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ORIGINAL REPORTING · PRESERVED
The idea was news before it was coffee.
Original newspaper reports follow the Jaques family’s Australian coffee story: early planting, pioneering harvesters, the first local brews and the challenges that followed.
THE JAQUES NEWSPAPER ARCHIVE
44 original scans. The complete archive.
Browse all 44 archive entries in their original order. Select a thumbnail or Open original scan to read the full PDF in a new tab.
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Australian Coffee makes comeback
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Coffee Soon from this NQ farm
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Coffee Project in Balance and DPI backs coffee project
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World-wide Weekly and A pioneering family gets a coffee break
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Beer Break for Coffee Men
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Trial gives Tableland a coffee break
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Partnerships offered in Mareeba coffee
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Checking the Coffee Trees
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First Coffee Harvester for Tableland Brothers
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Coffee Picker proves a success
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$70,000 Dollar Import from NZ
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Does the Work of hundreds of hands
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High Tech Coffee in the tablelands
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Future of coffee assured in NQ
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Coffee is shaping up as attractive crop in the north
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Quality Coffee from Mareeba
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Brothers show how Australia can be major coffee producer
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Coffee picker proves a success
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An Awful lot of coffee in Mareeba
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First coffee in 50 years in September
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Testing the Local Brew and Tenni group tour Tableland
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It's the end of coffee drought
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Coffee farming returns after 50 years
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Mareeba coffee growers aim for national market
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We will soon be drinking Aussie coffee
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Coffee party launches Mareeba brew and Coffee factory opens
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Spreading the taste
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Local coffee popular
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Our new coffee may give rivals grounds for complaint
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Coffee - brewing up a sweet aroma of success
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Mareeba Coffee makes an impact
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Special coffee official launch
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Mareeba coffee to be sold state wide
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Hawaiian coffee growers to study Mareeba company
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US experts say Tableland coffee a world winner
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Hawaiian delegation on tour of Jaques coffee plantation
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Resurgence in coffee interest in the north
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Councillors get coffee treat
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Price rise good news for coffee growers - A coffee storm brewing
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Coffee grower for sale - Tenders soon for insolvent FNQ pioneer
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New Coffee Shuttle 1 on first voyage
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Persistence pays off for Tableland coffee grower
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Pioneering a new northern industry
OPEN ORIGINAL SCANREADING THE RECORD
What the clippings capture.
The archive matters because it shows the risk before hindsight made the outcome look inevitable.
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EARLY TABLELANDS INDUSTRY
An industry with unfinished business.
Coffee had been grown on the Atherton Tablelands before the Jaques family arrived. The archive gives that earlier chapter a place in the story and records why commercial production later faded.
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1979
A commercial return is proposed.
The reporting follows a new plantation taking shape: land, seedlings, irrigation and processing plans assembled around the conviction that Australian coffee could return at meaningful scale.
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OCTOBER 1979
The economics are challenged.
One report questioned whether labour costs would overwhelm the project; another recorded Department of Primary Industries support. Both point to mechanised harvesting as the problem the venture had to solve.
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1985
The missing machine arrives.
Coffee Shuttle One became the family’s engineering answer: a pioneering, fully self-contained mechanical harvester developed for coffee with a Cairns team.