Exchange Hotel is a heritage-listed hotel at 2 Front Street, Mossman, Shire of Douglas, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by Vibert McKirdy Brown and built from 1934 to 1935. It was also known as Daintree Inn. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 9 November 2012.
History The Exchange Hotel is the second timber hotel to stand on the prominent site at the corner of Front and Mill streets in Mossman, a sugar town located about north of Cairns. Built in 1934–35 to replace the first Exchange Hotel (), which was badly damaged in a March 1934 cyclone, the second Exchange Hotel was designed to appeal to a tourist clientele. Tourism to the district increased after the opening of the Cook Highway in 1933, with road trips to Mossman and the town of Daintree among the local attractions promoted to visitors to far north Queensland.
Mossman lies inland from Port Douglas, on the flood-plain of the Mossman River between the Great Dividing Range and the coast. Cedar stands on the Mossman River were logged from 1874 and agricultural settlers followed the timber getters from the late 1870s, supplying fodder, maize, rice and tropical fruits to the Palmer River (1873) and Hodgkinson goldfield (1876).
Port Douglas was established in 1877 as a port for the Hodgkinson goldfield and Mossman was founded in the mid-1880s with the subdivision of land, located south of the Mossman River, owned by Daniel Hart and Thomas Wilson. The Exchange Hotel stands on part of Portion 72, selected by Wilson in 1879. Although early selectors attempted mixed agriculture, poor soil and high rainfall meant that the land around Mossman was more suited to sugar cane cultivation.
Initially, Queensland sugar cane was grown on large plantations, using indentured South Sea Islander labour, and nine sugar plantations (each with their own mill to crush sugar cane) were established in far north Queensland between 1878 and 1891. However, six of these had closed by 1891. The Brie Brie sugar plantation near Mossman operated a sugar mill between 1884 and 1888.
Several factors influenced the decline of the plantation system and its replacement by small farms supplying large central sugar mills. A drop in sugar prices in 1884, progressive restrictions on the use of non-European labour in the sugar industry from 1885, and government promotion of closer settlement by European "yeoman" farmers (owners of smaller landholdings), led to an end in the trade in South Sea Islander labour. The 1893 Sugar Works Guarantee Act provided loans to groups of farmers who mortgaged their land to the government, formed a company and built a co-operatively owned sugar mill to process their cane.
In far north Queensland, government funding was provided for the Mulgrave Central Mill (Gordonvale, first crush 1896) and the Mossman Central Mill (first crush 1897). The Mossman Central Mill Company, which was formed in 1894, purchased of Wilson's Portion 72 in 1896, and Mill Street, which ran east to the mill from the main north–south road, became the commercial heart of Mossman.
The sugar industry spurred Mossman's development. Two galvanised iron hotels were moved to Front Street from Craiglie in 1894, to become the Royal Hotel and Mossman Hotel, and the Queens Hotel was built in 1896. Mossman was linked to Port Douglas by a tramway in 1900 (sugar was shipped from Port Douglas from 1897 to 1958), and a tramway depot was located at the corner of Mill and Front Streets, near the Mossman Triangle. The town had five hotels by 1910, including the Exchange, Mossman, Royal, Post Office and Queens. After the 1911 cyclone damaged buildings in both Mossman and Port Douglas, businesses and government buildings located at Port Douglas gravitated to Mossman.
One of the early sugar suppliers to the Mossman Central Mill was Denis O'Brien, whose wife Teresa ran the first Exchange Hotel. O'Brien operated a hotel in Cooktown with Teresa from 1874, moved to Port Douglas in 1877 and opened the North Australian Hotel (now the Central Hotel). In 1893 O'Brien selected land near Mossman. He grew sugar and was a director of the Mossman Central Mill, with his son Edward Joseph O'Brien (one of eight children) later serving as chairman of directors for many years.
FW Buchanan built the first Exchange Hotel for the O'Brien's , and Teresa O'Brien is listed in the 1897 Pugh's Almanac as running the Exchange Hotel in Mossman. In 1904 the eldest O'Brien daughter, Kate, married Daniel J Kirwan, who became the licensee of the hotel in 1905, the year Denis O'Brien died at his property "Finlayvale".
The Exchange Hotel was originally one storey, but had a second storey by 16 March 1911 when a cyclone destroyed the upper floor. The hotel was repaired and continued to serve the town, despite being damaged again in a 1920 cyclone. Licensees of the hotel between 1914 and 1932 included EJ O'Brien, Sarah Ann Agnew, William Hyslop, Ellen Maud Petersen, Helena Norman McKenna, Teresa Nugent (nee O'Brien) and Ellen Constance O'Brien.
Meanwhile, government encouragement of the sugar industry meant that there were 4238 small canegrowers in Queensland by 1911. Most of Queensland's existing sugar mills were established by 1925, and an influx of cane-cutters, including Southern Europeans, before and after World War I boosted the population and economy of far north Queensland. Many of the cane-cutters went on to operate their own farms. The Queensland sugar industry flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, due to government subsidies. When combined with the Forgan Smith Labor Government's Unemployment Relief Scheme (civic building and infrastructure projects), a burst of building activity resulted in Mossman and other far north Queensland sugar towns.
