ROSIE RINGS A BELL
con't from page 2

And indeed he was, no ifs or buts about it.

I used above the word "awful". This needs explanation. So let me now read you what Lawrence had to say about the eponymous subject of his eighth major novel, written in Thirroul in June-July 1922 (Kangaroo is Cooley/Rosenthal, and Somers the Lawrence figure). You can judge for yourself:

...Kangaroo's face had gone like an angry wax mask...an angry wax mask of mortification, haughty...with two little near-set holes for eyes, behind glass pince-nez...He had become hideous, with a long yellowish face and black eyes close together, and a cold, mindless, dangerous hulk of his shoulders. For a moment, Somers was afraid of him, as of some great ugly idol that might strike. He felt the intense hatred of the man coming at him in cold waves. He stood up in a kind of horror in front of the great, close-eyed, horrible thing that was now Kangaroo. Yes, a thing, not a whole man. A great Thing, a horror.

Not a description of oneself that anyone would like to have preserved forever, like a fly trapped in amber, in a major work of "fiction" in the upper echelons of the canon of western literature.

And, yet, it happened, it happened..

...for when Lawrence arrived in Sydney at the end of May 1922, on his way from Europe to America, he ran across a real, not fictional, secret army, which he then portrayed - in a full-length portrait - in his Australian novel, Kangaroo (called by one critic "the most important book ever written about Australia").

Its leader was indeed Rosenthal, and he is the main Australian character in the novel - Benjamin Cooley, nicknamed "Kangaroo", the head of the secret army of "Maggies", which is plotting to take over Australia in a fascist coup.

In fact, the novel Kangaroo turns out to be a thinly-fictionalised diary of what happened to Lawrence in the few short weeks he had in Sydney and Thirroul in mid-1922. (How can it be otherwise? Lawrence could not have made up, in a matter of weeks, the accurate picture he draws of what it is now generally agreed by historians to be an actual secret army, formed in Sydney in July 1920 - not 1921 - as a response to the election of a radical left-wing Labor government a few months previously.)

How did Lawrence run across this momentous secret? By the sheerest accident. He met someone on a boat to Sydney who had a holiday house at

Collaroy. Lawrence was in need of cheap accommodation. This fellow-passenger invited him up to Collaroy to view possible holiday houses. There was an afternoon tea-party. At the party was someone who knew of a cheap, holiday house that had just become vacant in Thirroul. Next day this person took Lawrence and Frieda down to Thirroul and installed them there.

But this man also knew some figures in the secret army. These figures may have been looking for someone to contribute to the journal of their "cover" organisation, a patriotic body called the King and Empire Alliance (called in the novel "The Diggers"), of which Major MJR Scott was the treasurer, and Rosenthal the secretary. Lawrence was introduced to Scott, who introduced him to Rosenthal. The rest is literary history.

How did I run across all this? The sheerest accident. My wife Sandra wrote a biography of a famous English literary hostess, Lady Ottoline Morrell. We did the research in Austin Texas in 1972. The head of the library there was Lawrence's bibliographer. He suggested that after we returned to Australia we look into Lawrence's time there, as nothing had been done on that. We returned in 1975 and started the research. We quickly came across a lot of parallels between the novel and what was happening in Sydney at the time.

At an Australia Day party in January 1976 I was sitting next to someone who had written an article about Lawrence in Thirroul some years previously. I told him that I was beginning to suspect that there could have been a real secret army in Sydney in 1922. "Strange you should say that," he responded. "I interviewed Eric Campbell before he died. He asked me if I knew why his 1930-32 civilian para-military organisation had been called The New Guard. Then he added: 'Because there was an Old Guard.'"

I discovered that the "Old Guard" had been the name given - somewhat derisorily - to the organisation that Rosenthal and Scott had founded in 1920, and which Lawrence describes in Kangaroo so accurately, and so extensively, that the novel remains the best description we have of secret army activity in Australia between the wars.

Interestingly, Kangaroo is not the only novel in which Lawrence portrayed Rosenthal and Scott. (Lawrence was almost incapable of invention, and used real people and places over and over again throughout his literary works.) He portrayed Scott - the creepy Jack Callcott in Kangaroo - in the second version of Lady Chatterley's Lover as the impotent secret army aficionado Jack Strangeways (Scott, who indeed had some very strange ways, was impotent, due to wartime trauma).

Rosenthal he portrayed again in The Virgin and the Gipsy as the powerfully-built Danish artillery officer, Major Charles Eastwood, whose face is "like a mask". (The surname is a typical Lawrentian literary pun - Rosenthal is a village in the middle of the Black Forest in Germany, east of the Rhine, near where Lawrence stayed in 1912 - it was "an east wood".)

(Neither of these novels were published in Lawrence's lifetime, and when Lawrence re-wrote the second version of Lady Chatterley into the third version that was banned for so long, and which he knew would be published, he downgraded Strangeways into a minor character, removing all reference to his fascism and impotence.)

This week, however, happens to be national architecture week. And it is this aspect of the life and work of Sir Charles Rosenthal that we are here today to note, and with it Marrickville's connection to a prominent Australian soldier-architect.

Rosie left his mark here - and that is nothing to sneeze at.

- Robert Darroch