Camera Traps – June 2026

The Cow Bay Friends of the Foundation was established in 1998 and is dedicated to improving patient care by funding vital, state-of-the-art equipment for the Cow Bay Primary Health Centre, which offers a number of community health services, including a weekly doctor’s clinic and child health support, an immunisation clinic and adult health checks, mental health services, including case management, emergency care, pathology services, a visiting mental health social worker, physiotherapist and HACC occupational health assessor.

On 15^th August 2025, the new $14.8 million Cow Bay Primary Health Clinic officially opened, providing improved access to essential healthcare services for all residents and visitors in need of medical attention, in a modern purpose-built facility that includes a helicopter landing pad and staff accommodation. This environmentally friendly, fully self-sufficient facility has been designed to deliver continuity of care through severe weather events with state-of-the-art stand-alone renewable energy management.  The new clinic provides a much more comfortable, weather-proof and welcoming healthcare environment for residents and visitors in need of healthcare services within Daintree Rainforest and surrounds.

Cow Bay Friends of the Foundation has proposed a community-based shuttlebus with disabled lift provision as the next obvious improvement to patient care infrastructure, in an environment with an increasingly aging constituency.

Daintree Rainforest Foundation LTD strongly supports this proposition.  Indeed, having  given a lifetime’s contribution to this rainforest community through World Heritage presentation and managerial excellence, co-founding director, Prudence Hewett, at 90-years of age, has lost mobility to the ravages of time and some 20,000-KM of rainforest walking tours and now has great difficulty getting to the doctor for prescriptions that are necessary for both pain-management and also retaining the community’s brain-trust of rainforest custodianship in situ.

As it is in nature, evolutionary adaptations are proceeded by a need and structure is determined by function.  Our evolving rainforest community has a need to provide the wisdom of its elders with the respectability of a shuttlebus with a disabled lift facility, to overcome an emergent shortfall in healthcare infrastructure delivery in a World Heritage environment that honours and relies upon its elders for their irreplaceable knowledge.

Other larger communities closer to the regional city of Cairns already have these facilities, but now the time is ripe for Daintree Rainforest and surrounds to be supported in acquiring its own community-based shuttle-bus with disabled lift provision.  The inevitable alternative would have to draw off an already over-burdened ambulance service, when the local community, through the Cow Bay Friends of the Foundation has proposed the obvious solution.

To this end, Daintree Rainforest Foundation LTD encourages QLD Health and any other agencies and interests to support this timely initiative to the greatest possible extent.