Cairns Control Room
historic site in Queensland, Australia
Cairns Control Room is a heritage-listed military building at Grafton Street, Cairns City, Cairns, Cairns Region, Queensland, Australia. It was built in 1942 by the Queensland Department of Public Works. It is also known as World War II Volunteer Defence Corps, Cairns Scout Hut, and Cairns Scout Shop. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 16 April 2010.
History
After declaration of World War II a national Volunteer Defence Corps, founded under the banner of the Returned Soldiers League, was taken over by the Australia Army in 1941. In north Queensland VDC units were established in Townsville, Cairns and other larger towns in the region. At Cairns the local VDC used the council chambers as headquarters, but with Japan's entry in the war a more substantial building was required for a civil defence control centre in the event of air raids. In February 1942 it was decided that the Public Works Department would build a reinforced concrete control room in Norman Park for use by the VDC, police and ambulance service to coordinate emergency services in the event of air raids. Construction of the building commenced in March 1942. The building survived post-war demolitions and during the mid 1950s was handed over to the Scouting Association of Queensland for use as the organisation's local headquarters.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24190711. Authority coordinates are -16.919, 145.771. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1942, 2010 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cairns Control Room” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.