Mission Beach

Mission Beach is a string of four small villages along fourteen kilometres of sand between Innisfail and Tully, backed by lowland rainforest that comes almost to the high-tide line, one of the few places where two World Heritage areas, the Wet Tropics and the Great Barrier Reef, meet directly. The forest holds one of the more significant remaining populations of southern cassowary, a flightless bird up to two metres tall that occasionally walks onto roads and into gardens; road signs and speed limits reflect the risk to them. Dunk Island lies four kilometres offshore, reef trips run from Clump Point, and the region is a well-known skydiving drop zone.

History

The Djiru people have lived in the region for at least 5,000 years, leaving middens, fish traps, rock paintings and ceremonial sites, and they built wet-season villages of dome-shaped huts thatched with palm fronds and paperbark. James Cook sailed through in 1770 and named Dunk Island, and in 1848 Captain Owen Stanley of HMS Rattlesnake named Clump Point and landed Edmund Kennedy's ill-fated Cape York expedition to the south. In February 1872 the brig Maria, carrying a gold-prospecting party to New Guinea, was wrecked on Bramble Reef, and some of its survivors washed ashore here; several were killed by Aboriginal people, and the punitive raids that followed killed many Aboriginal people (Wikipedia, Mission Beach, Queensland).

What's there

• The cassowaries - southern cassowaries in the rainforest and sometimes on roads.
• The long beach - fourteen kilometres of palm-backed sand.
• Dunk Island - the island offshore, reached by water taxi.
• The rainforest edge - Wet Tropics forest running to the shoreline.

When to go

May to October for the dry season and stinger-free swimming; from November to May marine stingers make ocean swimming unsafe outside netted enclosures. Cyclones are a genuine risk in summer, and the area was severely hit in 2006 and 2011.

Good to know

Stinger season closes the water for half the year. Cassowaries are dangerous if approached or fed, and vehicle strikes are a leading cause of their deaths. The villages are quiet with limited dining, and cyclone damage has shaped the built environment.

Nearby

Tully and its gorge lie south; Innisfail and Paronella Park are north.

Key facts