28/5/02  www.cybersydney.com.au/dhl (from now on, the “dateline” will be this, our DHLA site URL):  Ruffels has responded to my email to him about Edgecumbe, the Basin, etc, viz:

Thanks for yours of last Wednesday.  Your proposition about the Oatleys and “Edgecumbe" is interesting.  According to the Sydney 1949 phone book, Mrs B.M. (“Trixie”) Oatley resided at 33 Beach Road,Collaroy.  Trixie's husband is listed as attending Andree's FWD Oatley's funeral (SMH 31/3/19, p10).  ("Cecil Oatley [RFA]").  I seem to recall telling you of a house opposite “Hinemoa” called “Dunoon”,  (“Hinemoa” was on lot 9 and “Dunoon” on lot 3 opposite).  Lot 3 was purchased in October 1919 by Eleanor Collins, wife of Robert Collins, grazier, of Narrawa (175 miles by rail to Goulburn, near Crookwell).  I cannot tell what type of building was on lot 3 in 1922.  The 1931 electoral roll shows Eleanor Collins residing in “Dunoon”.  Perhaps Robert Collins was an invalid convalescing at the Basin too?  Note, the house is in his wife's name in Florence Street.  The street directories are no help, because these were all holiday houses in 1922.  I have found nothing further regarding Taylor (whom I regard as worthy a subject as Scott for his own biog.).  I even consulted the list of members of  Lodge Neutral Bay No 267 for 1910-1930.  No George A Taylor.  I believe he lived in the outer suburbs, where he conducted his flying (Penrith) or his wireless experiments (Sutherland).  Nothing further on Stoughton Cooley either. 

[Ruffels hd told me on the phone earlier that he had looked up Taylor’s other works in the ML & found nothing of interest or relevance to L or K.]

 

1/6/02  www.cybersydney.com.au/dhl:  I just wrote an editing comment to the item above dated c.31/8/78 in which, to use another Australianism, I poked borak at Steele & Ellis for down-playing Lawrence’s 7/10/22 letter to Seltzer in which he asked, “Do you think the Australian Govt. or the Diggers might resent anything?”  I sd in that note that L must have bn referring to his Diggers secret army, not, as Steele & Ellis wd have it, Australian ex-servicemen generally – ie, Steele at least is still denying that L’s “Diggers” is a real secret army.  (I do no know what his, or the CUP’s for that matter, current position is on this.  I cannot conceive that they are still denying that there was a real secret army in Sydney in 1922.  They have probably now moved forward & taken up a position behind Eggert’s “not proven” line.)   In any case, the point I have to make here is that L in his 16/1/22 letter to Mountsier also sd:  “Ought one to put a tiny forward note, apologising to Australia?”  I must be honest here & say that this sentence, coming immediately after the “resent” remark made to Seltzer on 7/10, might tend to support Steele’s interpretation.  However, I think it can be read both ways – ie, if, as I maintain, he was referring to a real secret army of Diggers/Maggies, then this “apology” remark wd reflect a residual concern that he hd done something wrong with Kangaroo:  revealed something he should nt have (ie, a pang of conscience over his duplicity).  But I concede that the more obvious meaning wd be that he might have sd something in K about Australia that might need apologising for, that might reflect poorly on the country.  Nevertheless, such a possible interpretation does nothing, I wd argue, take any sting out of the previous remark to Seltzer about “the Australian Government or the Diggers” resenting what he hd written in K.  The crucial question is, does his use of the word “Diggers” refer to the KEA or to Australian ex-servicemen generally?  Nowhere else does L refer to Australian ex-servicemen as “the Diggers”.  The only use he makes of the word is to describe the “front” organisation behind his “Maggies”.  Indeed, the dual nature of Callcott/Cooley’s organisation – “the Diggers clubs*” and the “secret organisation” behind them, as Trewhella refers to it (see 29/1/78 & K [Heinemann] pp 160-61) - so reflects Brookes’ APL arrangement (see 15/3/78) as to make it well nigh indisputable that here L is referring to the KEA, & his (admittedly fuzzy) understanding of Rosenthal’s organisation.

