Thursday, Jun 03, 2010 at 22:10
I drove the road when it opened in the late 1980s. It was opened for a couple of weeks before it got shut down.
The Quaid Rd was the best road going over the range in its day. Tonyfish reckons it is not up to standard. Maybe it wasn't built following the instruction manual but it was built to high standard.
George Quaid built the road to service a residential development he was trying to get off the ground south of Mt Molloy. The new road would have more than halved the commute time from the new estate to
Cairns.
Uncle George had bought a property in the upper reaches of the
Mitchell River. He cleared the trees, damed the River and now wanted to sell this off as lakeside acreage allotments.
The whole lot was done with no legal approval apart from a verbal go ahead from his good friend, the Minister for Everything, Russ Hinze. Minister Hinze was as corrupt as politicians get however he died before he got his day in court. Minister Hinze had planned to get it all sorted, however there was a change of government before the development was finished.
The greenies eventually got involved as the road went straight through the guts of what was being planned to be world
heritage listed rainforest and the whole thing got squashed.
No Govt agencies were prepared to take on the road despite it being very popular. The road from Smithfield to the base of the Quaid Road needed millions spent on it just to meet the likely increase in traffic the Quaid Rd would have demanded.
This is the street version. The official version might be a bit different.
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