THE COUNTRY BENEATH THE CITY.

Before Cairns was a city, it was Gimuy. The name comes from the Yidiny language of the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji people — gimuy being their word for the slippery blue fig, ficus albipila, which once grew in abundance along the coastal margins where the city now stands. Walu means side of the hill; bara means people belonging to. The Gimuy Walubara Yidinji are, in the most literal and lawful sense, the people who belong to this place. Their custodianship of Country in this region stretches back across at least sixty thousand years of continuous presence — a timeline that renders the 150 years since the city’s colonial founding almost incidental by comparison.

That history has always been present beneath the surface of Cairns. What has changed in recent years is how visible — and how economically significant — it has become. Indigenous cultural tourism has emerged as the fastest-growing segment of the Cairns and broader Tropical North Queensland visitor economy. It is a shift that reflects changes in how international and domestic travellers understand what they are looking for, and it is reshaping the way the city thinks about its identity, its institutions, and its place in a national conversation about Country, culture, and belonging.

This article is not about travel itineraries or experiences to seek out. It is about a structural shift in one of Australia’s most significant regional economies — and about the deeper questions that shift raises for how Cairns, and Queensland more broadly, understands itself.

A REGION OF MULTIPLE CUSTODIANS.

Cairns sits within one of the most linguistically and culturally complex Indigenous regions in Australia. Cairns Regional Council formally acknowledges more than a dozen distinct peoples as Traditional Custodians of the region: the Djabugay, Yirrganydji, Buluwai, Gimuy Walubara Yidinji, Mandingalbay Yidinji, Gunggandji, Dulabed and Malanbarra Yidinji, Bundabarra and Wadjanbarra Yidinji, Wanyurr Majay, Mamu, and Ngadjonjii peoples. Each group holds distinct language, law, songlines, and responsibilities to specific Country.

The Gimuy Walubara Yidinji are the traditional custodians of the Cairns city area specifically. Their tribal land boundary — the Yabanday — covered a large area from the Barron River in the north to the Russell River in the south, east to the Murray Prior Range and west to Tolga, taking in coastal and freshwater waterways, mountain ranges, tropical rainforest, and mangrove systems. The Yidinji people had eight clans, each custodian of distinct estate. The wider Yidinji nation — comprising the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji, Dulabed Malanbarra Yidinji, Mandingalbay Yidinji, and Wadjanbarra Tableland Yidinji — forms one of four traditional owner groups representing the peoples of the Cairns region today.

To the north and west, in the rainforest country around Kuranda and the Barron Gorge, the Djabugay people — also known as Djabuganydji, or Tjapukai — have inhabited this landscape for an extraordinarily long period. Their Country extends from north of Port Douglas down to the Cairns inlet, through to Edmonton, up to the Atherton Tablelands and back toward Mount Molloy. Their language, Djabugay, belongs to the Yidinic branch of the Pama-Nyungan family, closely related to Yidiny. In December 2004, native title was formally recognised for the Djabugay people over land and waters within Barron Gorge National Park, a milestone acknowledged by Federal Court determination.

This density of distinct peoples, languages, and connections to Country is not incidental to the Cairns visitor economy. It is the substance of it. What visitors are increasingly coming to find is not a homogenised representation of “Indigenous Australia” but the particular, place-specific cultures of these peoples — cultures tied to the Daintree, the reef, the Barron Gorge, Trinity Inlet, and the ranges of the Atherton Tablelands.

FROM PERIPHERAL TO CENTRAL.

The tourism economy of Cairns has long been framed around its two UNESCO World Heritage assets — the Great Barrier Reef and the Wet Tropics rainforest. Indigenous cultural experiences were, for much of the city’s modern tourism history, treated as supplementary: a cultural afternoon alongside reef trips and rainforest walks, rather than a primary reason for visitation.

That framing has shifted. Tourism Tropical North Queensland — the regional body known as TTNQ, which markets the region internationally — now formally describes its offering through six pillars: reef, rainforest, Indigenous, outback, lifestyle, and adventure. The positioning of Indigenous as a named pillar alongside the two UNESCO sites is not a cosmetic change. It reflects genuine movement in what international visitors are seeking and what operators are reporting from the ground.

According to reporting from TTNQ’s Indigenous Experiences Cluster Group, First Nations tourism operators across the region reported record figures and increased business as international visitor numbers rebounded in 2024 and 2025. Walkabout Cultural Adventures, operating on Kuku Yalanji Country near the Daintree Rainforest, reported a thirteen percent uptick in bookings, surpassing pre-pandemic activity levels, with more than seventy percent of its clientele comprising international travellers. Mandingalbay Authentic Indigenous Tours, based on Mandingalbay Yidinji Country adjoining Trinity Inlet, experienced significant growth following a relaunch in 2022.

