01
Coffee Growing Started on Tablelands 79 Years Ago
An early account of coffee growing on the Tablelands, preserving the regional history that preceded the Jaques family’s modern revival.
FOUR GENERATIONS · TWO CONTINENTS
Coffee was never the easy road.
Jaques Coffee began in the fields beneath Kilimanjaro, crossed an ocean and took root again in Mareeba. Along the way came upheaval, two devastating setbacks, a machine no one in Australia had built before and a family that had the passion to keep going!
The Jaques family story
From Kilimanjaro to Mareeba.
Watch the story of the family, the coffee and the determination to begin again.
THE LONG VERSION
Land lost. Land found. A craft carried forward.
This is a story of ideas built from scratch, setbacks that might have ended them and a family that put another seedling in the ground to keep the dream alive.
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EAST AFRICA · BEFORE 1978
Beneath Kilimanjaro.
After the Second World War, Bill and Anne Jaques built a farming life in Tanzania, growing coffee and pyrethrum beneath Mount Kilimanjaro. Nat grew up there. Linda was raised in a tea-growing family in Kenya. Together, Nat and Linda carried a practical knowledge of agriculture—and a life already shaped by coffee—to Australia.
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1978—79
A new country. Familiar ground.
Nat and Linda left East Africa in late 1978 and travelled Australia in a ute with a piggy-back camper. In 1979 they reached Far North Queensland. Mareeba’s warm days, distinct dry season and coffee-growing latitude felt like the place to begin again.
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1980
Jaques Brothers Coffee takes root.
Richard and Mariolyn joined Nat and Linda as the first plantation was established near Mareeba. Around 100,000 Arabica trees were planted. Those trees would need five or six years before a commercial crop, but another problem was already clear: a harvest that had required hundreds of workers in Tanzania could not be viable here.
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1985
An impossible harvest, re-engineered.
Working with a draughtsman and engineers at NQEA shipbuilders in Cairns, Nat developed Coffee Shuttle One—a pioneering, fully self-contained mechanical coffee harvester. The machine helped remove one of the biggest barriers to growing coffee commercially in Australia.
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1986
Everything ready. Then everything gone.
Roughly 100 tonnes of coffee stood ready on the trees. With interest rates reaching 22 per cent, the bank foreclosed before the crop could be harvested. The plantation was sold and the family walked away from years of work.
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AFTER 1986
Planting again beside Emerald Creek.
Nat and Linda secured the property that remains the home of Jaques Coffee. Linda returned to full-time nursing while Nat worked and rebuilt the farm. Jason and Robert grew up helping establish the new fields, one seedling at a time.
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1995—96
Fifty thousand trees lost.
During the papaya fruit fly eradication program, government spraying damaged the plantation. The family says all 50,000 young trees were lost. Another nursery was raised, another field was planted and a long court battle ultimately found in favour of the affected growers.
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2005
The farm gate opens.
Jason and Robert helped build a small café and farm-gate operation beside the roasting shed. People could taste Australian-grown coffee where it was grown, take a bag home and later order directly online. Provenance became a relationship, not simply a line on a label.
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TODAY
Still family. Still Mareeba.
Approximately 85,000 productive Arabica trees now surround the processing plant, roastery and packing operation. Growing, harvesting, wet processing, roasting and dispatch remain connected on the same working plantation.
AUSTRALIAN INGENUITY
The machine behind the next chapter.
Coffee Shuttle One was not built as a showpiece. It was built because the numbers did not work.
Nat’s idea began with machines that swept beaches and streets. A New Zealand berry picker came first, but it could not remove enough fruit. So Nat and a Cairns engineering team designed something for coffee: one machine that could dislodge and collect the crop in a single operation.
It helped turn harvest from bottleneck into possibility. It remains part of the working plantation today.
One person. One tree. Two seconds.MEET COFFEE SHUTTLE ONE
- TREES IN THE FIRST PLANTING
- ≈100K
- A crop too large to pick economically by hand.
- A NEW HARVEST BEGINS
- 1985
- Coffee Shuttle One enters the Jaques story.
- PERSON
- 1
- The machine was designed to transform the labour equation.
- ONE TREE
- 2 SEC
- The measure that became part of plantation folklore.
FROM THE NEWSPAPER ARCHIVE
The idea was news before it was coffee.
Long before Australian-grown coffee felt plausible, local newspapers documented the wager: new fields, imported seedlings, kilometres of irrigation and a commercial model that depended on solving the harvest.
OPEN ORIGINAL SCAN
02
Australian Coffee Makes a Comeback
The young trees, the new plantation and an industry attempting to return after decades constrained by labour cost and frost.
03
Coffee Soon From This N.Q. Farm
A public glimpse of the plan to return coffee to commercial production in North Queensland.
04
Coffee Project in Balance / DPI Backs Coffee Project
Two reports place doubt and support side by side. Labour, mechanisation and the economics of a new Australian industry were already the central questions.
05
A Pioneering Family Gets a Coffee Break
Linda and Nat Jaques, baby Jason and newly planted fields: a portrait of the family before the first commercial harvest.