Moscow, 1930s. The Devil drops by for a visit. 

I first discovered this book in my youth. I have always had a fondness for old book stores and it was one day, back in the 70's that I was foraging through a load of dusty tomes in a Charlotte Street book shop in Brisbane that I sniffed out a new but strange book. Its title intrigued me. Perhaps as a young and somewhat optimistic young buck, I felt it might be a Russian version of " Lady Chatterley's Lover. "  I sauntered toward the cashier with a casual air and a look of student style indifference.  and paid a modest sum and chortled and sniggered smugly as I went back to my student digs to digest a night of Russian porn and the sensual delights of The Master and Margarita.  Oh, a good night ahead!

Yet what I had purchased for pennies turned out to be a life changing book for me and it had absolutely nothing to do with a gardener pulling weeds while guzzling bundy ginger beer and an older woman swooning at the sight of the gardeners youthful bare chest. I had been duped yet it was the best con I have ever fallen for. 

Mikhail Bulgakov was born in 1891 in Kiev, in present-day Ukraine. He first trained in medicine but gave up his profession as a doctor to pursue writing. He started working on The Master and Margarita in 1928 but due to censorship it was not published until 1966, more than twenty-five years after his death.

The book used crazy parable-like fantasy to jab at tyranny, yet he faced censorship and couldn’t publish freely in his lifetime. Even then, parody had its critics and censors. So what was it about?   How it ended up in a second hand bookstore in Brisbane for my humble self to grab is something I will never really be able to fathom. 

THE DUSTY GULCH GAZETTE

Special Investigative Edition

By Roderick (Whiskers) McNibble, Ledger-Sniffing Rodent

THE RETURN OF THE SHADOW EMUS -  AND THE PASSES THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING

From the moment they left, the Shadow Emus swore never to set foot on sunlit red dirt again. They abandoned Dusty Gulch, feathers slicked in defiance, wings sharp with ideology, and eyes fixed on the perpetual twilight beyond Dead Man’s Ridge, in the land the locals whisper about as Honklander territory.

They thrived there. They trained in subterfuge, memorised the rules of shadow, and learned that patience and quiet compliance could move mountains without ever touching the sun. For years, Dusty Gulch believed them gone for good. And then… the passes appeared.

Officially stamped. Officially endorsed. Somehow, improbably, valid. 

On 19^th February, 1942 real war came to Australia when two air raids by Japanese carrier based aircraft wrecked the town and the adjacent army and RAAF bases.

The first inkling that anybody in Australia had that something was about to occur was at 9.30am on Bathurst Island, about 80kms NE of Darwin. When the missionaries and islanders saw a huge formation of aircraft at high altitude. The mission was headed by Father John McGrath who also acted as a volunteer coastwatcher.

The mission was equipped with a radio transceiver linked to the AWA Darwin Coastal Station under call sign VID. AWA ran many aeradio stations under contract to the Department of Civil Aviation with range all over Australia and as far as Portuguese Timor.

The Adelaide River Stakes is the name given to the mass exodus of people prior to and following the Japanese air-raid in Darwin on 19^th February, 1942. Thanks mainly to an ill-informed statement by a former Governor General, Paul Hasluck, that it is a story full of shame for our national persona, but it is a myth.

The truth is that with much closer examination it was anything but a shameful episode in our most serious year of peril. The propaganda disseminated by the government of the day was based on inadequate information, over-the-top censorship and a failure to take the population into its confidence. 

The faults lie with a succession of failed civilian and military administrations which, like the behaviour of most politicians, was a deliberate trail of cover-ups and refusal to admit fault.

The raid on Pearl Harbour failed to catch the US carrier force which was still at sea. It also failed to destroy the oil storage facilities that would have crippled any ability to send a pursuing force.

The Japanese strategists knew that the obvious place for an American fight back to be based was Australia. It rapidly consumed the Dutch East Indies and the island of New Britain which was part of the PNG mandated territory awarded to Australia by the League of Nations.

On 10^th December, 1941 the tactics conceived by Yamamato and Nagano were again proved correct when Japanese aircraft sank the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse off the coast of Malaya.

At the same time Guam was captured from the Americans.