Given the impression I’d formed of Bowen’s founder, George Elphinstone Dalrymple as a man of action rather than a desk jockey, it was obvious he’d arrive in the area expecting to find the Irish surveyor’s party had been massacred or had met some other form of untimely end.
When he arrived not only would he have found the Irishman alive, he’d also be presented with a preliminary town plan, relieving Dalrymple of the need to produce his own. I suspected Mr Dalrymple would have accepted something like that with alacrity.
That town plan would have been drawn up in the expectation that the settlement would become the capital of a new colony, so it seemed logical to make the landscape Denison was built on a little more imposing that what we find in the real Bowen.
I was looking across to Flagstaff Hill on my morning walk when I realised that Denison needed not one but three hills between Dalrymple Point and the mouth of the renamed Don River (the Argyll).
The hill closest to Dalrymple Point would have ended up with a lighthouse on top of it, and would have been reserved for parkland or sporting facilities rather than commercial or residential development. Given the presence of deep water close to the shore, I thought the lee side of Beacon Hill would be a suitable site for the port facilities, with residential and warehouse developments extending around the shoreline from the tip of the point.
The second of the three hills would have been reserved for imposing government buildings, and would end up being christened something like Capitol Hill.
The third hill would have been reserved for homes with panoramic views across the Argyll floodplain, and the high ground Denison was built on would presumably have produced a wet season overflow conveying some of the Argyll’s floodwaters into the waters of Port Denison.
The highway south from Townsville, in this revised geography, crosses the Argyll , then runs well away from the river’s banks, crossing The Overflow leaving enough room to its right for extensive farming operations. Where you turn off the highway to head into Denison the fourth arm of The Crossroads is a minor road giving access to that farmland.
There’s a preliminary draft of some of the “Historical” material, but it’s not likely to be developed any further in the near future unless I run across something that seems to fit into what’s already there.
I haven’t taken that side of things too far, but more than a century of rivalry will be resolved when Australian netball representative Elizabeth O’Shanahan, a direct descendant of the Irish surveyor, ends up marrying former Wallaby Bryan Barron, scion of Denison’s Protestant business dynasty in London (far enough away to prevent the two families from intervening). An illness in one of the families brings them back to Denison, and the need to find them employment places them and their offspring in the Palace in time for the events described in Dirty Work At the Crossroads.