In the 1930s economic activity in Mossman was further increased with the opening of the Mossman District Hospital in 1930; the completion of the Cook Highway between Cairns and Mossman in 1933 (as part of the Unemployment Relief Scheme); and the opening of the Mossman Shire Hall and Douglas Shire Council Chambers in 1937. Mossman was by now the administrative centre of the Douglas Shire (established in 1903 to replace the Douglas Divisional Board).
During this period of prosperity for Mossman a cyclone on 12 March 1934 once again heavily damaged the top storey of the Exchange Hotel, but this time the whole building was replaced, with the timber sourced from the Daintree Mill. In April 1934 tenders were invited for the erection of a hotel in timber and concrete at Mossman, for Mrs T Nugent, the architect Vibert McKirdy Brown of Atherton. Tenders were also called for the removal of the old Exchange Hotel. Teresa Nugent was the daughter of Denis and Teresa O'Brien, and along with her sisters Anne Kenny and Bridget Fynn, assumed ownership of the land on which the hotel stood in August 1934.
VM Brown was a well known local architect who practiced in Far North Queensland from the 1920s to 1940s. Born in South Africa c.1887, by 1916 he was living in north Queensland where he enlisted and served in the army during World War I, listing his pre-war trade as "contractor". From 1925 Brown advertised himself as an architect in Atherton and over the next two decades he completed a wide variety of buildings throughout the Cairns and Atherton Tablelands area. Characteristics of Brown's works include art deco and simplified classical style ornamentation, particularly raised banding on facades.
Brown had a long association with the Atherton District Hospital Board, and was responsible for many of the Atherton Hospital buildings constructed in the 1920s and 30s. Brown also designed many buildings for the Catholic Church in the region, including St Augustine's Church School and Convent at Mossman (1934). He also designed several buildings for the Returned Sailors' and Soldiers' Imperial League of Australia, including their club rooms on the Esplanade in Cairns (1938). In his home town of Atherton, Brown designed many civic and commercial buildings, including the Tinaroo Shire Council Chambers (1928), various shops, and the Grand Hotel (1933) on the corner of Main and Vernon streets. In Mossman, he designed the former Jack and Newell Building (1936), which stands opposite the Exchange Hotel on the corner of Mossman Street, Mill Street and Junction Road. Other notable works by Brown include an extension to Boland's Department Store in Cairns (1936, now the Bolands Centre), the Rex Theatre in Cairns (1938), and Mareeba Fire Station (1939). Brown ceased practicing as an architect in the late 1940s and died in 1957, aged 70.
The new Exchange Hotel capitalised upon the existing far north Queensland tourist trade, which had been increasing since the 1880s. During the 19th century far north Queensland was seen as a romantic, exotic and tropical destination, with visitors mainly interested in the natural beauties of the area, such as landscapes, numerous waterfalls and the Chillagoe Caves. The health benefits of the spa at Innot Springs, and the coolness of mountain locations of Herberton and Kuranda, were also attractive.
However, transport infrastructure was limited to rough tracks and railways constructed to access mining, timber and agricultural resources. It was not until the 1920s, with the rise of the motor car and the construction of tourist roads by the Queensland Government, that tourism accelerated in the region.
In the 1920s and 30s, Cairns was the major entry point for visitors to far north Queensland, and had an established reputation as a tourist centre and "tropical winter resort." Arriving by the boat load, the number of tourists needing accommodation in Cairns often exceeded the number of "first class" hotel rooms available, with those missing out having to sleep on board their ships. The completion of the Brisbane–Cairns railway in 1924 (called the "Sunshine Route" from 1929) opened another option for reaching Cairns. By 1925, the Hides Hotel and the Strand Hotel were the only two first class accommodation houses in Cairns, and the need for a greater number and higher standard of accommodation options to foster the tourist trade, on the Atherton Tablelands as well as Cairns, was becoming more widely recognised.
From 1891 tourists could access the Atherton Tablelands by rail, but the construction of the Gillies Highway (Gordonvale to Yungaburra) in 1926 enabled the White Car Line to transport tourists by road, increasing access to attractions like Lake Barrine, Lake Eacham, the Mount Hypipamee Crater and the Curtain Fig Tree at Yungaburra. Other popular attractions in the region in the interwar period included the Barron Falls, the Maze, Fairyland Tea Gardens, and Dodd's butterfly collection at Kuranda, the "Jungle" at Malanda, and Paronella Park south of Innisfail. Favoured seaside resorts in the 1920s included Double Island Beach, Yorkey's Knob, Turtle Bay, Second Beach, False Cape, and Browns Bay, while visitation to the Great Barrier Reef occurred with launch trips to Green Island. The Palmerston Highway (Innisfail to Ravenshoe) opened in 1935 and allowed road access to the southern tablelands.