These are not isolated data points. Across Australia, as reported by industry analysis through 2025 and 2026, Aboriginal tourism experiences have been booked at a rate exceeding 1.1 million annually — a figure that represents a participation increase of more than forty percent compared to 2019, with Queensland among the three strongest-growth states alongside the Northern Territory and Western Australia. The demand is led by European, North American, and domestic travellers who are reorienting their sense of what travel to Australia should actually mean.

THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE SHIFT.

The wider Tropical North Queensland tourism economy provides essential context for understanding the scale of this shift. According to Tourism and Events Queensland’s International Tourism Snapshot for the year ending June 2025, international visitor expenditure in Tropical North Queensland reached a record $1.2 billion — up 24.7 percent over the previous year. International visitor numbers to the region grew 14.2 percent to 568,000 for that period. The average spend per night increased by 31.1 percent to $239.

By the year ending September 2025, TTNQ’s CEO Mark Olsen confirmed international visitor numbers had grown a further 14.6 percent to 595,000, driving record spend of $1.1 billion for that reporting period and an 18.5 percent increase. Visitor nights jumped by 19.9 percent to 5.8 million, and the average length of stay grew to 9.7 nights.

These are among the strongest regional tourism performance figures in Queensland’s history — and they are directly connected to the region’s identity proposition, of which Indigenous cultural experience is an increasingly central component. TTNQ has formalised this through its Deeper into Dreaming tourism brochure, spotlighting forty-one trade-ready Indigenous products curated to meet international standards. Over recent years, seven Indigenous tourism ventures received bespoke mentoring support to refine operations, marketing, and visitor engagement skills. The TNQ First Nations Tourism Action Plan, launched in May 2023, formalises the strategic integration of Indigenous tourism into the regional planning framework.

Queensland holds the highest number of Indigenous-owned and -led tourism products on Country of any Australian state — a point noted in TTNQ’s analysis as a genuine structural competitive advantage in international tourism markets. That advantage is concentrated most visibly in the Cairns region, where the density of First Nations groups, the distinctiveness of their connections to Country, and the scale of the visitor economy combine in ways found nowhere else in Australia.

THE INSTITUTIONS OF CULTURAL TRANSMISSION.

The growth in Indigenous cultural tourism is inseparable from the institutional infrastructure that has developed over decades to mediate that engagement — and from the ongoing debate about who controls it, how cultural integrity is maintained, and what equitable participation actually looks like.

The Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park represents one of the most significant long-running Indigenous cultural tourism ventures in Australia. Founded in Kuranda in 1987, Tjapukai was established by international theatre artists Don and Judy Freeman, David Hudson — an Ewamian man raised among the Djabugay people — and his wife. They combined performance expertise with the cultural knowledge of six Djabugay men — Willie Brim, Alby Baird, Wayne Nicols, Irwin Riley, Neville Hobbler, and Dion Riley — to create a production drawing on the dance-rich culture of the people of the rainforest around Kuranda. In 1996, Tjapukai moved to a twenty-five acre site at Caravonica, adjacent to the Skyrail Rainforest Cableway. More than three million people from around the world have engaged with the park’s presentation of Djabugay culture and Dreamtime stories. The park now operates at a cultural centre facility where the creation story of the Djabugay — the Bulurru, including the story of the Rainbow Serpent Budadji moving through Country from Crystal Cascades to Port Douglas — is presented in a 360-degree theatre experience.

The Tjapukai model was early and pioneering, but it emerged from a moment when the industry framework for culturally led, community-controlled tourism was still nascent. The decades since have seen the field evolve significantly, with growing emphasis on Indigenous ownership, leadership, and cultural protocols as the basis for any credible offering.

The Cairns Indigenous Art Fair — CIAF — represents a more recent and different model. Established in 2009 through the Queensland Government’s Backing Indigenous Arts program, CIAF was first held at the Tanks Art Centre in Cairns from 21 to 23 August 2009, exceeding expectations by attracting more than ten thousand visitors across three days. The fair became an independent not-for-profit organisation in 2013, governed by a board that has progressively increased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander representation. In 2024, CIAF contributed more than $9 million to the Cairns and Queensland economies while creating economic opportunities for thousands of Indigenous artists. Institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, the Harvard University Art Museum, the National Gallery of Canada, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia, and Auckland Art Gallery have made acquisitions through CIAF’s collectors and curators program.

