The Project
When I set out to write something about The North around the middle of 2012, things seemed reasonably straightforward: I'd write something. It would be about my part of the world, a region I'd arrived in just under fifty years earlier and have never felt inclined to leave. Since then, a great deal of water has flown under several bridges.
After many twists and turns, that vague and undefined ambition has coalesced into six main strands, accompanied by a tranche of reference material.
While I have called it The North, and there is some overlap across the border into the Northern Territory, the subject under discussion is Queensland's northern half.
It started as an attempt to get a handle on the region as I have known it. However, I can only make sense of the past sixty-odd years by considering the hundred-and-sixty-odd years of the region's migaloo history, and that only makes sense with some understanding of the physical and human environment the people who came here after April 1861 encountered.
But, from there, it becomes complicated. Those who arrived in The North brought their historical baggage with them. Their experiences were shaped by an environment that had, in turn, been shaped by those who came before them. Those First People encountered a physical and natural landscape formed over aeons.
So, faced with questions about where the story starts, it seemed logical to go back to the beginning and work forward. That explains the Origins; Indigenes deal with those First Peoples, what they found and how they shaped it; Antecedents look at the processes that landed later arrivals on the doorstep. Mapping The North is my account of how they recorded what they found.
The result is, in effect, a bookshelf that sits atop a filing cabinet of reference material.
