First Nations Cairns: Art, Culture, and Country

The Cairns region encompasses the Country of numerous Aboriginal language groups whose cultures, artistic traditions, and knowledge systems have shaped the tropical landscape for tens of thousands of years. The Yirrganydji and Yidinji peoples of the coastal and hinterland regions around Cairns, and the diverse language groups of the Atherton Tablelands and Cape York, maintain living cultural traditions that tourism increasingly seeks to engage with in ways that benefit communities while providing visitors with authentic encounters with First Nations knowledge and practice.

The Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park at Smithfield, for decades the primary cultural tourism offering in the Cairns region, has provided international visitors with an introduction to the traditions, music, dance, and skills of the Djabugay people. The park's program has evolved over its three decades of operation, responding to changing visitor expectations and to the community's own development of how it wishes its culture to be presented and experienced.

The indigenous art galleries of Cairns represent a significant cultural and economic sector, providing the market for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art that the tourism visitor base generates and that supports artists from communities across Cape York and the Torres Strait. The concentration of art galleries in the Cairns CBD reflects the city's role as the commercial hub for a vast Indigenous cultural region whose art production serves both the tourist market and the national and international art collecting market.

Yarrabah, the Aboriginal community 50 kilometres south of Cairns, has developed cultural tourism offerings that allow visitors to engage with community life and the extraordinary scenery of the Yarrabah peninsula in ways managed by the community for the community's benefit. The community's management of its own tourism reflects the self-determination principle that the Indigenous tourism sector has increasingly adopted as the appropriate model for cultural tourism in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

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