Cairns City Council Chambers

Cairns City Council Chambers is a heritage-listed former town hall and now council library at 151 Abbott Street, Cairns City, Cairns, Cairns Region, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by Hill & Taylor and built from 1929 to 1930 by Alex McKenzie. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 5 October 1998. It is now home to the Cairns City Library. The Cairns City Council Chambers was constructed in 1929-1930 and is a substantial reinforced concrete structure located on a large corner site surrounded by parkland. The building was erected during the third major phase of Cairns' development, 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. 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 Cairns-to-Herberton railway established the town as the principal port in the region. These boosts to the local economy in the 1880s generated a second building and development phase, during which the early temporary structures were replaced by more substantial timber buildings. Whilst a number of masonry and reinforced concrete commercial buildings were erected in Cairns in the years immediately preceding the First World War, the third major phase of Cairns' development was during the 1920s and 1930s.