Reflection and Reminiscence
I wasn't born in this part of the world, but I arrived in Townsville, a gangly Year Seven kid still three months shy of his twelfth birthday. That was in August 1963. A glance at the calendar suggests Sunday, 18 August, as a possible date.
The rest of my family lasted about seven years and then returned south. I decided I liked the place and stayed. Fifty years later, that allows me to claim dyed-in-the-wool Northerner status.
Exploring what kept me here is part of the motivation behind this collection of reminiscences. It's also easy to enumerate incidents, decisions, and other elements that influenced the conscious decision to stay, and they can be traced back to a time well before the Hughes family moved north.