[*In this single & particular context, a reading of  “RSL clubs” for “Diggers clubs” is probably the natural one.  Indeed, the Bondi Diggers Club, which is still clinging tenuously to existence, & of which I was once a member, was founded in 1922, & it was not a front for a secret army, as far as I know, anyway.  Elsewhere in K, however, it is clear that the “Diggers movement” L is referring to is Cooley’s organisation, founded “18 months to two years” previously – the precise time the KEA was founded and launched – & not the RSL, or RSSILA, clubs, as L makes quite clear in the “Diggers” chapter, see K (H) pp 186-189.]       

 

2/6/02  www.cybersydney.com.au/dhl:  In writing the above, I had cause to read all of Seltzer’s letters to L[awrence] over this 1922-23 period, & this entailed reading my just-acquired copy of the recently-published (ie, 2000) edition of vol 8 of the [Un]Collected Letters, containing Lawrence letters hitherto unpublished, but dating back to that period.  And in two of these new letters (DHL-Seltzer 16/1/23 & Seltzer-DHL 26/1/23) fresh information emerges that obliges me to amend my explanation of how the variant endings to Kangaroo came about (see “Not the End of the Story”, Rananim 9/1 & DHLR 26 1-3).  In the first letter, L says to Seltzer:  “You haven’t told me what you think of Kangaroo.”  And in the second letter, Seltzer replies:  “Congratulations on KANGAROO!  It is superb….”  Now, there can be little doubt that the first quote implies that Seltzer had only recently had an opportunity to read [the typescript of] K.  And the second quote just as obviously implies that he had only just read it.  Therefore I am probably wrong in saying, as I did in my ”Not the End” article, that Mountsier must have given Seltzer his setting copy of K before Christmas 1922.  (I hd said, in refutation of Steele’s Introduction & his explanation of how the variant endings came about, that Mountsier wd have given Seltzer the U.S. setting text soon after the collation was complete, which was around 23/11/22.  [Steele, on the other hand, in his Introduction proper, sd Mountsier brought the two setting texts to Del Monte around Christmas 1922, & that it was a few days later that the decision to cut the texts was made.])  It is now probable that it was indeed Mountsier – not Seltzer, as I had supposed – who brought the U.S. (but nt the UK*) setting text to Del Monte.  However, that does not change or afftect the gravamen of my argument that the original cutting decision was made in Taos by L back in October (& nt, as Steele wd have it - at least in his Introduction proper - at Del Monte around 1/1/23), & also that it was Mountsier’s confusion over L’s instruction of where the cut was to be made (created by the variant TS1R paginations & the missing TS1R p 466 in Mountsier’s copy of TS1R) that caused the texts to be cut in the wrong place (at “broken attachments, broken”, instead of L’s intended ending [“It was four days…”]).  Yet that leaves me to provide an explanation for why Mountsier did not, as L had clearly instructed him to do, give the U.S. setting text (TS2) to Seltzer “as soon as possible”.  (L wrote to Seltzer on 19/11/22:  “I hope Mountsier has given you Kangaroo.”)   I think the explanation lies in the breakdown in relations between Mountsier & Seltzer after September 1922 (see, eg, Letters vol 8 p 58, footnote #5:  “Seltzer had been at ‘daggers drawn” with Mountsier since at least September 1922 [iv. 298].”).  He probably disobeyed L’s instructions because he did not want to go and see Seltzer in New York in November 1922.  They were not on speaking terms, apparently.  (I was unaware of, or had not remembered, the poor state of relations between Mountsier & Seltzer in the months running up to L’s break with Mountsier in early 1923.)  And Mountsier was to go to Del Monte in a few weeks, anyway, where Seltzer was also due (for it is unlikely that Seltzer would not have read a text which he was going to Del Monte, in part, to discuss with Lawrence).  So Mountsier no doubt brought the U.S. text with him to Del Monte, & it was there, on the evening of 31/1/22, that Mountsier’s cutting error was discovered, Seltzer departing the next morning, New Year’s Day 1923, carrying with him the intended Kangaroo U.S. setting text (ending “broken attachments, broken”), & L promising to copy out from his retained (single) copy of TS1R the missing words – the infamous “last page”, containing the correct (“It was four days…”.) ending, which Seltzer subsequently received & incorporated, but whose printers later re-deleted, & which Secker also received, sometime after 10/2/23, but who then did print it, thus bequeathing to posterity the much-vexed variant endings, on which, in large part, as Warren Roberts hd sd, the whole CUP exercise was predicated, & which the CUP, courtesy of Bruce Steele, has seen fit to incorrectly perpetuate (& refuse, as of my encounter with their new Publisher in Taos in 1998, to correct in their “definitive” Complete Works edition).  Something of an irony, I think.

