Cairns Taipans

The Cairns Taipans are an Australian men's professional basketball team competing in the National Basketball League (NBL). The club is based in the North Queensland city of Cairns. The Taipans, named after a species of venomous snake native to Australia, entered the NBL in the 1999–2000 season. The Taipans play their home games at the 5,300 seat Cairns Convention Centre (CCC), known as "The Snakepit" within the NBL, and play in orange and white colours.

History

The first coach in franchise history was former Cairns Marlins ABA coach Rod Popp. Playing at the newly expanded Cairns Convention Centre, the Taipans played their first game against the Sydney Kings in front of 4,407 fans. However, there would be few highlights in their first season, finishing last with a 2–26 record.

With a large turn-over of players in their second season, expectations for Cairns were low. Headed by Guy Molloy, a former South-East Melbourne Magic and Australian women's national team assistant coach, the Taipans would improve to 6–22, sell out five of fourteen home games and attract over 4,963 spectators per match.

Cairns

Cairns (/ˈkænz/), is a major city on the east coast of Far North Queensland in Australia. The city is the 5th most populous in Queensland and 14th overall in Australia. Cairns was founded in 1876 and named after William Wellington Cairns, Governor of Queensland from 1875-1877. It was formed to serve miners heading for the Hodgkinson River goldfield, but experienced a decline when an easier route was discovered from Port Douglas. It later developed into a railhead and major port for exporting sugar cane, gold and other metals, minerals and agricultural products from surrounding coastal areas and the Atherton Tableland region. The estimated residential population of the Cairns urban area in 2014 was 146,778. The region has experienced an average annual growth rate of 2.8% over the last 10 years.

Cairns is a popular travel destination for tourists because of its tropical climate and access to the Great Barrier Reef, one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

History

Prior to British settlement, the Cairns area was inhabited by the Mandingalbay Yidinji and the Gimuy Walubara Yidinji people, who still claim their Native Title rights. The area is known in the local Yidiny language as Gimuy.

Cairn

A cairn is a human-made pile (or stack) of stones. The word cairn comes from the Scottish Gaelic: càrn (plural càirn).

Cairns are used as trail markers in many parts of the world, in uplands, on moorland, on mountaintops, near waterways and on sea cliffs, as well as in barren deserts and tundra. They vary in size from small stone markers to entire artificial hills, and in complexity from loose conical rock piles to delicately balanced sculptures and elaborate feats of megalithic engineering. Cairns may be painted or otherwise decorated, whether for increased visibility or for religious reasons. An ancient example is the inuksuk (plural inuksuit), used by the Inuit, Inupiat, Kalaallit, Yupik, and other peoples of the Arctic region of North America. These structures are found from Alaska to Greenland. This region, above the Arctic Circle, is dominated by the tundra biome and has areas with few natural landmarks.

In modern times, cairns are often erected as landmarks, a use they have had since ancient times; but, since prehistory, they have also been built for a variety of other reasons, such as burial monuments and for defence and hunting, as well as ceremonial, astronomical, and other purposes.

List of craters on Mars: A-G

This is a list of craters on Mars. There are hundreds of thousands of impact craters on Mars, but only some of them have names. This list here only contains named Martian craters starting with the letter A – G (see also lists for H – N and O – Z).

Large Martian craters (greater than 60 km in diameter) are named after famous scientists and science fiction authors; smaller ones (less than 60 km in diameter) get their names from towns on Earth. Craters cannot be named for living people, and small crater names are not intended to be commemorative - that is, a small crater isn't actually named after a specific town on Earth, but rather its name comes at random from a pool of terrestrial place names, with some exceptions made for craters near landing sites. Latitude and longitude are given as planetographic coordinates with west longitude.

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

See also

References

External links