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Team Dusty Gazette May 2025

7/5/2025

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Are strawberries really strawberries? Or is strawberry simply a ‘barry’?


Ciao Team Dusty!

Here in Melbourne, we are in the last days of autumn which is turning on some beautiful sunny days - albeit after chilly mornings. I am taking advantage of the weather to do lots of walking as well as all the usual exercises I do regularly: yoga postures, yoga breathing, balance and concentration exercises and (occasionally) Zumba for seniors. It was also a glorious autumn day (in March) when, after a great many years, I caught up with my good friend Graeme over lunch by the Yarra River. Melbourne was at her best that day.

Read the Gazette

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Team Dusty Gazette March 2025

13/3/2025

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What do Cyclone Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh & Prime Minister Albanese all have in common? 

Find out in the March edition of Team Dusty Gazette. Click on the link below.


Ciao Team Dusty!
​Here I am back in Melbourne at last. I arrived, appropriately, on the Australia Day Weekend. It’s taking me a while to settle into a routine and to get used to living in a suburb far from the beach. However, Mount Waverley is a lovely area. The suburb is not named after a mountain, rather it has been named to honour the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott and his novel Waverley which is set in the highland regions of Scotland. 
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Team Dusty Gazette November 2024

2/1/2025

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                                                         Ciao Team Dusty!

This morning I woke up to 16 degrees. Finally the weather is starting to warm up. The forecasters got it right when they predicted September 2024 would be the coldest in years. In fact, here in Orbost we suffered the coldest spring day in 41 years with a (so-called) high of 9.6° Celsius.

Today, being the first Tuesday in November, is Melbourne Cup Day.  The Cup is a handicap horserace which means each horse is allocated a different weight depending on its age and previous form. This adds a frisson of excitement because  the punters need to try guess which horse will overcome its handicap. 
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Team Dusty Gazette September 2024

22/9/2024

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Ciao Team Dusty!
This morning I woke up to 3.8 degrees! The other day, the weather forecasters warned us we would suffer the coldest September in years. This morning’s freeze brought that home to me. It’s now eight o’clock and the temperature is 12 degrees but still feels like 3 degrees to me. 

Continue reading to find out about the man who escaped the Min Min lights.
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Don't Call Me Love!

6/8/2024

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If someone outside family and friends dares to patronise you by addressing you with an inappropriate term of endearment like 'love', don't let them get away with it. At best it is disrespectful; at worst it is bullying.

People who attempt to belittle others in this way are usually insecure. They want to get a feeling of power and reassure themselves they are worthier than others by deflecting their feelings of inferiority.

This offensive use of endearments is done with the aim, subconscious or otherwise, of diminishing the person being addressed.

Make no mistake about it, speaking to people in this way is a put down. The underlying message is: You are less than I am. We ought not allow these acts of microaggression to go unchallenged.

Often, the perpetrators do not realise they are belittling the person being addressed. THAT is no excuse. The message is the same whether it is at the subconscious level, or the conscious level. If you call it out, you’ll do them a service by raising their self-awareness.

Reject the ‘endearment’ – politely and respectfully — but firmly. For example, you could say in a courteous tone: Please don’t call me love. (Being firm is important. The offender won’t take you seriously otherwise.)

If you find doing this confronting, practise saying it in your head and out loud in the privacy of your home. That way, it will slip off your tongue more easily when the occasion arises.
Be brave!


There may be times when something about the circumstances or the offender may send you a ‘let it go’ vibe. At such times you may choose to exercise your power to be lenient and allow the discourtesy to pass without comment.

Here is a link to my whimsical ditty called Don’t Call Me Love. 

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Team Dusty Gazette July 2024

25/7/2024

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Who is the dead man on the moon? Clue: He was a shoemaker who died in Australia.
​Find out more in this issue of Team Dusty Gazette.
Get your copy NOW! Click Here.
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Team Dusty Gazette May 2024

2/6/2024

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                                              Ciao Team Dusty!

Many of you would have celebrated Mother’s Day this month. My mum was the mother of ten children. Three of them were kept secret from me and my six siblings.  It was not until my mother died that we found her secret and I took up the task of writing a book about how my mother was separated from her first three children. It was a confronting story to write and, as it was my first full length novel, I did not feel confident I was up to the task. In fact, I had to enlist the help of hypnosis to find that confidence. The end result, as most of you know, was Whisper My Secret  which has been an Amazon best seller in several categories, several times over. Go Mum!