CIAF now operates as what its own documentation describes as “Australia’s premier First Nations-led art fair and cultural celebration,” held annually on Gimuy Walubara Yidinji Country. Its 2024 edition attracted an anticipated convergence of more than 30,000 visitors over four days at the Cairns Convention Centre, with satellite events across the Bulmba-ja Arts Centre, Cairns Art Gallery, and the historic Tanks Arts Centre at Edge Hill. Looking toward the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, CIAF has articulated an explicit ambition to expand its digital reach, deepen its presence in south-east Queensland, and position itself as a beacon of First Nations cultural excellence on the international stage.

"From its art fair beginnings in 2009 CIAF has evolved into a meaningful and multi-disciplinary event for cultural exchange, truth-telling, and knowledge sharing that over the years has launched careers, provided pathways and is a valuable source of income underpinning the development and future of Queensland's First Nations artists and industry."

— Francoise Lane, Artistic Director, Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, Queensland Government Ministerial Statement, 2023.

THE QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP.

The growth of Indigenous cultural tourism in Cairns raises a question that the industry and government have wrestled with seriously and imperfectly: who controls the representation, the revenue, and the future of this sector?

The answer matters beyond ethics. It matters economically. Research from across Australia consistently shows that tourists report higher satisfaction from Indigenous-led experiences. The distinction between an experience hosted by a Traditional Owner on their own Country and one packaged by a third party with only nominal Indigenous involvement is increasingly legible to international visitors — particularly those from European and North American markets who have become more attuned to questions of cultural authenticity and ethical travel.

TTNQ’s reconciliation commitments, formally accredited by Reconciliation Australia during Indigenous Business Month in 2025, represent an institutional acknowledgement of this. The organisation’s CEO stated plainly that “the Indigenous experience in tourism is a form of reconciliation” that allows visitors to connect respectfully to Country, culture, and people. Queensland holds a structural advantage in this framing because it is home to both Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures — a duality unique within Australia and one that CIAF, among other institutions, has made central to its cultural proposition.

The question of institutional ownership has also played out at the infrastructure level. In May 2023, the Queensland Government announced it would develop a business case for a First Nations Cultural Centre in Cairns — a facility envisaged as a significant regional hub connecting the distinct stories, traditions, and cultures of Far North Queensland to larger audiences, and as a complement to a parallel Brisbane-based centre. The Cairns Centre was positioned as an acknowledgement of the city’s role as a gateway to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures of the Far North. The business case was completed, but in June 2025 the Queensland Government — under a changed administration — determined that neither the Cairns nor the Brisbane cultural centres would proceed to construction. The decision was contested, with the completed business case reportedly highlighting the centre as an opportunity to reframe the government’s relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Queenslanders and to attract international tourists at scale. The proposal for the planned facility included an estimated annual draw of 435,000 visitors.

The cancellation of the centre is a meaningful data point in the story of this sector — not because it settles any question, but because it illustrates the ongoing gap between the rhetorical and economic recognition of Indigenous cultural tourism and the institutional investment required to anchor it permanently. The appetite exists. The infrastructure decision remains contested.

CAIRNS AS AN INDIGENOUS ARTS CAPITAL.

Beyond the institutional framework, there is a cultural geography of Indigenous artistic production centred on the Cairns region that has developed largely on its own terms — and which CIAF, among others, has helped formalise.

Tourism Australia, in its profiling of Indigenous cultural experiences in Cairns, has referred to the city as “Australia’s Indigenous art capital” — a characterisation that reflects the density of art centres, commercial galleries, artists’ collectives, and studios whose work is rooted in the diverse First Nations cultures of Far North Queensland, Cape York, the Torres Strait, and the Gulf. The region encompasses the Quinkan rock art of Laura, accessible through Kuku Yalanji Country; the cultural landscape of Mossman Gorge; the sea Country experiences offered through Dreamtime Dive and Snorkel tours on the Great Barrier Reef; and the community-led cultural experiences emerging from communities along the Cape York Peninsula.

The Mandingalbay Ancient Indigenous Tours, based on the ancestral lands of the Mandingalbay Yidinji people on the eastern side of Trinity Inlet, exemplifies a model that has become something of a reference point for the sector: deep Country-based engagement, guided by Traditional Custodians, incorporating ecological knowledge, language, and Dreaming. The experience begins with a traditional Welcome to Country through a smoking ceremony and moves into guided engagement with the living ecological and cultural landscape of Mandingalbay Yidinji Country within Grey Peaks National Park. It is, in the most literal sense, not a performance of culture but an expression of it.

