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Australians were the world's second highest consumers of tea per capita during the 1930s. After losing access to its main supplier, the Dutch East Indies, with the outbreak of the Pacific War, the Commonwealth of Australia established a Tea Control Board and later a coupon‐based tea rationing scheme. Drawing upon archival sources, this article examines the regulation of the supply of tea in Australia until 1955. Rationing delivered reduced amounts of tea to Australians at heavily discounted prices, maintaining a trend towards reduced tea consumption that had begun in the early 1930s.

The growing of tobacco was one of the most tightly regulated industries in Australia, until deregulation in 1995. Commonwealth regulations controlled the area cultivated with tobacco, the number of growers (ie quota holders) and marketing arrangements for tobacco leaf. This paper begins by outlining the nature and historical development of controls in the tobacco growing industry, and discusses how the Commonwealth government removed the industry's regulatory and protective framework in 1995. The third part of the paper examines how deregulation has impacted upon the Mareeba-Dimbulah Irrigation Area, Far North Queensland, where small farmers produced sixty per cent of Australia's tobacco in 1995. The discussion will show that the agricultural landscape once dominated by tobacco has been transformed, as local farmers abandoned growing tobacco in favour of sugar cane, avocadoes, mangoes, macadamia nuts and other small vegetable crops (eg navy beans, pumpkins). Tobacco, once promoted by the Queensland government as a crop to facilitate closer settlement in the Mareeba-Dimbulah Irrigation Area, will have almost vanished from the landscape by 2002.

Before 1950, Australians were the world's highest consumers of tea per capita. This book tells the story of how tea emerged as the national beverage in the Australian colonies during the nineteenth century, and explores why Australians consumed so much of the beverage for so long. Special attention is devoted to analysing the evolution of the Australian tea distribution network, especially the marketing strategies used by the tea traders to promote their products. Other topics examined here include the development of tea rituals such as afternoon tea and high tea and their role in Australian s

Australia is currently the second largest exporter of raw sugar after Brazil, and one of the world's top five sugar exporters. This book tells the story of how the Australian cane sugar industry grew into a major global supplier of sugar, how it became a significant innovator in the technology associated with the growing and harvesting of sugar cane as well as the production and transport of sugar. It describes the spread of sugar cane growing along the north-eastern coast of Australia during the late nineteenth century, and how subsequent twentieth-century expansions were tightly regulated in

Given recent concerns about the degradation of coral reef ecosystems world-wide, we investigated the environmental history of the Great Barrier Reef of Australia using qualitative methods. In particular, we used archival and oral history sources to reconstruct changes in coral reefs, islands and marine wildlife species for the period 1860—1970 and we evaluated the potential of qualitative methods to inform marine environmental research. Here, we argue that qualitative research offers a valuable means of reconstructing environmental changes, their drivers and their historical contexts. However, we found that qualitative methods also had important limitations. Hence we identify strategies for addressing those challenges and we suggest criteria for ensuring the accuracy and rigor of qualitative sources in marine environmental research. Overall, we argue that qualitative methods offer distinctive insights into the environmental history of the Great Barrier Reef, and that qualitative reconstructions can act as important triggers for conservation of marine ecosystems.

The historical exploitation of marine resources in Queensland has only been partially documented. In particular, the history of the commercial fishing of dugongs and marine turtles has received comparatively little scholarly attention. Since European settlement in Queensland, various human activities have exploited these resources. We present documentary and oral history evidence of the scale of those industries. Based on extensive archival and oral history research, we argue that diverse fishing practices occurred and that the sustained exploitation of dugongs, green turtles, and hawksbill turtles led to observable declines in the numbers of these animals – now species of conservation concern.