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The humble cup of tea has been consumed for centuries across the world for refreshment. It’s still a staple in many Queensland households, but have you ever stopped to consider the story behind our thirst for a ‘cuppa’? 

Tea drinking is something that came to Australia with early European settlers. Chinese migrants who flooded the goldfield across the country in the mid-19^th century also brought tea traditions with them. But it was British tea drinking practices that most influenced Australian tea habits.  

Britain – a tea-drinking nation 

The British have been drinking tea since the late 1600s, after adopting it from China and Japan. At the time, it was seen as an exotic indulgence—something only high-status consumers could typically afford. Along with the drink itself, Europeans also took inspiration from Asian tea culture, adopting the use of teapots and delicate porcelain teacups.

Over the next one hundred years tea became more widely consumed in Britain, so that by the late 1700s it was more of an everyday beverage; and by the early 1800s, tea was seen as a quintessentially British activity – part of the British identity – even though tea itself was still largely sourced from China until the mid-19^th century.  

Markman Ellis¹ , writing about the development of early British tea consumption, suggests that a combination of supply and demand helped turn tea drinking into a widespread fashion. On the supply side, tea flooded the market through the East India Company. On the demand side, curiosity about the drink, the social rituals surrounding tea drinking, and the practice of ‘tea sociability’ all played a role. By the 1870s, tea was accessible to almost everyone – even the poor working class and agricultural labourers – and was cheaper than beer.  

With tea both accessible and in vogue, it quickly became part of everyday life. And it wasn’t seen only as a refreshing beverage – tea was also viewed as a form of herbal remedy that cured things like stomach illness. Valued for its medicinal qualities, tea contains tannins—used by Joseph Lister in antiseptics – believed to combat dysentery and bacteria, while its caffeine provided both stimulation and relaxation.  Tea was even linked to a reduction in mortality rates. And for the temperance movement in both Britain and its colonies tea drinking was promoted as an alternative to alcohol – another health benefit. 

Tea service and social performance 

While not the only arbiter of class or status, material culture and social rituals offered a visible way to signal a person’s place in society – nowhere more publicly so than in the rituals of serving afternoon tea. The variety of tea, the teapots, cups and saucers tea was served in, the rituals and manners of the hostess in pouring and distributing – all very Bridgerton, all very constrained – were influenced by social standards and traditions.  

In 18^th and 19^th century Britain, society was highly structured and status conscious. Although social mobility was limited, any movement between classes depended on knowing, and being seen to follow, the accepted practices of one’s social sphere. 

The rituals of family dining and tea-taking were, and in some ways still are, shaped by material expressions of identity, particularly through tableware. Over time, dinner services and tea sets became increasingly decorative, used to signal “taste” and, in turn, to project social status and identity. 

This was equally as true in settler Australia where British practices were adapted within a colonial context.

Steeped in Status: Tea in Colonial Australia 

Just as in Britain, the rituals of tea drinking in 19^th century colonial Australia were used to express social status. Often associated with women’s domestic sphere, the tea wares used – and the observance of social etiquette in informal but public settings – signalled class and gentility. The decoration patterns chosen, along with makers’ marks on the base of teaware showing the manufacturer they were acquired from, clearly transmitted the affluence and taste of the owners.  

As Australia was less class constrained than Britain, 19^th century colonial society allowed for social mobility, particularly within the emerging middle class. In this more fluid environment, material culture became an important means of negotiating social identity and transmitting acquired class.  

Archaeologist Kate Quirk, who studied residents of a small 19^th century Queensland mining town, suggests that within the home, practices of gentility helped reinforce a family’s social identity. The responsibility for projecting this status often fell to women, enacted through public domestic rituals like taking tea.²  

Even early explorers, like Ludwig Leichhardt, who enjoyed ‘his damper and his tea sweetened with brown sugar, which are never missing at breakfast, lunch, or dinner’ acknowledged the appeal of tea as a form of refreshment³.  

Throughout the second half of the 19^th and into the early 20^th century, tea consumption in Queensland – the supposedly egalitarian society – was nevertheless very much influenced by class and identity. Whether you were a middle-class matron hosting guests in a mining town, an intrepid explorer quenching your thirst with a mug of sweet tea and  damper, or an ordinary Queenslander just enjoying a cup of tea at the kitchen table, the ways tea was served and consumed continued to reflect social position. And yet, over time, tea gradually shed much of this social signalling. What was once carefully staged as a marker of taste and status has become an everyday drink, enjoyed with little regard for class or display. But then again, taking a loved one to a modern high tea is a special way to show your love. 

Discover a stunning collection of teapots and teaware in Fragile and Forever: Ceramics from the Queensland Museum Collection, a free exhibition at Queensland Museum Kurilpa in Brisbane: museum.qld.gov.au/kurilpa/whats-on/fragile-and-forever

¹ Ellis, M. (2019). The British Way of Tea: Tea as an Object of Knowledge between Britain and China, 1690-1730. Curious encounters, 19-42.
² Quirk, K. (2007). Victorians in ‘Paradise’: gentility as social strategy in the archaeology of Colonial Australia.
³  Ludwig Leichhardt 18 October 1842, Memoirs of the Queensland Museum: Culture Series, 2013 7(1).