Community members across Cairns are calling for accountability after discovering that photographs of real local residents — many of them First Nations and Pacific Islander Australians — were quietly replaced with stock or duplicate images in printed materials and digital content produced under several publicly funded cultural programs. The replacements, some residents say, happened without consultation and, in at least some cases, without their knowledge that their original images had been removed at all.
For many in the Cairns community, the issue cuts deep. The city's Pacific Islander diaspora, concentrated heavily in the northern suburbs around Woree and Manunda, has long pushed for genuine, not cosmetic, representation in civic life. Having faces replaced by generic imagery — even if the replacement photographs feature people who look broadly similar — is, community members say, precisely the kind of erasure they have been campaigning against for years.
What residents are saying on the ground
At the Cairns Multicultural Hub on McLeod Street, community liaison workers from several Pacific Island cultural organisations gathered informally last week to discuss the issue after it circulated on local social media groups. Members described learning that a 2025 brochure produced under the Far North Queensland Regional Arts Development Fund program had, in a reprinted edition, substituted original community portraits with images sourced from a commercial image library. The original photographs had been taken at a community event held at the Cairns Botanic Gardens in Edge Hill.
One Cairns-based Tongan community organiser, who has worked with the Townsville-to-Cairns Pacific communities network for several years, told The Daily Cairns she was not notified before her photograph — taken at a funded community event — was removed. She described the decision as dismissive of the labour communities put into participating in those programs in the first place. She is not named here because she has not authorised media attribution of her personal account.
Similar concerns have been raised by members of local First Nations groups connected to the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji country, on which central Cairns sits. Community members affiliated with the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair network — which holds its flagship event annually at the Cairns Convention Centre on Wharf Street — say the broader pattern of image substitution reflects a systemic undervaluing of authentic community representation in publicly funded materials. The Cairns Indigenous Art Fair itself is not implicated in the specific complaints; community members raised it as a counterpoint, an example of a program that does consistently feature genuine community imagery.
Why the timing matters
The complaints have surfaced at a particularly sensitive moment for Queensland's First Nations treaty process. The state government has been advancing formal treaty framework consultations throughout 2025 and into 2026, with engagement sessions held in Cairns at venues including the Tanks Arts Centre in Anderson Street. Community trust in government-run programs is, for obvious reasons, central to how those consultations land.
Separately, Cairns Regional Council's 2025–26 budget allocated $1.4 million toward multicultural community programs, according to publicly available council budget documents. Residents who feel their likenesses were used and then quietly discarded question whether that investment is genuinely reaching communities or primarily serving institutional optics.
The Australian Human Rights Commission's guidelines on the use of community imagery in publicly funded materials — updated in February 2024 — specify that organisations should obtain ongoing, specific consent before altering or replacing images of identifiable individuals. Community members say they were not informed of the guidelines, let alone offered the consent process those guidelines require.
Cairns Regional Council has been contacted for comment. The Far North Queensland Regional Arts Development Fund, administered through Arts Queensland, has also been asked to clarify its image use policies and whether a review of affected materials is underway.
For community members navigating this right now, the most immediate practical step, advocates say, is to formally request in writing from the relevant program administrator whether your image was used, altered, or replaced — and to cite the Australian Human Rights Commission's February 2024 guidelines in doing so. The Cairns Community Legal Centre on Grafton Street provides free advice on community rights matters and has indicated it can assist residents who want guidance on how to proceed.
