The Great Teabag Tug of War

You know I love a good cup of tea, right? I mean a REAL cup of tea; made with tea leaves. I cannot disclose what goes through my mind when a café serves up a cup with a small brand label on a piece of string hanging over the edge and charges ‘coffee’ prices for it. Grrrr!

In my first Dusty Kent Mystery (Murder in Murloo) Dusty’s long-time family friend Guiseppe Di Stefano made tea for her in a china teapot ‘real tea; no teabags’. Pots of tea followed Dusty around Murloo in her quest to track down the cold-blooded killer of 27-year-old Gabby Peters.

Apart from ‘proper’ tea, another interesting feature of Murloo was its eccentric characters from ‘Dame Edna’, a ‘robust septuagenarian’ whose ‘fruit cake would be ideal for disguising the distinct odour of arsenic’ to Jock Campbell, who once landed his light plane ‘on the top of an old barn full of hay’.

The seaside village of Murloo is based on the actual village of Marlo in East Gippsland where I grew up, an area well-endowed with eccentric characters. One of these real-life eccentrics was Ben Buckley. Like my fictional character, Ben was the pilot of an ultra-light plane; a larrikin pilot who executed perfect landings in paddocks, on football ovals during training and even flew low under the Snowy River Bridge at Orbost (my hometown).

But perhaps Ben Buckley’s most eccentric act was to repurpose the cut-off strings from used teabags to make unbreakable ropes. And then to establish an annual teabag rope tug of war! ‘Five big footballers against five big shearers and they couldn’t break it,’ he declared at the 2019 Omeo and District Agricultural Show.

Now, I think we all need a nice hot cup of tea. (As Gabby’s mother said to Dusty in Murder in Murloo at the barbecue honouring her daughter’s memory.)