In the Beginning
While I acquired a more than passing interest in this part of the world after my family arrived in Townsville in 1963 and developed it over the next fifty-odd years, I can trace this project's origins to a particular time and place on a road trip. My partner and I were bound for Laura and Cooktown.
Those destinations prompted a particular mindset. The Hodgkinson goldfield was somewhere over my left shoulder, and the Palmer River goldfield was ahead of us. Looking at a not-overly-hospitable landscape, I imagined hopeful diggers pushing wheelbarrows through the scrub and thought it was about time I tried writing something about the North.
