Macadamia History

The macadamia nut originated from Australia where it grows in the rainforests of the eastern coastal areas of the Northern Rivers district of New South Wales and South East Queensland. The trees have long been known to the native Australian Aborigines who called the macadamia trees ‘kindal kindal’ and feasted on the nuts in the winter. The nut was known as ‘Baphal’s Nut’ after an aboriginal legend of a man named Baphal who looked after their Mountain land. In the legend, Baphal was injured and the animals brought him macadamia nuts for food and burned the leaves from the tree to signal help from his tribe. They named the mountain, his lizard companion and the nuts he ate all after Baphal. The nut was discovered by British colonists in Queensland in 1857. Walter Hill (Director of the Botany Garden in Brisbane) and Baron Ferdinand von Mueller (father of Australian botany and Royal Botanist in Melbourne at the time) had been traveling on a botanical expedition when Hill found one of the nuts, cracked it open with a vise, and planted the seed. He is credited with planting the ‘first’ tree and Mueller is credited with naming the tree after Scotsman John Macadam, a friend, physician, and member of the Philosophical Institute of Victoria.

The first known macadamia orchard was planted in 1890 on Frederickson Estate in New South Wales and consisted of 250 trees. Development in Australia took place in the 1940’s to the 1960’s, and in 1963 they had the first substantial move towards commercial production in their native country when Colonial Sugar Refining Co. Ltd. decided to establish orchards. Since 1970, they were heavily cultivated and hybrids were grown from seeds and grafting. Australia remains one of the world’s major producers.

Macadamia nuts were introduced to Hawaii in 1882, but it was William Herbert Purvis who gathered them and brought them to Hawaii’s Big Island. They were grown to be firmly established in the 1930’s as a commercial crop. They are grown in Australia, Brazil, Israel, Thailand, United States (Hawaii and California), Kenya, Malawi, Swaziland, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Costa Rica, New Zealand and Guatemala. The single largest planting is on 3,700 acres in South Africa, which has made them the top producer.