• Saving Jack Barnes Mangrove Boardwalk

The Jack Barnes Bicentennial Boardwalk (JBBB) off Airport Ave, reopened in August 2022 after years of closure, a five-year campaign to save it and a year’s restoration work. The boardwalk is named after Dr Jack Barnes who discovered the link between Irukandji Syndrome and the tiny box jellyfish that caused it. The JBBB had been in a poor state and the Cairns Regional Council had the lease on it which was ending in 2021. They wanted to concentrate funds on a new boardwalk at the northern end of the Esplanade and had nearly half a million dollars set aside for the removal of the JBBB. A group of Cairns and Far North Environment Centre (CAFNEC) volunteers, where I was then President, argued strongly that this money should be used in its repair rather than its destruction. After intense lobbying, this money was given to the airport last June and repair work undertaken by Yirrganydji Land and Sea Rangers under the supervision of the original boardwalk engineer, John Breen. I had managed to track down John on the Tablelands and he agreed to do a visual report on the cost of repairing the boardwalk. This had come within the approximate $0.5M budget and gave confidence to Cairns Airport to proceed with the restoration, which had taken back control of the land. Jenny Roberts, Jack’s daughter, from Brisbane, had contacted me, and came up to lend her support. There is a rich biota at the JBBB site, 15 species of mangrove, and the northern arm features rare saltmarsh where around 40 Pacific Golden Plovers roost and feed between late August and early April. It is also a key hang out for Eastern Curlew, our largest wader, whose numbers have collapsed in recent years. The southern arm, which I like to refer to as the cathedral, is truly majestic and contains some of the tallest mangrove forests in Australia and is certainly one of the few places where they are so accessible. JBBB is central to field studies from schools and universities, as well as tourists and locals. Nowhere else in Cairns can you find this diversity of mangrove habitat flora and fauna. The boardwalk was built using thin bamboo from the Red Arrow Track as pillar supports and I was fortunate to witness part of the repair where newly cut bamboo was used to replace a damaged section at the end of the northern arm next to Little Barron Creek. It was extraordinary to realise that this thin bamboo had been supporting the boardwalk for 34 years, protected because of the anoxic (without oxygen) conditions of the mangrove mud. There are now many more years of life left in the JBBB, subject to ongoing maintenance of course. This has been a great achievement for the conservation sector, Yirrganydji, Cairns Airport and all those supporters who worked hard for this fantastic community outcome.