What a delight Murder Under the Christmas Tree turned out to be. This book really was under my Christmas tree, a perfect gift to myself. It was first published in 2016, by Profile Books. As the title suggests, it is an anthology of ten short stories with a
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There were very few things that my darling mother did just to please herself rather than everyone else in the family. However, the exception was her making of ghastly gooseberry pies. She loved those horrible, sour little fruits. Our Tasmanian orchard was a bit of a disaster
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Harmony at Home has been trading at 30 Govett’s Leap Road at Blackheath (Blue Mountains) for the past 13 years. There is also a store down the Mountains at Richmond. The proprietor is Jock Ferguson. I just love the many Australian themed goods they stock. In the
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CHRISTMAS PUDDING …now the strangest tale I ever heard was about Charles Dickens cooking one in a top hat. However, my own effort surely comes a close runner-up. By the way,
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Erigeron karvinskianus is commonly known as Seaside Daisy. It’s a hardy perennial that can cope with wind, heat and salt spray. Now this doesn’t sound as if it should grow in the Upper Blue Mountains of NSW, but it also copes with frost and snow, and thrives
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In April 1920, Clarice Tucker (nee Thomas) was a young married woman living at Edenhope in western Victoria, not far from the South Australian border. Her family were from the small town of Inglewood, near Bendigo. It must have lifted Clarice’s heart when a letter from her
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Beatrix Potter was born in 1866. She experienced a stultifying. genteel London childhood that caused her to withdraw into her own world. It was a world that would later be made magical by her artistic talent and love of nature. We, and generations before us, have been
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Shame on me for treating Pip Williams’ The Bookbinder of Jericho so badly. In my defense, it wasn’t in pristine condition when I picked it up from our local street library. I was reading it among the giant rhododendrons in the park at Blackheath, in the Blue
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I recently wrote an article for this website about Enid Blyton. If you haven’t read it, here is the link. It was inspired by a piece I came across in the wonderful Australian newspaper archive TROVE. Written in 1952, it was a reaction to the South Australian
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