Attic Whispers from The Blue Mountains — Fact or Fiction? #3 [July 2026 Edition]

Attic Whispers from The Blue Mountains — Fact or Fiction? #3 [July 2026 Edition]

    The lost girl and the hidden bracelet

Greetings from my attic in the Blue Mountains!

In the last newsletter, I asked you whether the Vatican operated a network that helped Nazi war criminals escape to South America and Australia after the war.

Here is your answer:

Fact. Every word of it.

The ratlines are one of the most thoroughly documented and least discussed chapters of the twentieth century. Senior Church officials were involved. False identities were provided. Men who had overseen mass murder lived out comfortable lives in Sydney, Buenos Aires, and dozens of other cities, their pasts buried under new names and new respectability. The historical record is unambiguous. The Swiss banks, the forged documents, the complicit institutions — all of it confirmed by decades of investigative journalism, declassified intelligence files, and the painstaking work of Holocaust researchers.

I did not invent any of it for The Empress Holds the Key. I simply followed the trail where it led.

That is the thing about this series. The history keeps turning out to be worse than the fiction.

Now. Before I tell you about Book #2, here is today’s statement. This one comes from the Australian outback — from a chapter of history that most Australians have never been taught.

In the 1890s, a young Bunuba man named Jandamarra led a guerrilla resistance campaign against colonial settlement in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. He was a tracker for the police, then turned against them, freeing Aboriginal prisoners and fighting a three-year campaign across the Napier Range that the colonial authorities could not suppress. He was eventually killed at Tunnel Creek in 1897. His skull was removed from his body, sent to England, and held there for decades before being repatriated to Australia in many years later.