Introduction

This new year, I have been particularly anxious about our lack of Queensland travel and associated eBooks. We are Queenslanders, who currently live in the state, and have lived in Queensland for just over half our lives. We should understand the State. Currently we have one eBook related to Queensland: Queensland Coastal Towns – A Road Trip.

Quite simply, we should have more!

Choices for more Queensland travel

Our cheeky elder daughter gave me a notebook for Xmas with a customised front cover which read: Things Graham thought of while riding his bike. Apparently, I return from most of my morning bike rides sprouting new ideas – Katherine’s common refrain is – not another idea – he’s been riding again! Positively rude I say.

The question about a lack of Queensland travel has been on my riding mind lately.

So, what are our choices? My initial thoughts are to:

  • explore the Wide Bay Burnett Region;
  • travel to more Queensland towns photographing heritage buildings;
  • revisit the road trip through Queensland Coastal Towns; and
  • visit the Queensland outback

For the remainder of this post I’ll discuss these Queensland travel options and associated eBooks.

Wide Bay Burnett Region

Living in Maroochydore (on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast) means that the Wide Bay Burnett Region is right on our doorstep. The major cities of the region are Bundaberg, Hervey Bay, Maryborough and Gympie. There are also many regional towns (e.g. Kingaroy, Childers, Rainbow Beach etc.).

This region is attractive to the traveller/tourist with many highlights:

  • Gympie (Heritage buildings; Gateway to the Cooloola Coast of Inskip Point, Rainbow Beach and Tin Can Bay and onto Fraser Island);
  • Maryborough (Heritage town; Annual Mary Poppins Festival);
  • Harvey Bay (Whale watching; access to Fraser Island – World Heritage listed and World’s largest sand island); and
  • Bundaberg (Access to Southern Great Barrier Reef – Lady Elliot and Lady Musgrave Islands; Marine turtles at Mon Repos Beach; Australia’s best Rum Distillery; Bargara Beach)

Last year we visited Gympie and photographed all the Heritage listed buildings (except the Post Office – undergoing renovation/restoration – there’s always one!), and this year we are planning to visit the Cooloola Coast (staying in Rainbow Beach). Childers, a town in the region, is also on our list for heritage buildings.

We need to make this area our own and produce, and continually update, an eBook.

Visits to our best heritage/historic cities/towns

In our road trip up and down the Queensland coast the prime purpose for us was to photograph heritage listed buildings. Unfortunately, we have not visited all the cities/towns with good heritage-listed buildings (e.g. Brisbane, Ipswich, Toowoomba, Warwick, Childers, Charters Towers, Ravenswood and perhaps Mount Morgan). However, we have started by visiting Brisbane in January)

Now, I think there is at least one eBook here, for example: Our Top 10 Heritage/Historic Queensland Cities/Towns. The criteria for selecting these Cities/Towns would be State significance, heritage listed buildings and our family association.

As mentioned above we have lived in Queensland for over half our lives and certain cities and towns resonate with us as a family.

Our top 10 Cities/Towns, that meet the above criteria, could be:

  1. Brisbane (State significance, Heritage buildings, and family association)
  2. Ipswich (State significance, Heritage buildings, and family association)
  3. Warwick (Heritage buildings)
  4. Toowoomba (Heritage buildings, family association)
  5. Gympie (Heritage buildings)
  6. Maryborough (Heritage buildings)
  7. Rockhampton (Heritage buildings)
  8. Townsville (State significance, heritage buildings, and family association)
  9. Charters Towers and Ravenswood (Heritage buildings)
  10. Cairns (State significance, heritage buildings)

This is a work in progress and may take a few years.

However, there is an alternative!

Queensland heritage buildings

As mentioned earlier we have many photographs of heritage listed buildings from our trip along the Queensland coast. So, we just need to finish the job by visiting the towns mentioned above (i.e. Brisbane, Ipswich, Toowoomba, Warwick, Childers, Charters Towers and Ravenswood).

There are some common heritage-listed buildings in these towns which could form the focus for a series of eBooks (and an overall printed book). For example, heritage-listed schools of arts, post offices, pubs (hotels), banks and war memorials are generally available in most of these towns and could be the basis for a series of eBooks.