When my mother met my father during the second World War, he took her back to his hometown Orbost in East Gippsland, which also became my hometown. Last time I told you about my relocation back to Orbost, which is now my home base until I am able to return to Melbourne to live.

At present I am taking a break in Aireys Inlet, a small coastal town located on the Great Ocean Road southwest of Melbourne. This spectacular seaside hamlet attracts tourists, surfers, filmmakers and, of course, writers. Australian crime writer Arthur Upfield lived at Aireys in the 1950s and wrote a murder mystery set in the lighthouse. Split Point Lighthouse is still a working lighthouse playing a vital role in helping vessels navigate the treacherous waters of Bass Strait. The lighthouse keeper, however, has been replaced by an automated system which still operates every night.

The romance of the lighthouse is only one of the delightful elements of this area. I also encounter lots of beautiful birds here, as I do in Orbost. However, I have not come across a sheep here in Aireys as yet. In Orbost one day while I was enjoying a cappuccino at a café in the main street I was serenaded by a bleating sheep in the background. I later found out the sheep (a ram I think), which looked like a sheep in cow’s clothing cos it had the colouring similar to a Holstein cow, was a much-loved pet. This delightful encounter remined me of the days when, as kids, my brothers and I used to ride on the back of a big old ram from the sheep farm next door. He was as big as a Shetland pony - at least he seemed to be to the child me - a gentle giant who didn’t mind having us kids on his back.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Lugubrious brown eyes stared at me from behind great wide nostrils that resembled portals to secret caves. This dromedary didn’t like me. Tooting Moon

DID YOU KNOW?
Sheep have rectangular pupils which allows them to almost everything around them except what is directly behind then - without turning their heads. Even if a sheep has its head down grazing on luscious grass it can see what’s happening around it.

And did you know there was once a sheep called Sugar living on a farm in Melbourne who answered the call of adventure from the wild. Sugar escaped from the farm and ventured out into the big wide world to see what she could see. Eventually she was taken in by a mob of kangaroos who treated her as family. She lived contentedly with the kangas for five years -  until a human spoilt her fun. This human spotted Sugar with her bush family and thought Sugar looked a little worse for wear and badly overdue for a haircut. And wouldn’t ‘ewe’ know it, she organised a rescue mission which took six months of plotting and planning.

Rescue? Sugar, in the care of her Skippy family, was doing just fine and living life to the fullest in Melbourne’s Sugarloaf Reservoir. She was nonplussed when the ‘bleating’ humans arrived in 2023 and spoilt all her fun.

They took her to the Australia’s best ‘baa-baashop’ where she was pampered and given a glamorous buzz cut. She came out without her huge wool coat looking a little sheepish. That huge coat was what had the humans worried because having so much wool on her back could have exposed Sugar to parasite infection and disease.

Sugar has now been adopted by a non-kangaroo family where she continues to get pampered and expertly groomed every day. So, I suppose you could say, ‘all’s wool that ends wool’.

Remember: All of the Dusty Kent Mysteries, including the latest book Death in The Dandenongs, are available FREE in Kindle Unlimited.


​Get regular deliveries of the Team Dusty Gazette. Click here.

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Team Dusty Gazette

11/3/2024

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For those of you who missed out, below is an excerpt from the Team Dusty Gazette which was sent to my subscribers in January 2024. To be the first to get the news subscribe here – you’ll also receive a free book of stories including Shanty Shooting which won the Scarlet Stiletto prize in 2023 (Mystery with History).

                                                                           Ciao Team Dusty!
Here in Melbourne the city is buzzing with tourists and fun, in part due to the Australian Open Tennis. The weather, however, is not playing ball. Melbourne is well known for its erratic weather and this year is no different. We have had serene temperate days befitting our ‘temperate oceanic climate’, high humidity days, cool days, drizzle days and thunderstorm days and all in a random mix. January is usually a relatively dry month in Melbourne but this year we have had the wettest start to a year since 1996. I accept some responsibility for this because I have been asking for rain for weeks. You see, I used a little of the prize money won by my story Shanty Shooting in the 2023 Scarlet Stiletto Short Story Awards to buy an umbrella in a beautiful rich yellow from Blunt Umbrellas who make top of the range umbrellas that are designed to last a lifetime. I call it my ‘Rolls Royce’ umbrella. I was so pleased with it I wanted to show it off, so I needed rain! 

