Third, in case I decide to pursue some kind of exercise in historical fiction I need a collection of reference material that details the sequence of events as well as the people involved and the locations where these things happened.
Those considerations have produced A Chronology of Sorts, Northern People and Northern Places. The content in these areas is by and large the digital equivalent of the card index system the historian will probably adopt to sort the research material as it is encountered.
Eventually, A Chronology of Sorts will contain a decade by decade overview, a year by year survey and a month by month chronology, but the material that is slotted in there at the time of writing comprises a lot of unsorted draft material without too much in the way of sorting and reshuffling.
Northern People, with its links to Wikipedia entries, the Australian Dictionary of Biography and other sources, provides a very basic way of identifying and collating information about significant personalities. At some point in time, these will morph into something bearing a closer resemblance to actual biography, but that will only happen when particular individuals come under the microscope as part of a wider narrative.
Northern Places is slightly more advanced, providing the basic detail for Highways and Byways, and data that can be used elsewhere in the project. Eventually, this will turn into a reasonably detailed history of each locality, but that will take a while.
And, in the background, there’s the possibility of the big sweeping work of historical fiction I’ve been threatening to embark on. That will involve interaction between the almost Bowen that features in some of my fiction and the wider North, with a plot line involving a commercial and political rivalry between two families. That rivalry will run back to the early settlement of the town of Denison, and take the characters through actual events as the dynastic rivalry unfolds.
That plot line, of course, will involve people, places and events that find their way into A Chronology of Sorts, Northern People and Northern Places. It’s something that I’ve started to explore in The Denison Saga, though the actual form any narrative takes is going to depend on what gets turned up along the way.