[*As Steele conceded in his “footnote scenario”, Mountsier probably gave or sent the UK TS2 setting text – mistakenly cut by him at the “broken attachments” ending - to Seldes of The Dial before Christmas 1922.]

3/6/02  www.cybersydney.com.au/dhl:  As I went through these entries, I came to my first letter from Joe Davis, reported in note 31/8/78.  In it he sd he had been told by an old Thirroul resident, an 84-year-old Mrs Smith, I think, that “the Friends owned Wyewurrie, next to Wyewurk”.  As I can’t remember everything I’ve seen & done, I sent off an email to Ruffels, the font of such wisdom, asking if he knew anything about this.  He replied yesty, thus:

Regarding the Friends and Craig Street.  If there is one question you have asked me more than any other, it is this one.  If I had the time I could dig out the dates of those replies and refer you to them.  This will be my fourth, I think.  Lucy Friend owned all the lots on the western side of Craig Street and round the corner in Surfers Parade.  The house 'Wyuna' must have been the Friend's holiday bunker in  Thirroul.  Lucy Friend sold [it] in August, 1921.  The purchaser, Arthur Woodhill of Burwood, sold [it] to Mr Ible in April, 1922.   He ran his milk-vending business from 'Wyuna".  I have never been able to discover if there truly was a 'Wyewurrie' in Craig Street.  I doubt it.  (I quoted the somewhat spurious legend 'Wywurk' was flanked by 'Wyewurrie' and 'Cheerup' in a Good Weekend par on house names, many years ago).  I think I picked the story up in a [Illawarra]Mercury or Sydney Press article photocopy in some long ago library search.  The house on 'Wyewurk's' north was 'Cheerup' but the gate sign said 'Chirrup'- which I like better.  Next to that, on  south-east corner of Craig Street and Surfers Parade, was 'Ripples'.  J[oe] D[avis’]s book will probably tell you.  I think JD originally told you the Friends owned or stayed in 'Wyewurk',  [no, Wyewurrie] but he said that early on.  A bit of local oral legend.  Doubt it.  I think your diary says the Friends (mistakenly) thought their family owned 'Wyewurk'.  A thought has just occurred to me as to where the confusion might have arisen.  'Chirrup', or 'Ripples', and 'Wyuna' were conscious copies of  'Wyewurk's' design.  Their owners consulted the Irons family - or the Southwoods, about the layout of this ideal holiday house.

In a second email yesty, John added this information: 

I have had a think about your question about 'Wyewurrie' being in Craig Street. The story of this arose from two sources:  1] when Joe Davis interviewed Lodelia Smith, daughter of long-time Thirroul shop-keepers, early on in the piece, she told him that Lucy M[ay] Friend's block in Craig Street had its frontage in Surfers Parade. The name of the house was 'Wyewurrie' [Mrs Smith sd];  2] [local historian] Edgar Beale, enquiring into ‘Wyewurk's’ early history, claimed it was originally called 'Wyewurrie' (Illawarra Historical Society Journal, 1 October, 1983, pp 60-61).  The source of my previous contention to you, that others copied from the layout design of 'Wyewurk', was the late Rita Brown [as told to] to Joseph Davis.  She told him her house 'Chirrup' was on and the other was the house on the north west corner diagonally opposite her house.  Probably 'Wyuna'.