When not out doing my Mary Poppins impersonation, I’ve been working on Dusty Kent #8 - almost every day. It’s a blissful experience hiding away in my ‘hayshed’* with nothing else on my mind except writing. I get so lost in ‘the zone’ I sometimes have to remind myself to eat. I have finished ‘Act I’ (apart from the fine tuning) and have just started ‘Act II’. My progress was slowed down by the unexpected appearance of a new character. I had to pause to create a profile for him and think about his role in the story. He seems to be a bit of a grumpy old man! 
*As a kid growing up in the Australian bush I often escaped into our hayshed at the bottom of the paddock. I nestled into the hay bales out of sight where my brothers could not find me to read books. It was sanctuary where I could live in stories. That’s why I use ‘hayshed’ as a metaphor for the place where I write.

                                                                                Did you know?
One of Australia’s quirkiest animals is named after a creature from Greek mythology known as the ‘Mother of Monsters’ who was half-woman and half-snake - because the animal was perceived to have qualities of both mammal and reptile. Just like a reptile, it lays eggs. Just like a mammal it feeds its young on milk – even though it doesn’t have any nipples. The milk oozes out of the skin in the pouch and the baby animal licks it up. That’s not all that’s quirky about this monotreme with porcupine-like spines. The echidna also has a toothless jaw, a bird-like beak, a quoll-like pouch and their babies are called puggles.

And now for the quirkiest thing about the echidna; their unconventional sex life. The breeding season starts with an echidna train – a long line of around ten male echidnas waddling after one female echidna. The ‘train’ winds its way through the bush for long distances until the female is ready to mate. Then she flops down on her stomach and waits for the males to dig a circular trench known as a ‘mating rut’ around her. The largest male wins the lady. When he has pushed all his rivals out of the way, he lies down next to her, places his tail under hers and they mate. 

But that’s not the quirkiest thing of all about echidnas. Red alert! I’m about to ‘talk dirty’. The male echidna has a four-headed penis! It is used only for mating and never carries urine. When mating, two of the heads retract while the other two grow bigger. Both male and female echidnas are promiscuous. Male echidnas alternate which penis heads they use when mating with different partners to improve their chances of becoming a dad! (The mind boggles at what scientists must go through to find this stuff out.)     Ref: www.environment.sa.gov.au

                         The next Gazette is due out in March 2024. Don’t miss out. Subscribe now!
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Short Story Award

4/12/2023

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Winner! I was thrilled that my short story Shanty Shooting won first prize in the Mystery with History category at the recent Sisters in Crime Scarlet Stiletto Awards. Honoured to receive my prize from the creators of the Phryne Fisher TV series - Fiona Eagger (l) Deb Cox (r)

I wrote Shanty Shooting as a 'rehearsal story' for the next Dusty Kent novel. The story is set in the 1860s and is inspired by the real homicide that I plan on weaving into Dusty Kent Mystery #8. Writing the rehearsal story was a way of helping to get the details of the real event clear in my mind before I start to write the book.

I’m looking forward to my upcoming two month break from teaching which will allow me to get stuck into writing the book.


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Why is Matilda an impeccable choice for the Aussie women’s soccer team?

15/8/2023

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There’s more to Matilda than meets the eye.

Matilda is a powerful bisexual name of German origin. In Australia it is used as a girl’s name while in Germany and the Netherlands it is primarily a boy’s name. During the Middle Ages the name was popular among European royalty. There was the Empress Matilda of England (1102 – 1167), the first woman to be named as heir to the English throne, and many other royal Matildas.

The name is composed of maht which means strength and hild which means battle, giving it the meaning of ‘strength in battle’. That makes Matilda appropriate and perfect for the Australian women’s national soccer team, don’t you think?

The team’s name was inspired by Banjo Paterson’s song Waltzing Matilda. The Matilda in the song refers to the swagman’s bed roll or swag – an indispensable possession that went everywhere with him.

The name Matilda was chosen for the team formerly known as the Female Socceroos by popular vote in 1995 in a naming competition organised by the Australian Women's Soccer Association through SBS (the Special Broadcasting Service). 

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has suggested Australia should create a Public Holiday in honour of the Matildas if they win the 2023 FIFA World Cup. Some groups are against this idea fearing another public holiday will be too hard on businesses.

We can resolve that issue easily. In Australia Easter has four holidays. With such a rich cultural and religious diversity in this country surely it is no longer appropriate to have a strong national focus on a Christian tradition. Let’s remove Easter Monday from the public holiday list and replace it with Matilda Monday. Too easy!

Ref:letslearnslang.com
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    Brigid George is the pen name for JB Rowley. Brigid George writes murder mysteries like Murder in Murloo. JB Rowley writes other books like Whisper My Secret.

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  • Brigid George, Author
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