There are memories that refuse to grow old.

The 29th anniversary of Princess Diana’s death has had me thinking about the day it happened nearly 30 years ago. 

I still get emotional when I remember it.

Not the footage.

Not the flowers outside Kensington Palace.

Another room. Another set of faces. A kindness that had no business being there. It is a true memory. It has never faded. And something that I have never understood. Until now. 

And it all down to a tattooed hand, a solemn face and an unexpected gesture of kindness. 

So off we go, again, down memory lane and having a cup of tea... 

The result of the recent bi election in Secret Harbour in WA sends a powerful message.

Australia was never built on timidity. It was carved out by men and women who faced droughts, floods, and wars with grit, courage, and an unshakable belief in the fair go.

Yet today, that fair go is being strangled, and Aussies are saying " Enough. " 

Ordinary Australians are being priced out of their own homes, left to sleep in cars and tents, while politicians in Canberra open the gates to mass migration on a scale our forebears could never have imagined.

We are told to stay quiet, to swallow the line that questioning this is “racist,” while our way of life - our language, our culture, our unity - is chipped away. The same spark that lit Eureka smoulders again, and if ignored, it will roar into flame.

A Dispatch from the Pointy End

Foreword By Roderick (Whiskers ) McNibble, Senior Investigative Rodent & Occasional Correspondent

Every now and then, the Gazette receives a story which makes us stop, put down the cheese sandwich, and wonder whether the person writing it has ever heard of occupational health and safety. This is one of those stories.

It comes from a gentleman known to us simply as PP, who spent many years travelling around the far north of Queensland, working in places where the roads are questionable, the rivers contain things with teeth, and the definition of a "safe working environment" appears to have been left open to interpretation.

PP tells the story in his own words. We have not altered the account.

We have merely added this introduction because, having read what follows, the Gazette has developed a rather awkward suspicion that Mayor Dusty McFookit may have had a previous life somewhere north of Cairns.

We have absolutely no evidence for this. Dusty denies it. PP has not been asked. For the moment, therefore, we shall simply report the facts. And leave the reader to draw their own conclusions.

PLUMBING!

The Mayor Has Finally Met a Pipe He Can't Fix

A Special Medical - Plumbing Bulletin from Roderick (Whiskers) McNibble
Senior Investigative Rodent & Occasional Plumbing Correspondent

There are times when a journalist must put aside the usual trivialities of politics, corruption, government overreach and the suspicious disappearance of three crates of lamingtons.

This is one of those times.

Mayor Dusty McFookit is sick.

And while certain irresponsible rumours have suggested that the Mayor is merely hiding beneath the floorboards of the Dusty Dingo Pub to avoid his civic responsibilities of posting here on the Dusty Gulch Gazette, the Gazette can now confirm that he is genuinely crook.

“Some of us may forget that, of all the Allies, it was the Australians who first broke the spell of invincibility of the Japanese Army.”
- Quote from Field Marshall Sir William Slim, Commander of WW2 Commonwealth forces in Burma (and later Governor General of Australia).

And that first fracture in the Japanese Land Forces strength came at Milne Bay in September 1942. Alongside Guadalcanal weeks later, Milne Bay marked the first land defeats of the Japanese, shifting the Pacific war’s momentum. 

Where Do the Children Play? 

I have no opinion to offer publicly on the Lindsay Clancy case. 

What caught me this morning was the children.

Sometimes the present has a strange way of sending us back to places we haven’t thought about for years.

This morning, when I was reading about Lindsay Clancy's case, I wasn’t looking for " Bad Minnie.". But she found me. 

I certainly wasn’t thinking about a business college in Invercargill more than thirty years ago.

Something about the story sent my mind wandering backwards, and suddenly I was standing in a cemetery in Winton again, surrounded by a group of my students, looking at a patch of ground where, according to local legend, nothing would grow.....