedback started to roll in.
“Sundry rashes, fungal infections and longstanding conditions were cleared in days, many of which had hung around for years resisting treatments,” Mr Dean said.
The Deans eventually abandoned the wetland farm and replanted run-down coastal cane country at Ballina, where they also set up a distilling and packaging plant.
That site today includes a tourist facility with a tea tree maze and rainforest walk, shop, café and information centre which employs 57 people.
Its 68-hectare farm is still producing tea tree oil for the label.
The label today needs 50 tonnes of oil, sourced from other Northern Rivers growers.
