From Bowen, the Highway would continue through the Burdekin to Townsville, and the Byways would run from Bowen out through Collinsville to Mount Coolon and points beyond and along the Burdekin to Clare and Dalbeg.
A few months spent gathering material, however, was enough to convince me that the step by step along the highway approach was not the way to go. I needed a systematic approach, possibly working from hyperlinks on a map to what amounted to a Gazetteer (1) and I could do the same thing around the coastline.
It would need a chronology as well. I'd been sorting the accumulated material into something resembling a timeline anyway.
At that point, I decided that a historical approach would be better, turned the attention to the explorers, and realised that there had to be a narrative element as well.
And so, like Topsy, it just grew.
But it also morphed along the way. An original notion of splitting the narrative into predictable sections (Exploring The North, Settling The North, Mining The North etc.) was likely to become unwieldy, and would almost certainly involve some degree of duplication.
Then the penny dropped.
At every stage of what we might term the whitefella, or migaloo history of The North, details were recorded on paper, often as sketches or 'mud maps' that would later become real maps. Each new settlement must have a street plan; each new suburb entered onto the latest edition of a street directory.