In my reply, I acknowledged that I now recall I hd asked him that before, no doubt more than once.  However, I added:  “But my memory that Wyewurrie was next to Wyewurk dates from very early.  I must have read it somewhere.  I will check my records & get back to you on this, for I feel it could be important.  There is something odd about the Friends relationship with Craig Street.”   This is now my email to JR of today:

John – I sd I wd look at my records re Wyewurrie, etc.  The only reference to the name I can find is in an article in Walkabout dated 1/8/57 (which is very early – I don’t think I have anything earlier that this on Wyewurk) by Beverly Longworth Lee (whom I do not know).  Its “hook” (as we say in jourmalism) was the “recent” Royal Tour by HM, & I quote the intro:  “During the recent Royal tour of Australia, Queen Elizabeth paused in her journey…to admire the panorama that spreads out below The [Sublime Point] Lookout.  The Queen is reported to have said the view was one of the most breath-taking she had ever seen.”  (Well, she wd, wdn’t she?)  The article, which is probably the one you can recall, went on to imply that Ms Lee had visited Wyewurk, for she mentions the crockery and furnishings inside.  She then says:  “Behind the walls of the house, that still stands between its neighbours, “Chirrup” and “Wyewurrie”, the great English author wrote…”.  I think this pretty well implies that she actually saw, or heard from a reliable source, that the place next door to Wyewurk was, either then or previously, Wyewurrie.  The fact that Joe’s Mrs Smith also used that name wd tend to confirm that identification, despite your (and my) fruitless researches to the contrary.  Edgar Beale’s info ditto.  But that is not the point.  The point is: could the Friends have hd some closer relationship with Craig Street other than the “statistical” fact that Lucy May Friend owned the other side of the street up to 1921?  There is a body of evidence that wd imply that the answer is yes.  What is that evidence?  (And it’s reasonably important to establish the truth here, for it wd illuminate how L found out about Wyewurk, & the circumstances of his taking up residence there, not to mention his relationship with the Friends & how he found out about the secret army.)  The major evidence comes from Yeend, which means from “behind the closed door”.  He sd originally to Andrew [Moore] that Wright [Walter Friends’ bro-in-law] hd told him that one of the Friends gave the key of Wyewurk to L.  A little later Yeend told me, or Andrew, that one of the Friends hd owned Wyewurk.  (Incidentally, when I was chasing the Scriveners, one relative recalled that the Scriveners used to go down to Thirroul & stay in a place owned by the Friends, & I seem to recall they implied it was Wyewurk.)   Then there is the “circumstantial” evidence, outlined in my “Barber of Thirroul” article [Rananim 2.1], that implies that it hd to be a Friend who knew Wyewurk hd bn vacated the previous day (Saturday), took L&F down to Thirroul, got the key from Lucy Callcott, showed the Lawrence’s the still-warm Wyewurk, & negotiated their immediate occupancy.  This female Friend, I strongly believe, was either Dawdie Friend or the wife of Robert Moreton Friend.  Finally, there is the evidence of the novel, which we know is fact turned into “fiction”.  This implies that the house next door to Cooee (ie, next door to Wyewurk) was at least occupied by the Callcotts (probably Robert Moreton Friend & his wife).  All this implies a closer Friend relationship or intimacy with the environs of 3 Craig Street than wd come from the “historic” link via Lucy May Friend’s property dealings.  One extra point.  The names of the various houses involved, on both sides of Craig street, seemed to have chopped & changed down through the years.  The original name of 3 Craig Street was not Wyewurk. (Was it “Idle Here” or something similar?)  Indeed, the whole of Thirroul was a seething mass of similar names & name changes – Sans Souci, Take-it-Eazee, Linga Longa, Rest Well, Bide-a-Wee, etc.  I have a note that says the original name of 1 Craig Street (I don’t know if it’s 1, or lot1) was “Ocean View”.  (All of the above is a bit heavy, research-wise, so I’ll conclude in a lighter vein.  L hd used the name of his Thirroul residence before, in 1918, in a letter to Katherine Mansield, in which he sd: “I’m supposed to be doing that little European history, and earning my living, but I hate it like poison, and have struck.  Why work?”  Also, it will amuse you to learn that in the will of Thomas Irons [who hd owned Wyewurk up to 1919] there is a list of the cars his motor-firm Taylors was working on at the time of his death.  They included not only the Friends’ two Austins, a limo for Sam Hordern, a Buick for T.B. Nossiter, and a Coey for Dalgetys [probably Sir Henry Braddon]!  And you will know, of course, that in 1922 there was a make of car [or motor-cycle] called a Callcott!  Pip, pip.)

