As we made our way along the highway between Bowen and points north and south, I'd been toying with similar scraps of detail.
What were the stories behind, for instance, Kuttabul and Koumala?
What about all those little sugar townships in the Burdekin and Herbert River?
Why did Ayr and Ingham end up (comparatively) towering over Brandon and Halifax?
Thinking along those lines produced another obvious candidate. I could create something with a title along the lines of About the North: Highways and Byways. It could start somewhere between Rockhampton and Mackay.
Somewhere along that stretch of road the traveller crosses the boundary between The North and the rest of the country.
Like the nineteenth century colonial politicians I was inclined to draw the line somewhere around Cape Palmerston, almost due east of Koumala, though that would rule Carmila, Flaggy Rock and Clairview out of the narrative.
No, I thought, better to start on the highway out of Rocky, noting each place in turn. There aren't that many of them.
And that's more or less what I did, figuring once I'd traced the highway to Mackay there'd be another chapter on the highway from Mackay to Bowen and another on the roads out of Mackay that take the traveller along the Pioneer Valley and up to Eungella or away to the southwest towards the coalfields.