At the end of 1991, Gordon had just completed a university degree, and yet he had no idea at all what he wanted to do with it, or himself. In his years at university, he had spent his spare moments on weekends and semester holidays reading books about gentleman adventurers which were written in the 1930s through to the 1970s. It wasn’t just the stories which entertained him, but the fact that they were set decades in the past. Everything seemed to look better back then, in the movies and television serieses which brought some of those books to life on the screen. The designs of cars, the architecture of houses, the fashions people wore, the less developed scenery of the past all seemed to have so much more appeal than life in the present. Before he’d started university, in fact before he had started his final year of high school, he had been reading super hero comic books ever since he was 8 years old.

In school year 9, he had begun reading a satirical super hero comic which used animal characters set in a world of talking animals. It was called Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew. The series came to an end after only 20 issues, but the company promised an upcoming mini-series called The Oz Wonderland War, which would involve Captain Carrot’s Zoo Crew participating in an all-star adventure combining characters from “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard of Oz”.

Gordon never found the mini-series in Australian shops during high school, and had to stop his comic book reading altogether at some poing in year 11, to concentrate on his studies. He didn’t resume it until his second year at university. By then he had found that the supply of comic books to local newsagents was limited, and had discovered much larger specific Comic Book stores in the city. He also learned that the Oz-Wonderland War mini-series had not come out when originally advertised, but had been pushed back two years, and went to print during his first year of university. So he read it in the holidays between second and third years and enjoyed the super hero satire once more. By then he had started attending martial arts classes, as he figured it was the closest he could get to becoming a gentleman adventurer or a super hero. At least he’d be able to do more in a skirmish, if one should occur.

A few weeks after finishing his final year of university, he decided to read the whole Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew 20 issue run through again, followed by the mini-series. This time the story had a different effect on him. He began to pay much more attention to the characters from Oz and Wonderland, and found that their storylines pointed to a happier time of the past, but not only the past. They also pointed to places that were considered realms of fantasy even in the 19th to early 20th century periods in which the original novels were written. No longer committed to heavy study schedules and the pressure to pass exams, he took note of the mini-series’s text pages references to the fact that L Frank Baum had written 13 sequels to “The Wizard of Oz”, along with other stories that tied in with the series. After his death, other authors had taken up the mantle of turning out more Oz stories and introducing many more characters, some of which had made their way into the Oz-Wonderland War mini-series of comic books.

Gordon set out to seek out as many Oz novels as he could from the second hand stores all over the district and beyond. Keen to escape any signs of the present while reading them, he went to the most northern suburb of his district, Wahroonga, and sat on the rocks at Cliff Reserve, looked out on the vast expanse of bushland that seemed to stretch on forever before his eyes, and sat down to read. He made his way through one or two Oz books each time he went there. There were 2 of Baum’s novels he couldn’t find or order in any shop, and he didn’t find any of the Oz novels written by subsequent authors in the 1920s onwards. So it seemed that he was mentally pulled back to the unappealing reality of 1992 Australia.

One day he was walking through a convenient alleyway between shops, when he saw two men attacking a woman. One knocked her to the ground, and the other pulled a jewelled necklace from around her neck and then stood up. They both had their backs to Gordon, until they turned to walk away with their ill gotten gems.

Gordon knew that this was the first and most important opportunity to make use of 18 months’ martial arts training. He kicked the first man solidly in the hip, which he knew would make walking and fighting extremely problematic, as all martial arts techiques depend heavily on hip movements. The man buckled, while his partner in crime stepped in to swing his fist towards Gordon’s head. Gordon did an upper block to parry the blow, and then launched a double knife hand strike to the man’s collarbone. It jarred him severely, but didn’t knock him over. Gordon hit him hard in the forehead with his fist, and he fell backwards, colliding with his injured partner. Gordon launched one more kick at the nearest man’s stomach, causing them both to fall over. He retrieved the stolen jewelled necklace, and walked over to the fallen woman. She was magnificently beautiful, and wore a long and elegant dress quite unlike anything he was used to seeing in 1991. Then he noticed that a wig had fallen from her head in the struggle. He wondered why a woman with lovely long straight natural hair needed a wig which seemed to have been custom made to look exactly the same as her real hair. She saw him holding the wig and reached for it, struggling to speak. There were marks on her throat, and Gordon guessed that her assailants had attempted to strangle her in order to make stealing the necklace easier. She began whispering between gasps for breath, and he leaned down over her face and strained his ears to make out what she was saying.