This distinction — between culture performed for audiences and culture expressed by its custodians — is increasingly central to how the industry evaluates itself, and how visitors evaluate their experiences. The fastest-growing segment of the Cairns visitor economy is not growing because of better marketing alone. It is growing because it offers something that cannot be replicated elsewhere: Country-specific, custodian-led engagement with cultures that have maintained their relationship to this precise landscape across unbroken millennia.

PERMANENCE, IDENTITY, AND WHAT RECORDS THE RECORD.

The story of Indigenous cultural tourism in Cairns is ultimately a story about identity — about which version of Cairns is recognised, which aspects of its history are visible in its economy, and how that recognition is encoded into the structures that outlast individual administrations and industry cycles.

Cairns Regional Council has noted that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people made up 9.7 percent of the city’s population at the 2021 census — one of the highest proportions of any significant Australian city. Their presence is not historical; it is contemporary, civic, and active. The Gimuy Walubara Yidinji Elders Aboriginal Corporation continues its work as a catalyst for the community. Cairns Regional Council endorsed its second Innovate Reconciliation Action Plan in May 2025, covering the period from July 2025 to June 2027, building on its status as the first local government in Queensland to have had a Reconciliation Action Plan endorsed by Reconciliation Australia. The First Peoples Advisory Consultants, established in July 2024, provide formal input into council policy on matters affecting First Peoples across economic, social, cultural, and environmental dimensions.

CIAF’s future was secured to 2030 through an agreement confirmed in late 2025, with a focus on strengthening operations, expanding digital capabilities, growing international partnerships, and increasing revenue through sponsorships and grants. The Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games loom as a moment when the eyes of the world will be on Queensland — and CIAF’s leadership has explicitly positioned the organisation to shine in that context, building on sixteen years of institutional development and artistic credibility.

The Tropical North Queensland tourism sector has been projected to grow to a $7.5 billion industry by 2032, supporting an additional 12,500 regional jobs and contributing an additional $780 million in tax revenue annually. Whether Indigenous cultural tourism reaches its structural potential within that trajectory will depend on questions that are still being answered: questions about infrastructure investment, about the depth of community benefit, about who leads and who merely participates.

What is not in question is the direction. cairns.queensland — as the permanent onchain civic address for this city and its identity layer — points to a future in which the full cultural depth of Gimuy/Cairns is encoded into how the city presents itself to the world. That includes its First Nations dimensions: not as heritage exhibits, but as living, economically active, and institutionally embedded aspects of a city that is, in the most meaningful sense, still in the process of understanding what it is built upon.

The fastest-growing visitor segment in Cairns is not growing by accident. It is growing because the world is catching up to something that the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji, the Djabugay, the Mandingalbay Yidinji, and the other custodians of this Country have always known: that this place has a depth of story and connection that nothing about the last century and a half has extinguished. The work — for the city, for the tourism industry, for government — is to ensure that the economic recognition of that depth translates into genuine benefit for those in whose names it is marketed. That is the civic challenge that this moment, and the decades toward 2032 and beyond, will be measured against.

CONCLUSION: COUNTRY AS CIVIC FOUNDATION.

There is a version of the Cairns story that begins in 1876 with the town’s colonial founding, that runs through the opening of the international airport in 1984, the development of the reef tourism industry, and the emergence of the city as the fourth-most-visited destination for international tourists in Australia. It is a serviceable account of economic geography.

There is another version that begins in Gimuy — that begins with the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji and the Yirrganydji, with the Djabugay in the rainforest country around Kuranda, with the Mandingalbay Yidinji along the inlet, with the Gunggandji on the Yarrabah Peninsula. This version does not displace the first but absorbs it. It makes the 1876 founding a relatively recent chapter in a much longer story of human relationship with this extraordinary country — reef, rainforest, river, range.

The growth of Indigenous cultural tourism in Cairns is the economic expression of the second version beginning to assert itself within the first. That is what makes it structurally significant rather than merely a market segment. It represents a shift in the base narrative of the city — in what Cairns understands itself to be, and in what it offers the world as a reason to engage with it.

The civic project of anchoring that identity permanently — making it legible in institutional structures, in economic frameworks, in the digital and onchain infrastructure through which cities represent themselves to the world — is one of the defining tasks of this period. cairns.queensland names that project: a permanent, foundational record of a city that is, at its deepest layer, built on Country, and is slowly, imperfectly, consequentially learning to say so.