 

13/6/02 www.cybersydney.com.au/dhl: I am now correcting/editing some articles we scanned in from back issues of Rananim for the website (we did not keep them electronically, unfortunately, though from now on we will have them intact from the last two issues forward). The one I'm doing now - "What's in a Name?", the second part of the "Nomenclature" series (Rananim 5/2) - is very "dirty", and in need of a lot of subbing. However, in going over it I came to the part that tried to analyse where the name "Fred Wilmot" came from. I remarked that he appears in two manifestations in the novel. First he is Alfred John, [WJ] Trewhella's dead brother and first husband of Rose Trewhella (she married her late husband's younger brother, William James, or Jaz). Then he changes to Victoria Callcott's older brother, "Fred Wilmot", Jack Callcott's "best mate". In this second manifestation he is a mining engineer on the South Coast. Very odd and confusing, and plainly some reflection of reality and Lawrence's ham-fisted effort to disguise what was obviously "sensitive" and in need of camouflage. I originally thought he may have been based on the brother of AAK [Andree Adelaide Oatley, nee Kaeppel], Carl Oatley (the family "wastrel"). This was for two reasons, mainly. First, like the fictional Alfred John, he does not appear in the novel, except in name (and Carl Oatley was in Melbourne in 1922). Second, he went to school with Jack Scott, and was probably his "best mate". But that was before the Friends hove into view. Now it seems far more likely that some Friend is mixed up in the fictional Alfred John Trewhella and Fred Wilmot, Jack Callcott's best mate. Who might he be? The names "Alfred John" and "Fred Wilmot" should give us some clue (for, as pointed out in the "Nomenclature" series, Lawrence's names almost always have meaningful echoes embedded in them). But you can seldom argue from the name to the real "departure point". At best, they provide confirmation (ie, "Ah - so that's the link!"). So the starting point has to be: Who are the likely suspects? This in complicated by Lawrence's tendency to deal in amalgams - combining bits of real people to make up his characters*. One also wonders why Lawrence put this shadowy character in at all. He doesn't contribute anything to the plot in either manifestation. On the other hand, his persistence is interesting, and probably indicative. He intrudes, most probably, because he is intimately connected with another character, to whom he is (almost inextricably) attached in some way. (Or else he is the ghost of someone whose characteristics have been "strip-mined" by Lawrence.) It is highly probable that he is someone's brother. And the brother of a female "original", too. One strong possibility is that he is the brother of the "real" elements Lawrence borrowed for the character Victoria Callcott. At present, there are two prime suspects. First, Walter Friend. Second, George Sutherland. In this entry I will not go into why these are the two main candidates, though it would be obvious from the mentions of their names above (and especially Yeend's chortle [see 29/5/02 above]: "…you're on the right track…Sutherland leads straight to Walter Friend"). So my next job, when I can spare the time, is to devote some thought and research to the task of unmasking the enigmatic "Fred Wilmot". (*I should try to coin a term for these "amalgam" elements, or bits of people. Something catchier than "ingredient people". If anyone has a suggestion, please email me.)

