Cyclic peptides have been reported to have antimicrobial, antifungal and many other bioactivities. Several plants in the citrus family (Rutaceae) family are known to produce orbitides, which are small head-to-tail cyclic peptides lacking disulfide bonds. One of these is the Australian rain forest tree Melicope xanthoxyloides, in which the first plant cyclic peptide, evolidine (cyclo-SFLPVNL), was discovered by Australian scientists Eastwood et al. in 1955. Evolidine was thereafter all but forgotten in the academic literature, yet we revisited this Aussie-first by using de novo transcriptomics to determine the biosynthetic origin for evolidine. It is encoded by a short transcript of ~250 nucleotides and comes from within a precursor protein just 46 residues in length. Other, similar transcripts also encode cyclic peptides, which we characterised by tandem mass spectrometry. Mining publicly available data for other species revealed a host of similar potential peptide-encoding sequences across the Rutaceae and probably beyond.