There’s The Denison Saga, a concept that won’t progress until I start serious investigations of the hinterland beyond a substantially modified Bowen created for my novel (Dirty Work at the Crossroads) that has definite possibilities for a broad work of historical fiction.
The close to fifty years I’ve spent in the North is pretty close to one-third of the region’s whitefella history.
It’s worth taking a glance back to 1963 with a second glimpse back fifty or so years earlier to see how much things had changed through the North’s second half-century.
The city I’d just arrived in might have been the second largest in the state, but it was still, essentially, a country town. There were factors that had enabled it to grow past its peers and regional rivals, but there wasn’t a great deal of difference between Townsville and, say, Rockhampton.
Both owed much of their growth to a position at the junction of the railway line running along the coast and a second line running west. That line delivered livestock that kept meat works at Lakes Creek (Rockhampton), Alligator Creek and Ross River (Townsville) operating.
Two slaughterhouses to one accounted for part of the differential between the two cities, but that was only part of the picture.
The line west from Rockhampton serviced pastoral districts out to Longreach.
From there it looped through Winton to connect with the Great Northern line.
That line, running west from Townsville filled dual purposes.
First, it looked after pastoral centres between Charters Towers and Cloncurry.
More significantly, it also delivered minerals from Mount Isa to the coast.