24/6/02 www.cybersydney.com.au/dhl: Well, something strange and perhaps wonderful has happened. On Friday night John Shaw rang. (John is the NY Times rep in Australia, an old journo and friend who recently migrated to Canberra.) He said he had run across a lady, with the interesting name of Wendy Brazil, who has a Lawrence connection. She grew up in Austinmer (next town/suburb north of Thirroul) and says her father knew Lawrence while he (DHL) was in Thirroul, and used to go for walks on the beach with him! It's possible, though very unlikely - unless her maiden name was Crossle or, better still, Friend - or best of all, Sutherland. She's no dill, however, for John says she's a academic with a double doctorate, one in literature. I have written to her today, and await her response with sceptical optimism bordering on hope.

 

2/7/02 www.cybersydney.com.au/dhl: Wendy has replied. Her father's name was, disappointingly, Kelly. He was some sort of boarding-house keeper, and was certainly around Thirroul and its environs (but mainly Wollongong and Austinmer) in 1922. Yet she repeats her claim that her father walked on the beach with Lawrence and had long talks with him. I would place no credence in this claim were it not for the fact that she says she still has in her possession a copy of Kangaroo in which her father had highlighted certain passages. She also mentions the "two ladies" who lived next door to Wyewurk and who also knew Lawrence when he was in Thirroul. I am seeking more information from her about the marked passages and from Ruffels re where Kelly might have lived in 1922. If he was in Thirroul, this might add to the credence of the claim.

20/2/03 www.cybersydney.com.au/dhl: Went down to Canberra this week to attend an Open Source in Government seminar. While there, I took the opportunity to look up Wendy Brazil, who came to the Commonwealth Club for drinks with her husband Norman. She brought with her not one but two annotated copies of Kangaroo, which had belonged to her father. I had a quick glance at the copies (a pocket 1950 Heinemann and a 1954 reprint Penguin - much the same text, however). Nothing of immediate note (and later examination - she let me take them away - confirmed that there was nothing dramatic or especially significant in the annotations). I questioned her closely, and although nothing resembling proof of her statement that Lawrence met and talked with her father Ron Kelly on the beach below Wyewurk in 1922 emerged, there seems to be some basis for the claim. She was not making it up - her father did tell her - and it also seemed unlikely that he would have made it up. So, on balance, I think it is likely to be so. However, as later examination also confirmed, there is nothing I could find in the annotations that would indicate that Lawrence used in Kangaroo material gathered in any conversations with Kelly. (For a fuller account of this - plus the very useful "discovery" about "who put the comma in" - see the two articles I have written in Rananim 11.1 (accessible elsewhere on this site).

18/3/03 www.cybersydney.com.au/dhl: Finished Rananim 11.1 last week and posted it out on Friday. Best issue yet, I think (but I always think that). However, I made a bit of a boo-boo with my "Who Put A Comma In?" feature. On the other hand, the error rendered the point I was making - that the CUP and Bruce Steele had got the "Kelly correction" passage wrong - even stronger, if anything. I had remarked in the article that "For the life of me, however, I cannot see why Lawrence left out the question-mark," adding that I thought Steele should have put it in (and then going on to suggest what the correct text* was, which reinstated the omitted question-mark). But of course I was wrong. Lawrence did put the question-mark in - on the galley proofs, just as he had also inserted the comma at the proof stage. In a footnote to the previous [text] paragraph I had remarked that Lawrence's final proof corrections - which must establish the final and correct text - could be deduced by comparing Seltzer's setting text (Berg 3) with the Seltzer edition (ending apart). And by comparing these two texts (ie, "Alone, what sort of alone. Physically…" [Seltzer setting text, Berg 3] and "Alone, what sort of alone? Physically…" [Seltzer 1923 edition]) we can deduce that the question-mark was indeed inserted by Lawrence as a galley-proof correction, and thus must stand as the correct and final text. (It is, to say the least, slightly worrying that the CUP, through its chosen editor Bruce Steele, has omitted these two of Lawrence's final proof corrections - the comma and the question-mark - in the one paragraph. I have not analysed the rest of the CUP text on this matter, but one wonders how many more of Lawrence's final proof corrections have not been included in the CUP text of Kangaroo: a question one almost dares not contemplate, even though Steele implies in his introduction to the CUP Kangaroo [p. xlvii - "Lawrence's corrections can be readily identified from a comparison of TSII and A1", ie Seltzer's setting text and the Seltzer edition], that he has taken these proof changes into account.)

