Cairns Convention Centre, which opened in 1997, is a multi-purpose arena, located in Cairns, Australia. The capacity is 5,300 people.
It is the home arena of the Cairns Taipans basketball team. The record crowd is 5,500 for an NBL Finals game in 2004 between Cairns Taipans and Perth Wildcats. During Taipans games it is commonly referred to as "The Snakepit" in reference to the team's nickname.
The convention centre is said to be Australia’s first environmentally-designed major public building. It boasts several green features such as a double-layer pleated plate roof that provides half of the centre’s grounds and garden watering needs. It has won a number of awards for its green features, including the first EIBTM environmental award in 1994.
Famous quotes containing the words convention and/or centre:
“No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius—a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“Here in the centre stands the glass. Light
Is the lion that comes down to drink. There
And in that state, the glass is a pool.
Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws
When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)