Coffee Shuttle One was built because the maths did not work. Harvesting roughly 100,000 coffee trees by hand could make an Australian crop impossible to sell, so Nat Jaques set out to change the harvest itself.

Working with a draughtsman and engineers at NQEA shipbuilders in Cairns, the idea became a pioneering, fully self-contained mechanical coffee harvester. By 1985 it could dislodge and collect the crop in one operation.

One person. One tree. Two seconds. Decades later, Coffee Shuttle One remains part of the working Mareeba plantation: not simply a museum piece, but a practical answer that helped Australian-grown coffee move forward.