Cedar Bay National Park


Cedar Bay was a national park in the Shire of Cook, Queensland, Australia. In 2015, it became part of the Mangkalba section of the Ngalba Bulal National Park.

Geography

The park is northwest of Brisbane, south of Cooktown and accessible only by boat or foot. The park is one of the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area series of national parks, and is a gazetted World Heritage site. It is also known as Mangkal-Mangkalba in the dialect of the local Aboriginal population, the Eastern Kuku Yalanji.

History

The Cedar Bay area was developed in the 1870s for tin mining, and the remains of the tin work can still be seen in the area of Black Snake Rocks.
Cedar Bay gained a degree of notoriety in the 1970s when the Bjelke-Petersen government destroyed a hippie commune that was present. The raid was controversial because of the immense cost and use of a helicopter, light aircraft and a Navy vessel to arrest 12 people on drug and vagrancy charges. At the Cedar Bay inquiry, police were accused of burning huts, smashing personal belongings, destroying clothing, chopping down fruit plantations and, ironically, consuming alcohol at the site following the drug raid. Police, in their defence, tendered evidence of squalid living conditions and described the commune’s inhabitants as “filthy, criminal hippies”.
In 2007, the national park was part of the of land handed over to Cape York's Aboriginal population by the Queensland government. The handover came as a result of a 1994 Native Title claim.
It was known as Mount Finnigan National Park before being enlarged.

Activities

The park contains some of the northernmost tropical rainforests in Australia. Birdwatching is a popular activity with the most common birds including cassowaries, yellow-breasted sunbirds, double-eyed fig-parrots, mangrove kingfishers, beach stone-curlews and pied imperial-pigeons. Bush camping is permitted in the park, however fishing and collecting are prohibited. The sole walking track in the park was a former donkey track used by tin miners. It is inaccessible to all but fit walkers.