The Cairns Esplanade

The Cairns Esplanade
The esplanade street as we know it today was the first to be surveyed in Cairns in October 1876. It was named Troughton Esplanade after the Travelling Superintendent of the Australian Steam Navigation Company, Captain Fred Troughton. At some point in the history of Tropical North Queensland, the original city plans were lost and the name Troughton was dropped, resulting in the simple name “Esplanade”.
The Cairns Esplanade, in Tropical North Queensland, Australia, has been a focal point for locals and visitors in Cairns city since the region was founded in the late 1800s. It is a recreational area for people from all walks of life — backpackers traveling around Australia, visitors looking for a beautiful view during an early evening dinner, couples having an early morning jog, teenagers using the skateboard ramp, CBD workers resting on the grass for lunch.

The esplanade was once a sandy beach. It is believed that the dredging of the Grafton Channel for shipping resulted in the mud completely covering the sandy beach because the sediment gathered during the dredging process was dumped offshore and promptly swept back into silt the inlet and cover the esplanade beach with mud. This infusion of mud has been great for the mangrove ecosystem, but not great for tourists who would rather see a sandy beach than a muddy tidal swamp. The arguments purported by developers are that the mudflats are an artificial ecosystem that is not integral to the mangrove forests. But environmentalists assert that the area has been in its current form long enough to be home to thousands of species of mud-dwelling creatures, and to dump the sand on top of them is environmental vandalism.

Recorded with Canon EOS 60D

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