The Project: Strands
Inevitably, there would be an autobiographical element in what I ended up writing. Most of it deals with my family's relocation from Brisbane to Townsville in 1963, my decision to stay when my parents and my younger brother headed back south a little over seven years later, and what happened after that.
The autobiographical content splits naturally. Northward Bound offers a what we left behind and what we found narrative. It also serves as an introduction to the project's main themes and a peculiarly Northern perspective on the historical content herein.
Within that autobiographical narrative, Recollection and Reconstruction address memories I can document. Reflection and Reminiscence deal with matters that are harder to verify and what I think — or thought at the time — they meant.
Second, there's a possibly overambitious attempt at a biography of the region. Origins will track forward from the beginning of the universe, fast-forwarding to the point where plate tectonics became a factor in moulding the physical environment the First Peoples landed in. Indigenes will address how they arrived, the biological environment they encountered and how they responded to it. While much of that content remains on the drawing board, What Mob Is That? attempts to list the main groups — the traditional custodians of different areas — and make sense of the multitude of groups that appear in the ethnographic literature. The final result — when it appears as a single text rather than a collection of individual pages— will be a cross-referenced alphabetical list.
Antecedents provide the background for the next waves of arrivals: the navigators who reached — or, in the case of the Portuguese, may have reached — Australian shores and traced its outline and those who followed in their wake, establishing the colony at Botany Bay that morphed into New South Wales and the convict outpost at Moreton Bay that became a separate colony in 1859.
With the background in place, Mapping The North is my attempt to chronicle Northern history, tracing back to what people thought might lie in this part of the world (Perceptions and Misconceptions), the processes that brought them into the neighbourhood (Prelude: Tracing an Outline) and the Six Voyages that gave those who arrived on the scene after 1788 something to work from. At first, those later arrivals were Adding Detail — filling in some of the spaces their predecessors left blank before George Elphinstone Dalrymple led the overland party that established the settlement at Bowen in 1861. From there, the detail continues to go down on paper in a narrative that could — but \won't — continue until the outline of every suburban subdivision, new neighbourhood or separate locality has been dealt with.
Significant questions that can't be ignored but don't quite fit into that framework slot into Themes and Variations — When Is Something "Discovered"? A Radical, Republican, Multicultural North? Really? Why did it take so long to "Discover" Australia's East Coast?
So that's The Bookshelf that sits on top of a Filing Cabinet of reference material.
