Thanks, manehi and Brendan. Most enjoyable.

Did this in an hour, apart from WILDFOWL and ENDEAVOUR: obvious now: usually the Grauniad takes me ages.

Mike @36: count me in too: I just made an anagram of it starting with neo- and messing with the leftovers assuming the ending -ic.

Also the clue is “FROM town under”, so an abbreviation is more than acceptable.

My only tiny regret is that as I was slogging through this, I pulled up today’s Xmas prize which only comes as a pdf, and was casually looking it over when I realized I was also looking at the solution to this puzzle. All I read before quickly scrolling away was MAD HATTER (which I already had) and ALICE – which I might have taken days to guess. The “I” in ALICE then gave up WILDFOWL, which led to another missing word, etc., until I was finished. I was only sad at that point to see that Brendan did not invite the dormouse to this party.

The triple theme was wonderful, especially the “secret” words – ones that weren’t “obviously” linked to the theme by referring to other clues/answers. My first glimpse of it was getting TEA PARTY and then instantly SARAH PALIN, which was just enough to work from CHA and all its references to get EARL and GREY, OOLONG, DARJEELING, BOSTON, etc.

Managed to fill in ENDEAVOUR in ink, but didn’t get the reason why, so thanks for that explanation!

PS, as far as MASSA, the “modern” post office etc. abbreviation is “MA” – all the states have a two letter abbr now for the convenience of computers, I suspect. However, in days past, many states had other, longer ones, with both MASS and MASSA seeing use. I was lucky in that the clue part “state” already had me thinking of US states as potential fodder, and I had even considered Eastern US states along the way to reaching A_S_M… cool, yet another (double!) themed clue/answer. Brilliant.

Re 9ac: yes, the town is, strictly, Alice Springs, but there is the Nevil Shute novel, adapted as a film, ‘A town like Alice’, which made it OK for me.

As for ‘crossword of the year’, I had the privilege of blogging the one that you mention and my preamble was, “I don’t know how many times I’ve read comments like, ‘How does he [Brendan / Virgilius] keep doing it? I’m always afraid I’m going to miss the theme in a Brendan puzzle but today there was no danger: every single clue and / or solution referred to it and I think this was probably the best of his puzzles so far – and that’s saying something. The surfaces were stunningly witty and pertinent and so many of them produced an ‘aha’ [and a couple proved too clever for me]. Sheer brilliance! Thank you, Brendan.”

So, unless something mind-blowing comes up in the next couple of weeks, I’ll be agreeing with you!

I’ve seen every single Morse episode, but the problem is when you show me one tomorrow, it’s like new to me. Therefore I (must say: we) couldn’t explain ENDEAVOUR (10ac).

My PinC was (only slightly) annoyed by Massa(chusetts) being “A state in East”. It is indeed for Americans (and Brendan is – I guess, more or less – one of them nowadays), but as a Brit she felt “East” meant something else – verdict: ‘unfair’.

Small quibble re 9ac too: we were convinced that the ‘town down under’ is called Alice Spings (and not just Alice).

Apart from this, a magnificent crossword with the superb MAD HATTER (11ac) and the witty OOLONG (23d) as Our Highlights.

Crossword of the year (as Dad’s Lad said)?
Well, for me that is still Brendan’s very controversial War & Peace crossword (10 Feb 2010).