The tea of the Australian bush: loose black tea thrown into a tin billy of rolling-boiling water over an open fire, swung in a circle to settle the leaves, and poured into enamel mugs under a sky with no roof to it
Origin: Australian Pastoral Interior
From the journey of Tea.
Billy tea is the tea of the Australian interior: of the droving routes, the shearing sheds, the goldfields of the 1850s, and the long campsites of the swagmen who walked the stock routes of New South Wales and Queensland with their swags rolled over their shoulders and their billies hanging from the end of a stick. The billy is simply a tin or enamel can with a wire handle, used to boil water over an open fire for both cooking and brewing, and its association with Australian outdoor life is so total that it entered the national mythology through Banjo Paterson's 'Waltzing Matilda' (1895), in which the swagman 'sat and waited while his billy boiled' by the coolabah tree. The tea brewed in it is not the careful, calibrated preparation of a Kyoto tea house or a Darjeeling estate: it is direct, strong, slightly smoky from the fire, and consumed without ceremony from an enamel or tin mug that may also have served as a soup bowl the previous night. The technique of swinging the billy in a wide vertical circle to settle the tea leaves at the bottom (using centrifugal force rather than a strainer) is one of the genuinely original contributions of Australian bush culture to the world's tea traditions. Opinions remain divided on whether a gum leaf or two added to the boiling water is authentic character or sentimental romanticising; the debate has been going on since the gold rushes. A square of condensed milk squeezed from a tube, or white sugar from a paper sack, is the sweetening; black, the drink of those who mean it.
At home, billy tea can be made in a saucepan or a camping-style tin pot for reasonable authenticity. The result will not have the smokiness of an open fire, but the directness and strength of the preparation is unchanged. Billy tea is best drunk outside. It is not improved by fine china. In the words of the bush tradition, it is 'a man's drink in a man's country', an assessment that has aged in interesting ways but whose underlying truth (that this tea was made for people doing hard physical work in unforgiving conditions) still applies when you are miles from a kettle and the fire is the only thing between you and the cold.
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