Bruce Chatwin in Songlines, this gem of a book (1987), has exquisitely recounted how the Australian Aborigines turned the whole continent into their museum, with their history told to them by every turn in the landscape.
Hence, it will come as little surprise if the same native people of Australia provided their very first European visitors, in the late 1760s — Captain James Cook and his crew of the Endeavour — with samples of the tea tree and recommendations to use it for health purposes. On board the Endeavour, it received its name as tea tree, for the teas leaves provided them with — and that name held.
Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist in this expedition, once back in London, hired five artists to depict the species brought to England and entrusted his fellow-botanist in the expedition, Daniel Solander, with their descriptions.
However, the first botanical accounts of the tea tree had to await the beginning of the twentieth century: they were provided from Australia in 1905 by two scientists, J. H. Maiden and E. Betsche — earlier on they had likewise written the first scientific report on the macadamia tree.
The native habitat of the tea-tree is low-lying, swampy, subtropical, coastal ground around the Clarence and Richmond Rivers in northeastern New South Wales and southern Queensland. It grows 3 to 8 m (10-25 ft) high and is shrub-like.
The essential oil was distilled for the first time in 1925 and its antiseptic, antibacterial and antifungal effects were described and published in dental medicine and medicine journals. Tea tree oil — in somewhat like manner as oil of cloves — became a standard antiseptic agent for surgery, especially for dental surgery. There are quite a few other therapeutic uses — later about these.
My personal acquaintance with tea tree oil stems from a very common condition. Accounting for half of all nail and integumentary infections, known by the acronym TUDO, is a fungal infection of the nail bed most often appearing first on the great toe and more prevalent in men and those over the age of 60. About 10 % of the American population is afflicted. A podiatrist recommended that I use it and the results were gratifying, I was finally able to at least control that fungus.
The essential oil from the tea tree has many other applications, against a wide diversity of bacteria and even some viruses, that of the common cold for example. I find it eerie that the recommendations of tribesmen to Captain Cook, three and a half centuries ago, jibe with the findings today of physicians and pharmacologists. Claude Lévi-Strauss, who published The Savage Mind in 1966, would not have been unduly surprised — nor Bruce Chatwin for that matter.