Well it’s Thursday and I normally post my weekly Blogs on Mondays but … yeah this week I forgot, didn’t I.

But I do have an excuse! We’ve been down in Melbourne for nearly a fortnight staying with my daughter’s family and only flew back this week.

In Melbourne we spent a lot of our time with our two gorgeous, non-stop grand-children. Some of that time involved re-watching some of our favourite BLUEY episodes as well as catching up with the most recent ones.

What a brilliant series BLUEY is! Such a rarity for a show to appeal to three generations and bring so much laughter and joy, along with plenty of happy and sad tears, to adults and kids alike. It deserves every acclaim it receives. I love it.

Now we are back home in BRISBANE and in case you didn’t know, Brisbane of course is also the home city of Bluey and the Heeler family. So it’s always fun to watch the show and spot local landmarks and to see settings and places you instantly recognise like South Bank and the City Skyline.

In fact the suburb I grew up in, the suburb where my wife and I met as teachers and where we mainly raised our children – ASHGROVE – features prominently in the BLUEY series as do the surrounding suburbs of Bardon (my wife’s home suburb), Paddington, Red Hill, the Brisbane CBD and other areas of South East Queensland.

Here are just some favourite examples.

Our previous house was in Hawthorne Ave Ashgrove about 100 meters from the Golden Crown Restaurant in Waterworks Road (now closed down) where Bandit takes the girls one episode for a chaotic takeaway pick-up. We also used to get takeaways there and from the Fish and Chip and Indian shops beside it.

The library the Heelers go to is the council one in Ashgrove. It’s our local library and when it first opened (back in the late 60s I think it was) my sister Helen was one of the librarians there.

The playground where Bandit takes Bluey for her bike riding lesson is based on Woolcock Park at Red Hill. We’ve taken the grand-kids there.

The hardware store Hammerbarn that the Heelers go to is based on Bunnings at Keperra. We’ve also shopped there. And in an example of life imitating art recently Keperra Bunnings was temporarily transformed into Hammerbarn! They quickly sold out of gnomes.

And of course it was great to see that like us the Heelers are big supporters of the MIGHTY MAROONS of Queensland!

But that’s not all. I have some other (very tenuous) connections to the Bluey universe!

The first is that JOE BRUMM the incredible creator of Bluey did his secondary schooling at Marist College Ashgrove – and so did I (albeit decades apart!). I also taught at Marist Ashgrove when Joe would have been in Year 11 and 12. (I don’t recall coming across him at all but surely it’s possible I could have inspired him from a distance!)

A second connection is that like Joe Brumm, I also wrote a story about a dog, which although nowhere near as astronomically successful as Bluey, was a Honour Book in the CBCA Awards, won a Queensland Premiers Literary Award and made its way to some other countries. (By the way, if by some miracle you are reading this Joe, I’d like to make it clear that Mr Mosely is very open to a guest appearance on your show at any time! I’d suggest you get your people to call my people except I don’t have people so I’m guessing that they probably wouldn’t answer.)

A third tenuous connection is that my story The Running Man is also set in Ashgrove. So I’d like to think that I’ve also done my little bit to promote my home suburb overseas, particularly in Germany where the book has been used as an exam text over the years. (Images of pages below featuring Ashgrove are from a wonderful German language study guide by Thorsten Utter and Elinor Matt)

All of which goes to prove that I’m basically the poor man’s answer to BLUEY.

Daaah Da Da Dah Da Daa Dah Dar Da! (Or something like that.)

Cheers
Michael