Drive the Pacific Highway around Coffs Harbour and the banana is still the local landmark. The industry behind it has moved to the far north of Queensland.
Where it started
The Australian Banana Growers’ Council, the industry’s national peak body,
keeps the history on its own site. Banana plants arrived in Australia in the 1800s, brought
first by Chinese migrants. Commercial plantations followed: Chinese workers from the
goldfields established them around Cooktown, Port Douglas, Cairns, Innisfail and Tully in the
1880s, and then, in the council’s words, In 1891, Herman Reich started plantations
in Coffs Harbour and surrounding areas in New South Wales from the plants first brought to
Queensland.
What followed is stated just as plainly: Northern New South Wales was the home of
the first major commercial banana plantations in Australia and is still an important growing
region
, and The Coffs Harbour area and further north along the far north coast of
NSW were the main growing regions for bananas in Australia through the 1900s, up until the late
1900s when north Queensland began to increase production.
The council also records who did the growing, and it is a genuinely local piece of
heritage: alongside Chinese and Italian farmers in the far north, it names Indian Sikh
families north of Coffs Harbour, around Woolgoolga
, and says the Italian and Sikh
communities continue to be actively involved in growing bananas across
Australia
.
Where it is now
The council’s current industry figures put Australian production at approximately 369,000 tonnes of fresh bananas in 2024/25, valued at $719.4 million. The geography is lopsided.
| Region | Share of production |
|---|---|
| Far North Queensland (Cassowary Coast, Atherton Tablelands, Lakeland) | 94% |
| Mid North and Northern New South Wales | 4% |
| Carnarvon, Western Australia | 2% |
| Northern Territory and south-east Queensland combined | under 1% |
Apply the 4 per cent to the national tonnage and the Mid North and Northern NSW crop comes to roughly 14,800 tonnes. That is our arithmetic on the council’s own published share and total, and it is indicative rather than exact.
The growing country the council describes for NSW runs from Murwillumbah and the Tweed near
the Queensland border, west to Lismore and south to Ballina, and then, further south,
from Woolgoolga, north of Coffs Harbour, down to Stuart’s Point which is south of
Nambucca Heads
. That second stretch is this masthead’s patch almost exactly.
The crop that replaced it
Here is the comparison that makes the point, and both halves come from industry sources.
We reported in July that the Australian blueberry crop was worth $505.1 million at 27,540 tonnes for the year ending June 2024, and that New South Wales grew about 86 per cent of it, with the national handbook centring that production on Coffs Harbour.
| Crop | National value | National tonnes | NSW share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bananas (2024/25) | $719.4m | ~369,000 | 4% |
| Blueberries (year to June 2024) | $505.1m | 27,540 | ~86% |
Read across those two rows. New South Wales grows about 23,575 tonnes of blueberries and, on our arithmetic above, roughly 14,800 tonnes of bananas. The state now grows more blueberries by weight than bananas, in the region that invented the Australian banana industry. On value the gap is far wider again, though that comparison needs a caveat we will make in a moment.
Two honest qualifications. The figures are from different sources and different data years, bananas for 2024/25 and blueberries for the year to June 2024, so they are a fair picture rather than a matched pair. And applying a production share to a national value assumes the per-tonne value is similar across regions, which we have not established, so we give the weight comparison as the firmer one and leave the value comparison as directional.
What the numbers do not say, and one thing they do
Our reading, offered as opinion on the sourced facts above. The temptation is to read this as decline, and it is not quite that. The council still calls northern NSW “an important growing region”, the national crop grew rather than shrank as it moved north, and the region did not lose horticulture, it changed crop. Whatever else the last thirty years did here, the land is still farmed intensively and is now the centre of a different national industry.
What did change is concentration risk, and it changed in both directions at once. A region holding 4 per cent of a national crop is insulated from that crop’s bad years. A region holding 86 per cent of a different one is not. The blueberry figures we published in July showed a crop that grew 36 per cent in a single year; a number that can move that far up can move down.
One structural fact is worth keeping in view alongside all of this, because it applies to the whole industry rather than to any region: the council states that all fresh bananas available in Australia are grown here, with no imports, because of the plant pest and disease threats imports would carry. An industry with no import competition is unusually exposed to its own biosecurity, which is why so much of the council’s published material is about exactly that. For a region growing 4 per cent of the crop, that is somebody else’s emergency most of the time. It has not always been.