Cunninghams Gap reconstruction is complete. The Cunningham Highway's crest has been reduced: the mountainside stabilised against rockfall, the steepest section eased for heavy vehicles, the work delivered inside the Gondwana Rainforests World Heritage Area while keeping around 6,000 vehicles a day moving through it.
I've worked engagement on this exact stretch of road twice, fifteen years apart, from both sides of the table. In 2011 I was in community engagement at TMR, on a $40 million safety overhaul across eight hazard hot spots on the same 7-kilometre mountain section, after storms and rockfalls had closed it again and again. This time @McIlwain brought me in for the critical start-up: I developed the engagement strategy, stood up the community and stakeholder engagement and began implementation, then handed it to the in-house team in 2024 who took it through to today's completion. This corridor doesn't get hit once. It gets hit, rebuilt and hit again: landslip damage then, bushfire damage now. Each time, the same freight operators and Scenic Rim communities either side of the Gap have to keep moving through the works.
That's why engagement here doesn't get to reset with every new damage event. They're the same audience across a landslip recovery and a bushfire recovery, and what you tell them the first time shapes how much patience they bring to the second.
Cunninghams Gap keeps getting rebuilt because the people who rely on it keep needing it. This time the work was built to hold, and hopefully it's the last major rebuild this stretch needs. But the corridor isn't going anywhere, and neither is the work of keeping its communities alongside whatever comes next. That's what resilience actually looks like.
#CommunityEngagement #Freight #TransportInfrastructure #ScenicRim #DisasterRecovery