Kissing Point was one link in a deliberate chain. The scheme began with Fort Lytton in Brisbane in the early 1880s and extended to Green Hill Fort on Thursday Island, built almost simultaneously with the Townsville battery in the early 1890s. The thinking, devised for Queensland by the military engineers Sir William Jervois and Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Scratchley, was that fixed gun positions ashore would work in concert with naval power to deny an enemy the harbour. Major Edward Druitt supervised the design and construction here, the same engineer who fortified Magazine and Thursday Islands. Only four such coastal batteries were ever built in Queensland, and three survive. The Kissing Point fort kept its essential parts: two gun emplacements, an underground magazine, range-finder positions, a lookout, and casemate store rooms, all enclosed by an earthen seaward parapet.

The fort was never just stone and steel; it was a gathering place for soldiers. From 1887 the low ground behind the battery hosted regular training, and from 1889 the annual encampments of North Queensland's military forces. The Kennedy Regiment, raised in Townsville in 1886 and one of Queensland's oldest units, made this headland its home. Its members carried on through the Federation militia, fought as part of the Imperial forces in both World Wars and earned battle honours, and continued after 1921 as the 31st Battalion. For more than 125 years, until the army formally relinquished the site in 2007, a military presence persisted on this rock, an unbroken thread of marching feet and morning parades stretching from the colonial era into living memory.

The wider barracks took its name not from Townsville but from a mountain village in Lebanon. On 13 June 1941, during the Syria-Lebanon campaign against Vichy French forces, Australian troops of the 7th Division fought the Battle of Jezzine. Their commander was Major-General John Lavarack, whose name Townsville's other army base also carries. When the headland barracks expanded around 1941, it was christened Jezzine in honour of that victory half a world away. The Second World War transformed the site: five prefabricated P1 huts were thrown up to meet the urgent demand for accommodation as the war reached Australia's doorstep, and those increasingly rare huts survive today as relics of a nation scrambling to defend itself.

By the late 1990s the army was preparing to dispose of the headland, and Townsville pushed back. A determined public campaign argued that this place, with its forty-five-kilometre sweep of views across the bay to Castle Hill and Magnetic Island, belonged to the community. In 2009 most of the site was transferred to the Townsville City Council in trust, specifically for public use, and reopened as a park honouring two histories at once. The Army Museum of North Queensland now occupies the old precinct, its dioramas tracing the colonial wars through Korea, Vietnam and beyond. Woven through the grounds is the Wulgurukaba and Bindal heritage of the headland, told in interpretive signage and dozens of commissioned public artworks, recognising that this coastal landscape held meaning for its Traditional Owners long before any gun pointed out to sea.