The Project: What to Write?
Although the origins of this project lie on Day Three of a road trip to Cooktown in May 2012, its roots go back to my family's move from Brisbane to Townsville in August 1963. Over the intervening decades, I'd become fascinated by The North. Now, en route to the Palmer River Roadhouse and Laura, I was encountering country I hadn't seen before, although I had read about the days when would-be gold miners flooded into the hinterland behind Cairns, Port Douglas, and Cooktown bound for the Palmer River and the Hodgkinson.
As we made our way through Mount Molloy and Mount Carbine, I started thinking that the scraps of information I'd gathered about these places needed to be formalised. Although a day-by-day travelogue of the trip would appear on the Little House of Concrete website, I was probably looking at something more than that — a stand-alone project rather than an addition to an existing one.
But what kind of project?
A history, done properly, would mean lengthy spells away from home in libraries and archives. Geoffrey Bolton's A Thousand Miles Away was almost fifty years old. A mountain of material had appeared in the meantime. Henry Reynolds had produced North of Capricorn: The untold story of the people of Australia's north. There might be room for another general history of The North, but I wasn't inclined to attempt one.
In the end, I settled on a sort of multi-stranded biography of the region. It would start — metaphorically — with a blank sheet of paper. As various travellers encountered the region, charted what they'd found, and described what they saw, the details were recorded on maps. Mapping The North would serve as the project's centrepiece, and would come in five instalments. One would deal with what various Europeans thought might lie hereabouts. A second would deal with possible Portuguese encounters. Another would cover what is known about the half-dozen voyages that sketched in an outline of the Northern coast before 1788. A fourth would detail the voyages that filled in blank spaces around the coast and the overland journeys that traversed the region before the first settlers arrived. Episode five would take the narrative through Queensland's separation from New South Wales, the migaloo arrival in The North, the gold rushes and what came afterwards. That might segue into a sixth, seventh, or eighth episode and carry the narrative towards the latest residential subdivisions in various North Queensland centres.
And I could surround that central narrative with the backstories and supplementary detail a (perhaps not quite) insatiable curiosity might unearth.
