History, Narrative and Back Story
When I set out to write something about The North, it did not take long to discover some things do not quite work.
An initial idea based around a Highways and Byways travelogue ran out of legs around the time the first version reached Mackay.
So while there's a section called Highways and Byways, it's an alphabetical sequence of what we know about [here] rather than a step-by-step, stop-by-stop sojourn along a stretch of bitumen.
I could have started another step-by-step sequential account of coastal features. However, it was apparent that Around the Coastline intersected with accounts of particular voyages.
An alphabetical listing can collate the details of European encounters with Cape Hillsborough, Hinchinbrook Island or the Endeavour River. However, those encounters sit more neatly in a narrative rather than a listing of largely unrelated incidents at that location.
So I turned my attention to The North as I have known it.
That delivered a fairly obvious narrative stream, running through my family's arrival in Townsville in 1963 through a couple of years on the city's fringes in an area that later became its demographic centre.
So Recollection, Reconstruction, Reflection and Reminiscence includes themes like 'Course, when I come here, this was all scrub and A Teenager's Guide to Townsville in the Sixties. However, my ambitions extended beyond such modest horizons.
I was always going to write a history; more than likely, there'd be more than one.
As it turns out, I have ended up with several of the little devils, and the devil is in the detail.
That became obvious as I started looking at those European encounters with coastal features.
It seems logical to start at the beginning, so I went back to 1606 and the Duyfken voyage.
Move forward through Torres, Carstensz, Tasman and Cook, and you have five of the Six Voyages that delivered an outline of the Northern coastline.
The sixth represents a seemingly unrelated venture that raises more questions than answers.
Then with the outline in place, later expeditions set about Adding Detail.
When the first settlers appeared on the scene, we have North Queensland, which sits on an ancient landscape inhabited by many First Nations, all of whom must feature in the emerging narrative.
Which Mob Is That? sets out to identify them after the earlier sections of Indigenes outlines how they came here and what happened when they arrived. Origins deal with the landscape and biological environments they encountered.
Meanwhile, under the general heading of Antecedents, I can outline the historical processes that brought the newcomers here.
