Cairns
Cairns (, ) is a city in the Cairns Region, Queensland, Australia. It is on the east coast of Far North Queensland. The city is the 5th-most-populous in Queensland and ranks 14th overall in Australia.
Mulgrave Shire Council Chambers
Cairns was established officially in October 1876 as a port to service the newly discovered Hodgkinson goldfields. In this first phase of Cairns' development there was a small flurry of building activity (mostly shanties and tent houses), but the town competed with both Cooktown and Port Douglas for the Hodgkinson trade, and made little progress until the establishment of a local sugar industry and the opening up of the Atherton Tablelands' mineral fields, in the early 1880s. The 1885 announcement that Cairns was to be the terminus for the Herberton railway established the town as the principal port in the region. These events boosted the local economy in the 1880s and generated a second building and development phase, during which the early temporary structures were replaced by more substantial timber buildings. A number of masonry and reinforced concrete public and commercial buildings were erected in Cairns in the years immediately preceding the First World War. Some of these buildings replaced earlier timber structures which were by that time in a poor condition. The third major phase of Cairns' development occurred between the First and Second World Wars, at which time the city's status as the principal port of Far North Queensland was consolidated and the city centre virtually re-built.