It's not unusual to hear of futures and fortunes being read from tea leaves, but one local academic is using tea to go back and retrace the history of Australia.

Tea has played a vital role in a number of crucial points in world history. The mighty John Company and the Dutch East Indies Company made worldwide affiliations and friendships based on tea trading with China. More recently events like the Boston Tea Party reveal the incredible impact tea can have on history.

In her thesis, Macquarie University PhD student Susie Khamis is looking at how tea came to Australia, its impact and the way it reflects Australian history.

"I feel like I'm writing the history of Australia through Bushells tea," Khamis says. "It sounds ridiculous and ambitious, but it's possible."

"If you look at Bushells' branding in the 1900s," Khamis explains, "you see that the kind of images and ideas that they latched onto paralleled what was happening in Australian culture generally."

"Whether it was jazz in the 1920s, thrift through the depression or the happy housewife in the 40s and 50s, Bushells' branding reflected it."

According to Khamis, tea has been present, though often scarce since the First Fleet.

"A female convict wrote a letter home to England bemoaning the conditions, and among other things, the lack of tea," says Khamis. This gives an insight into the popularity of tea around the world.

"If tea was so popular and widely accessible that even poor convicts were lamenting its absence, it demonstrates what a powerful commodity tea must have been in the 18th century," says Khamis.

"Up until around the 17th century, England was a coffee drinking nation," says Khamis, however, "in 50 years tea became the national drink of choice."

This popularity carried over to Australia, who in the late 1920s was the highest tea drinking country in the world according to Khamis.

Despite the recent decline in popularity, Khamis still believes tea has great relevance to modern Australian culture.

"I think coffee has certainly chipped away at the prominence and centrality of tea in Australia," Khamis says, "but that makes it all the more challenging for tea companies to adapt."

Khamis believes boutique tea houses and tea companies are going to have to do something a bit more exciting if they want to compete in a world of Starbucks and McDonalds.

"I don't even drink tea," Khamis tentatively admits, "yet I find it fascinating that something as simple and ordinary as tea can say so much"