"…and he sang as he looked at his old
billy boiling, Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?"
Early Australian settlers brewed their tea in a billy. They
made it this way out of necessity – modern Australians do it
simply because they love it.
A billy is a metal can with a wire handle. You fill your billy
with water, and suspend it over a fire. When the water boils, you
remove the can from the fire, add a handful of tea leaves, then
leave it to brew for a few minutes.
Now comes the clever bit. To get the tea leaves to sink to the
bottom, you swing the billy back and forth at arm's length. You
need a wide, purposeful swing. A hesitant action just gives you a
painful scalding.
Finally the tea is poured into metal mugs. For a modern effect
you can add milk and sugar, although it's unlikely the early
settlers had access to either.
A variation is to add a few scented eucalyptus leaves with the
tea.
[Extract
from History & Tradition]
Private trade
The East India Company rewarded its crews
according to results. If no tea was landed, no one got paid. And
if a sailor was shipwrecked on some foreign shore…well, that
was tough.
Bringing home the cargo was everything. Commitment to that
goal was reinforced by allowing officers a small volume of
‘private trade’. Private trade was cargo that the officers
could buy and sell on their own behalf. The goods had to be
non-perishable because they were stowed in the lower parts of the
ship, below the level where it was safe to store tea.
Officers extracted maximum value from their private trade
allowance by importing fine Chinese porcelain. It was a product
that was of great value and in great demand.
The smuggling conspiracy
Taxation and smuggling go hand-in-hand. The
higher the tax, the greater the profits from evasion. And so it
was with tea in eighteenth-century Britain.
No one knows how much tea was imported illegally. Landing a
boatload of tea on some deserted shoreline was an easy way to
make a quick profit – so easy that whole communities became
involved in the trade.
Most smuggled tea originated in the Netherlands. A single trip
across the North Sea could net a fortune that was big enough to
share round – indeed it had to be, to buy the silence of
everyone involved.
