Cairns Court House Complex is a heritage-listed site incorporating a former courthouse and a former public administration building (now an art gallery) at 38–40 Abbott Street, Cairns City, Cairns, Cairns Region, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1919 to 1921. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 21 October 1992.
Cairns Court House Gallery
The building is now home to the Court House Gallery. Opened in 2020, the Gallery features exhibitions of historical and contemporary art by regional, national and international artists.
History
The former Cairns Court House (erected 1919–21) and the Cairns Art Gallery (former Cairns Public Offices, erected 1934–1936) are located on a 2-acre site reserved since 1876 for police purposes. Both buildings were erected during the years between the First and Second World Wars, the third major phase of Cairns' development, at which time the city's status as the principal port of Far North Queensland was consolidated, and the city centre virtually re-built. Both are substantial masonry buildings, whose construction reflected Queensland Government confidence in the growth of Cairns as an important regional centre during the interwar period.
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 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 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. The Cairns hinterland Soldier Settlement Schemes of the 1920s, the completion of the North Coast rail link to Brisbane in 1924, the extensive re-building necessitated by a spate of cyclones in the 1920s, and the poor condition of earlier timber structures, combined to produce unprecedented building activity in Cairns. The city centre in particular is dominated by masonry structures of the 1920s and 1930s, and in this respect is markedly different from other Queensland towns and cities. Reinforced concrete was the preferred building material, but the Queensland Government chose to erect the important Public Offices in brick.
Courthouse
The 1919–21 building was the third courthouse erected in Cairns. An 1878 marine survey of Cairns harbour indicates that the first courthouse was located on the customs reserve, and may have shared the same premises as the first customs house. This probably was the temporary courthouse erected by the Works Department in Cairns in December 1877.
The "temporary" courthouse remained in use for several years, but was replaced during the second phase of Cairns' development. In 1883 the Works Department prepared plans for a more substantial timber courthouse, which was erected in 1884 on the Esplanade, but facing Abbott Street, on the police reserve. At the time, it was considered to be very fine, the best erected building in Cairns, both in so far as appearance and design as well as in construction. By 1890, however, the local court had outgrown its courthouse, and the building was in a state of disrepair. Despite repeated comment from public and judicial circles alike that the courthouse at Cairns was the worst on the circuit, it was not replaced until the present building was completed late in 1921.