Discover Businesses and Services on the Atherton Tablelands

The Tablelands sit on elevated country inland and west of Cairns, where the land rises from the coast onto a plateau along the Great Dividing Range. That extra elevation gives the region a noticeably cooler and fresher climate than the tropical coast, with green pasture through much of the year and cool mornings in the higher settlements such as Herberton and Ravenshoe.

It is above all a rural region. Dairy and beef country, cropping, horticulture, coffee and tropical fruit growing sit alongside small towns that serve surrounding farms and properties. The landscape is unusually varied for a single region: remnant rainforest and waterfalls in the south and east, crater lakes and volcanic soils formed by past volcanic activity, open woodland and drier savannah country further west and north, and the large storage of Lake Tinaroo in the middle.

Atherton is the largest service centre, with Mareeba to the north an important agricultural and business hub. Tolga, Yungaburra, Malanda, Millaa Millaa, Herberton and Ravenshoe each carry their own mix of farming, small business, hospitality and visitor trade. Distances between them are short, so trades and professional services routinely work across several towns in a day.

For residents and property owners that spread matters. Electricians, air-conditioning and refrigeration technicians, builders, mechanics, accountants, allied health providers, community and disability services, cafés, restaurants and accommodation operators are typically local businesses covering a wide service area. Cenlocal exists to make those businesses easier to find in one place.

The history of the Tablelands begins long before European arrival. Aboriginal peoples lived on, cared for and travelled across this country for many thousands of years, with detailed knowledge of the rainforest, rivers and open country that shaped how the region was used and understood.

The broader Tablelands is not the country of a single group. Research and native title records describe a number of distinct Traditional Custodian groups whose lands meet across the region — among them the Ngadjon-Jii people in the southern rainforest country, the Tableland Yidinji people in the upper Barron River and Lake Tinaroo area, and Bar-Barrum and Mbarbaram peoples in areas further west. For that reason Cenlocal does not name one group for the whole region. Cenlocal acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the Tablelands region and pays respect to Elders past, present and emerging.

European exploration of the area is usually dated to the 1870s, when prospecting parties moved inland from the coast in search of minerals. Tin was found on the Wild River in 1875, and pastoral interests followed later in that decade. A major lode tin discovery in 1880 led directly to the founding of Herberton, one of the richest tin finds in Australia at the time.

Mining drove the region's first wave of development, and it in turn drove timber getting: mines needed sawn timber for shafts and workings, which brought sawyers onto the rainforest country. As land was opened for selection through the 1880s, settlers cleared heavily forested blocks under land conditions that required clearing and cultivation. Vast areas of rainforest, including valuable cabinet timbers, were felled — a loss the region's later conservation and tourism story is built around.

Agriculture followed the clearing. Maize was among the first crops, and from around the turn of the twentieth century governments encouraged dairying, which became strongly associated with the higher-rainfall southern Tablelands and towns such as Malanda. Transport connections made the difference to all of it: the railway from Cairns was built up through the Barron Gorge and extended in stages between the late 1880s and 1916, eventually reaching Ravenshoe, and it fixed Cairns as the region's port and the towns along the line as its service centres.

The Tablelands changed again during the Second World War, when very large numbers of Australian and American service personnel were camped and trained across the plateau — an episode that spread the name "Atherton Tableland" far more widely than before. Today the region combines continuing agricultural production, strong local trade and professional sectors, Aboriginal cultural connection to country, and a substantial visitor economy built on rainforest, waterfalls, crater lakes and heritage towns.