While I wasn’t born in this part of the world, I arrived in Townsville, a gangly Year Seven kid still three months shy of his twelfth birthday, in August 1963.
I’ve lived up this way ever since allows me, as far as I’m concerned anyway, to claim to be a died in the wool Northerner.
There are others with stronger, longer, claims, but I reckon those credentials stand up a bit better than those of many more recent arrivals.
I got to the North, stayed on through High School, University and Teachers' College and refused to accept an appointment to teach in my nominal home town after my parents relocated back to Brisbane at the end of 1970.
No, I arrived, decided I liked the place, and as so many have done, stayed.
The North Queensland I encountered fifty years ago was,, an entirely different entity to the one we know today. You’d hardly expect it to be otherwise, but there are still remnants of the old North lurking in the background, assuming you know where to look and what to notice.
The origins of this project, however, lie very much in the twenty-first century. After years when I was regarded as a died in the wool recluse, travel has started to become part of the equation now that I can afford to do it, and the past few years have seen me out and about in the Big Back Yard to a much greater extent than was previously possible.
At the same time, those ramblings have produced a number of items on The Little House of Concrete website, and on The Little House of Concrete Hits The Road blog, and the thought of doing something along these lines has been lurking in the murky depths of Hughesy’s consciousness for a couple of years.
As we head through the landscape hereabouts I often find myself musing on matters historical, geographical and geological, and these things certainly warrant a touch of investigatory digging.