The origins of this rather grandiose project lie on Day Three of a road trip to Cooktown in May 2012, though its roots go back much further.
After my family moved from Brisbane to Townsville in August 1963 I became quite fascinated with this part of the world, and, over the intervening years, managed to pick up what I thought was a reasonable overview of The North, its history and geography.
We were on our way to the Palmer River Roadhouse and Laura on a Tuesday morning, having overnighted in Atherton, crossing country that was new to me, though I'd read plenty of intriguing material about the early days as would-be gold miners flooded into the hinterland behind Cairns, Port Douglas and Cooktown.
As we made our way through Mount Molloy and Mount Carbine, however, I started thinking that the scraps of information I had retained about these places, and locations across The North as a whole, needed to be formalised in some way.
The most obvious candidate was the road trip travelogue that would be tapped out on the computer once we were comfortably back in the Little House of Concrete. I had the iPad to record day by day impressions, and the results would be expanded with a little additional research and would eventually appear as an iBook and PDF on the Little House of Concrete website.
But I thought we needed something more than that.