Opinion: Port Douglas suffers from poor entrance statement
Published Wednesday May 6 2015, 3:55pm
WHY does such a beautiful place as Port Douglas have such a tawdry entrance?
Entrances and first impressions are important.
Bad ones take a time to erase and set an attitude that results in people concentrating of successive bad things.
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If you go to a hotel room and see a stain on the carpet, you then look for other bad things.
Similarly, a good first impression sets you off looking for other good things.
For a tourist town this is crucial.
The entrance to Port Douglas should say: “Tropics, warm, green, relax”.
Instead, we have a jumble of traffic signs and power poles on the Captain Cook Highway and a dead flat roundabout with some meaningless rocks and green paint.
When you turn in, the first bit of tropical garden is spoilt by a grocer and booze merchant’s billboard.
There is no way the state road authorities will do something better with the roundabout, so the answer seems that we must forget any sense of Port Douglas entrance on the Captain Cook Highway. That highway is the road from Cairns to Craiglie and Mossman. We must make our entrance felt just after you turn through the roundabout on to Port Douglas road.
Indeed, we can make a virtue of contrasting the mishmash left behind on the state highway with our tropical garden town.
The sign saying you are in Port Douglas has poor typography and no welcoming image.
It has an afterthought black-and-white sticker saying “Douglas Shire” across the bottom, presumably because some bureaucrat has to ensure the government entity gets a guernsey even if the visitors don’t give a toss.
The next roundabout (Ulyssess Avenue and Agincourt Street) is blighted on one corner by what looks like a used-car yard in a third-world country. Can’t someone enforce land-use rules and if necessary assign some land away from the town’s main entrance to the task of flogging off cars?
The local government has done a pretty good job with the roundabouts on Port Douglas road coming in to town. They have statement-making tropical trees and shrubs in the centre and safety is met with soft green lawn around the edges through which drivers need a sightline.
But we really have to replace the pathetic little “Welcome to Port Douglas sign” and make an architectural and landscape statement that tells people they have arrived in tropical paradise.
The state roads bureaucracy is responsible for the entry roundabout.
It is flat because of “safety”.
Well, how is it that other roundabouts can have vegetation?
If safety is a problem, lower the speed limit on the roundabout to 40km/h.
If safety is a problem, why have they allowed a mosaic at all?
Drivers are going to be more distracted working out what it all means than if it had been planted out.
And while we are at it, Port Douglas is blessed with some beautiful avenues created by a discipline of having a single species line each side of the street. Warner Street and Garrick Street are classics.
However, you have to make sure that the effect is not spoilt by intermittent plantings of other species nor slowly eroded by letting trees die without being replaced by a tree of the same species. You have to take the long view.
Otherwise the effect becomes like a mouth with missing teeth.
Yes, these things take money. Yes, we have to pay rates. But we all benefit from the overall effect. When visitors say, “Port Douglas is a beautiful town”, in a way that they do not apply to other north Queensland coastal towns, you have to ask why.
The place is beautiful but we have to constantly maintain and improve it and pay for it if we are all to continue to benefit from the public and private landscaping of the town.