“Scarecrow in Oz… Scarecrow only in Oz…in Oz,” was all he could discern from her soft toneless voice.

He helped her up, put her necklace back on and motioned to put the wig on her head.

“I can’t think why you need this, but I guess it’s important to you,” he said.

She took the wig from his hand and held it by her side.

This time she was able to speak a little louder, and make proper use of her vocal cords.

“I don’t see any point in wearing it now either,” she said, “But I offer you my gratitude for retrieving it, and my necklace. I sold the rest of my jewellery: my arm bracelets and my crown, when I came here nearly 20 years ago, so that I could buy a new home in your … district. My name is Elma.”

“Crown?” said Gordon, “I’m Gordon, and you were saying something about Oz, which is particularly interesting to me, because I’ve recently been discovering and reading the Oz novels by L Frank Baum.”

“I found a few myself,” said Elma, “I’m surprised that Ozma allowed communication between Emerald City residents and L Frank Baum with the wireless telegraph all those years. When she cut off the outside world’s access to Oz, even its awareness of the existence of Oz, there were very few ways left that one could get in or out of the kingdom. A few people like Jenny Jump and others have found their way in and out over the years, but it’s not nearly so common now, not like the days when the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Cowardly Lion all turned up in America in the 1900s.” (See John R Neill’s 1940s Oz novels for Jenny Jump’s adventures, and see L Frank Baum’s and W Denslow’s newspaper comic strip “Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz” in the 1900s for the Scarecrow’s, Lion’s and Woodman’s adventures in America.)

Gordon recalled that Baum had introduced some of his later Oz books by writing from Ozcot, California, about the communication and access matters which Elma had just mentioned.

“I thought that Baum’s supposed communcation with Ozma and the others was all just part of the fiction,” said Gordon, “Are you trying to tell me that Oz really exists?”

“Of course it does, although you’re the first person I’ve ever wanted to tell, since I arrived here. People don’t age much in Oz,” said Elma, “Some stop ageing in their teens. Others reach early adulthood and stop aging then. I stopped when I was just a little princess. I’d already been given my own castle to make use of when I pleased, but I wanted to see more than just the Oz I’d grown up with. When I was 14, I found a dark dark cave, which nobody else had explored. I took a lantern in there and walked until I came out in a bushland. I walked for some time until I came out in a place that I later learned is called Wahroonga.”

“That bush, or at least the rock that look out onto it, is where I read my Oz books!” said Gordon, “To think that I used to sit up there and look out at that bush after reading a book, and wish that Oz was real, yet feeling that the pseudo country atmosphere of the bush views was the closest I’d get to the past or the apparently non-existent Marvelous Land of Oz. Little did I know that a logn walk in that bush would have brought me to the cave that you used.”

“I’ve been calculating the passing of time in both kingdoms, since I learned that people age here,” said Elma, “I had a bit of an adventure back in my own town in 1926, when I was a little princess of sorts. I aged to 14 by 1928 and then stopped ageing. I remained a 14 year old for decades.”

(Princess Elma was introduced in the 1926 novel “The Hungry Tiger of Oz” by Ruth Plumly Thompson.)

“So you must have been born in what we know as 1914,” said Gordon, “When did you come here?”

“In 1978. I was 14 when I arrived, and it took some doing to find someone willing to take a teenager seriously enough to pay her a small fortune for expensive jewellery. Then I had to find an adult friend to help me do the transaction to purchase a house here. I didn’t know about people ageing when I arrived. Now it seems that I am 28. I was planning to return to Oz, before I age much more. If it weren’t for you, I might not have survived to make the trip.”

“I was 10 in 1978. You were born 54 years before I was, and yet here you are at 28 after living in Oz for 64 years and then here for 14 more.”

“So you’re 24 now.”

“Going on 24 in a few months.”

“If you came back to Oz with me, you’d be 23 forever.”