Kennedy Highway

The Kennedy Highway is a highway in northern Queensland, Australia. It runs as National Route 1 for approximately 243 km from Smithfield, on the northern outskirts of Cairns, to the Gulf Developmental Road in the vicinity of Forty Mile Scrub and Undara Volcanic national parks (at Minnamoolka, about 40 kilometres south of Mount Garnet). South of this junction, the road continues as the Kennedy Developmental Road (State Highway 62) to Boulia about 936 kilometres away, via Hughenden. West of the junction, National Route 1 continues as the Gulf Developmental Road to Normanton.

Map of Kennedy Hwy, Queensland, Australia

From Smithfield, the highway climbs up into the Atherton Tableland before heading in a general south-westerly direction to the aforementioned junction. The highway is mostly two-lanes. Major towns on, or just off, the Kennedy Highway include Smithfield, Kuranda, Mareeba, Atherton, Ravenshoe and Mount Garnet. Past Mount Garnet, the Kennedy Highway has several long sections of single lane bitumen. The section between The Lynd Roadhouse junction at Conjuboy and Hughenden is mostly unsealed and is also known as the Hann Highway.

For a distance of more than 100 km, from the crossing on the Diamantina River to a point southwest of Middleton, the Kennedy Developmental Road passes across a roughly circular zone measuring some 130 km across that has been identified by Geoscience Australia as a crustal anomaly. Proof is currently lacking as to the cause, but it is believed likely that the anomaly was caused by an asteroid strike that happened about 300,000,000 years ago.

Two northern councils (Etheridge and Flinders) have proposed development of the Hann Highway which would allow for the transport of products from Far North Queensland to markets in New South Wales and Victoria considerably quicker than via existing coastal routes which have rougher terrain and are sometimes impassable due to floods.