Currently, I cannot decide between the 10 cities/towns or heritage buildings approach. Each day my thinking changes (C’mon get it together!).

I am unsure about including the family association idea in the 10 cities/towns approach. I did a short course of memoir writing back in the noughties and it frightened the life out of me. Memoirs seem to be too revealing and confronting for me. However, since adding my profile to OS Wayfarer, I have been contemplating writing Our Story which would embrace not just our time in Queensland but elsewhere in Australia and overseas. So, I’m thinking that may be the better approach.

While I’m prevaricating, I think it would be smart to just continue to gather the photographs of heritage-listed places and decide later.

Our eBook: Queensland Coastal Towns – A Road Trip can be found on:

Amazon (Kindle US), Kindle UK, AU Kindle

Smashwords (EPUB), Smashwords also distributes to Oyster, Scribd, Yuzu, Blio and Inktera (formerly Page Foundry) and reaches OverDrive (world’s largest library ebook platform serving 20,000+ libraries), Baker & Taylor Axis 360, Gardners (Askews & Holts and Browns Books for Students), and Odilo (2,100 public libraries in North America, South America and Europe)

Kobo; Apple iTunes; Barnes and Noble

Updating/Extending our existing Queensland coastal towns eBook

As mentioned above, our theme for the trip along the Queensland Coast was heritage-listed buildings in each of the cities/towns we visited. We had never meandered our way along the coast before, it had always been a sprint to and from Brisbane and Townsville; and on a couple of occasions Townsville and Melbourne!

Consequently, we didn’t pay too much heed to the touristy things to do along the way.

This needs to be rectified.

While it is still early days in our thinking, we consider Cairns, Townsville and the Whitsundays could be targets. We’ll also visit Charters Towers and Ravenswood to photograph their heritage-listed buildings.

Furthermore, we may explore a different way of seeing the highlights. For example, we could fly from Brisbane to Cairns and work our way back down on the train (Spirit of Queensland). We talked about this in our Coastal Towns eBook and we’d like to try it.

Queensland travel eBooks

A few Queensland travel eBooks can be produced from these travels:

  1. An eBook about the Wide bay Burnett region;
  2. A series of eBooks about Queensland Heritage Buildings (e.g. Schools of Art, Post Offices, Pubs, Banks, War Memorials etc) and a consolidated printed book;
  3. Extend/Update our eBook Queensland Coastal Towns – A Road Trip; and
  4. Our Top 10 Heritage/Historic Queensland Cities/Towns.

These eBooks are achievable over the next few years, and this makes me feel more comfortable about our Queensland travel plans and associated eBooks.

Conclusion

The saying goes, if you want to learn something teach it (to which I subscribe). Similarly, if you want to clarify your thoughts about something, write about it – hence this blog post. Invariably it helps, as it has done in this instance.

My conclusions are:

  1. We should focus on the Wide Bay Burnett region (own it!) and produce, and regularly update, an eBook about the region.
  2. As time permits, we should visit Brisbane, Ipswich, Warwick, Toowoomba, Charters Towers, Ravenswood and Childers to complete our bank of heritage-listed photographs. After this we can decide on the framework (Cities/Towns versus heritage building focus, that is Schools of Art, Post Offices, etc) and produce the eBook(s). One final thought: I’m beginning to favour the heritage-listed building focus. This will enable us to concentrate (almost immediately) on separate eBooks for Schools of Arts, Post Offices, Pubs, Banks, and War Memorials etc., with a view to a consolidated eBook/printed book at the end.
  3. Our schedule is crammed during 2020 and so the upgraded/extended Queensland Coastal Towns eBook won’t happen immediately. I am now a better photographer with better gear, so we might just have to repeat the journey.
  4. Surprisingly, we are starting to rethink an eBook detailing Our Story, but I’m still a little squeamish about it. I need some time, so we might delay it until January 2024 – our 50th anniversary!

What do you think we should do? Please leave a comment below.

Follow our Quarterly Journal to see how our focus on our Queensland Travel and associated eBooks progresses.

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