The native bush secret thousands of Australians with sore knees, backs and hands keep telling their friends about

It usually starts on the stairs. Your hand finds the rail before you’ve even thought about it. Getting out of the car takes a bit of planning. You stop kneeling in the garden, and the knitting stays in the basket a little longer every night.

If that sounds familiar, you’ve probably tried a few things already. Almost everyone who writes to us has. “I have tried so many creams, tablets, etc” is a line we read week after week. The next part is usually some version of “I was sceptical, but…”

I want to explain that “but”. Not with a lab coat, because I’m not a doctor. With what thousands of our customers have told us, and with a plant from my home state that most people have never heard of.

When we read through the reviews, the same few options come up again and again. Each one makes sense on its own. Here’s what people tell us happened next:

• The pharmacy gel. It’s usually the first thing people are pointed to, and plenty of people get on well with it. But the pack asks you not to use it for more than a couple of weeks without checking in with a health professional. It was never designed to be your everyday cream.
• The heat rub. It works hard while you can smell it, and so can everyone else in the house. Some people love the burn. Others told us it was too much to put up with every day, or that the smell “reminds me of a nursing home”.
• Another tablet. A lot of our customers are already managing a morning line-up of medicines. Many simply told us they’d rather not add one more.
• Heat packs, rest and the odd massage. Lovely at the time. But you can’t take a massage table to the shops.

Here’s the pattern. None of these options is “wrong”. But knees, backs and hands don’t ache on a two-week schedule. They ache first thing in the morning, on the stairs, and at 3am when you try to roll over.

What most people are missing isn’t a stronger option. It’s a gentle one they’re happy to reach for every day, as often as the day needs it.

On Flinders Island and in the north-east corner of Tasmania grows a tall native shrub called Kunzea ambigua. Locals know it as White Cloud or Tick Bush. In spring it’s covered in small, creamy-white, honey-scented flowers, and its leaves carry an oil with a fresh, clean bush smell.

My mum Michelle and I started Zea in 2016 with a little market stall in Tasmania, selling kunzea products to anyone who’d stop and have a sniff. (The name Zea is just Kunzea, shortened.) The leaves are harvested and steam-distilled in Tasmania, and every batch of oil is tested before it goes into a single tube.

Ten years later, Kunzea Pain Relief Cream is the thing people come back for. Not because it’s magic, but because it’s the cream they’re happy to use every day.

Kunzea Pain Relief Cream is a listed medicine on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods (AUST L 360 331). It’s listed as an anti-inflammatory, and to relieve muscle aches, pains and soreness, mild arthritis, joint pain and mild rheumatic aches, and mild sciatica, nerve pain and neuralgia.

Every gram carries 75mg of Tasmanian Kunzea oil, with rosemary extract, Tasmanian lavender oil and vitamin E. That’s it for the actives. No menthol, no heat, no synthetic fragrance.

But the part our customers notice most isn’t on the label. It’s how easy it is to live with.

We didn’t run a clinical trial. What we have is thousands of reviews from people who were just as unsure as you might be. Here are the ones that answer the questions we get asked most, in their own words.

Individual results may vary.