Attic Whispers from The Blue Mountains — Fact or Fiction? #4 [July 2026 Edition]
The elusive secret buried in the human DNA
Greetings from my attic in the Blue Mountains!
In the last newsletter, I asked you whether a Bunuba resistance fighter named Jandamarra was killed in the Kimberley in 1897, and whether his skull was held in England for 113 years before being repatriated to Australia.
Here is your answer:
Fact. Every detail of it. Jandamarra was a real man — a tracker, a fighter, a figure of extraordinary courage and complexity — and his story is one of the most remarkable in Australian history. He was killed at Tunnel Creek on 1 April 1897. His skull was removed and sent to England, where it remained for over a century. It was repatriated to the Bunuba people in 2010. The colonial authorities who could not defeat him in the field settled, in the end, for taking his head.
I did not invent Jandamarra. I could not have. No imagination is equal to what actually happened to him.
In The Disappearance of Anna Popov, Jandamarra appears as a presence — a man still working out his unfinished business from the other side of death. I described him that way because his story did not end at Tunnel Creek. It is still being told.
This is one of the reasons I keep writing historical fiction. The history keeps showing me things about human nature that I could not have invented.
Now. Before I tell you about Book #3, here is today’s statement. This one moves from the darkest chapter of the twentieth century into the laboratory — into the frontier of science where the next great battle over human life is already being fought.
The author visiting a research lab to learn more about the human DNA
For decades, scientists dismissed approximately 98 percent of human DNA as having no function. They called it “junk DNA.” In recent years, that assumption has been overturned. Researchers have discovered that much of this so-called junk is not junk at all — that it contains regulatory sequences, ancient viral remnants, and genetic switches whose functions we are only beginning to understand. Some scientists now believe that hidden within this vast, largely uncharted territory are the keys to diseases we cannot yet cure, and to human capabilities we cannot yet explain.
Fact or fiction?
The answer is coming in the next newsletter.
But first, let me tell you about The Hidden Genes of Professor K.
It begins with a death. A scientist of extraordinary gifts — a man on the edge of a discovery that could change medicine forever — dies before he can tell anyone what he has found. What he leaves behind is not a paper, not a formula, not a tidy set of conclusions. What he leaves behind is a trail. Deliberately obscured. Carefully hidden. Designed to be followed only by someone who knows what they are looking for.
That is all I will tell you about the plot. Because this is a book that builds its tension slowly and deliberately, and the pleasure of it is in the unfolding.
What I can tell you is what drew me to this story in the first place.
I am not a scientist. I want to be honest about that. But I am a researcher, and when I began pulling on the threads that eventually became this book, I found myself in territory that genuinely unsettled me. Not because the science was frightening in itself. But because of what it suggested about the gap between what we know and what we think we know. About how much of the most important territory — in medicine, in genetics, in our understanding of what a human being actually is — remains unmapped.
You can claim your free copy of ‘Behind the Scenes’ now by downloading your FREE Literary Companion. Just follow the prompts at the end of this newsletter.
Professor K is a fictional character. But the science he is working on is not fictional. The questions he is asking are being asked right now, in laboratories around the world, by real researchers who are finding real answers that nobody is quite ready for.
I spent months with that material. I read the papers. I spoke to people who work in this field. And I came to understand that the most dangerous discoveries are not the ones that tell us something new. They are the ones that tell us that something we were certain of was wrong.
The Hidden Genes of Professor K moves across multiple continents and multiple decades. It connects the crimes of the Second World War to the science of the present day in a way that I found, as I researched it, increasingly plausible and increasingly disturbing. The past in this book is not background. It is the engine. What happened then is still happening now, in ways that the people involved have gone to considerable lengths to prevent anyone from discovering.
Jack Rogan is very good at discovering things people want kept hidden. That is, as always, both his greatest strength and his most reliable source of danger.
The answer to today’s question is waiting in the next newsletter.
If you haven’t read The Hidden Genes of Professor K before, you can get it right here now:
https://geni.us/HiddenGenesProfessorK
P.S. The Hidden Genes of Professor K is Book #3 in the series. If you are reading in order, you are now deep enough into Jack’s world to understand what drives him. This book will test that understanding in ways you may not expect.
STAY SAFE, STAY CHEERFUL, and please STAY IN TOUCH.
Sincerely,
Gabriel Farago
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- The Empress Holds the Key
- The Disappearance of Anna Popov
- The Hidden Genes of Professor K
- Professor K: The Final Quest
- The Curious Case of the Missing Head
- The Lost Symphony
- The Death Mask Murders
- The Stolen Altarpiece