* This refers to the paragraph in the "The Battle of Tongues" chapter beginning "Alone, what…" and ending "…depend on."

I should add, in passing, that our Lady Hopetoun twilight cruise last Friday night was an outstanding success, verging on triumph. The change to night-time, which was inconvenient for many prospective participants, far from being a minus, was a considerable plus. Dining by moonlight on the still and silent upper reaches of Middle Harbour is an experience not to be missed. And we now intend to make all future Lady Hopetoun cruises twilight ones, and even upgrade our on-board dining arrangements with candles, silver, napery, crystal, and other more formal trappings. We felt much like the Czar's family on the Imperial Yacht. Sydney can be uniquely beautiful, if you know how and when to approach her.

20/5/04 Bondi: Some interesting developments. First, I was contacted last week by a Wendy Carlisle from the ABC. She is a researcher or assistant producer on a projected new ABC TV programme, provisionally entitled "The History Detectives". (I think AM put her in touch with me.) It is scheduled to go out at 7.30 on Sunday nights - prime time. She wanted to explore the possibility of doing a segment on the DT, etc. I said I was amenable, if they were serious. She was somewhat trepidatious, as her boss was Michael Cathcart, a Melbourne-based historian who wrote "Defending the National Tuckshop" (an expose of the Victorian League of National Security) which I apparently rubbished in a review (in Quadrant, I think). I remember him, for I attended in London a talk he gave on secret armies in Australia at the Institute of Australian Studies. He made fun of the phenomenon (reflecting his book title) and I thought him rather juvenile, or at least under-graduate, and probably said as much. Nevertheless, she came out to Bondi to see me, and we talked about such a possible segment (I tried to mollify Cathcart in the process). I showed her the Yeend letters - by way of the proof she sought - and we photocopied them for her to take away and digest. And there it stands (though she apparently was to see AM today). I will see what happens, but if it works the way I hope it might, I might be able to use this - immanent prospect of exposure and scandal - to prise the proof I need out of Kings, etc.

20/5/04 Bondi: Meanwhile (for this deserves a separate entry) I had been re-reading my notes (in preparation for the possible programme) and I came across the entry dated 8/5/89 in which I speculated what might have happened at The Basin that crucial first Sunday, May 28. A penny (or cent) dropped, and I now think I know (after all these years and effort - and frustration) what happened, and how it all came about.

The key is linking what Yeend said (when the door creaked open for a brief moment) about what happened that Sunday afternoon ("Again, why does it have to be Walter Friend? - his father and brothers had equal claim [or words to that effect]" And: "If I were you I would look at Beach Road [rather than Florence or Seaview.") with what we are pretty certain happened re Hum and Hinemoa. Now, the point here is that we know, or can be pretty sure, of some things, which I will go on to enumerate. The problem is connecting them up into a credible, indeed almost-certainly-true, explanation. So, this is what I now believe happened:

Hum met L at the wharf. He installed him in Macquarie Street. Hum's family were staying up at Collaroy (school holidays), even perhaps in Hinemoa (or at least nearby in Seaview Pde). L urgently needed cheap accommodation, preferably by the sea. Hum had invited him up for tea on Saunday afternoon and to see the accommodation possibilities nearby. Ferry, tram up to Narrabeen, then to The Basin and Hinemoa. At tea were Robert Morton Friend (who was staying in rented holiday accommodation in Beach Road, around the corner from Hinemoa), and probably Dawdie Friend (his elder sister) and Jack Scott, plus AAO and family (and Hum, etc). At tea the possibility of Wyewurk was mentioned by RMF/Dawdie. At dusk, RMF, who had the Friend family car, offered to drive L&F back to the city. They went round to Beach Road to pick up the car. Then back down Pittwater Road and across the Spit. Probably dropped Scott off at Wycombe Rd on the way to Milson Point. Then across on the ferry. RMF drops the Ls off at their Macquarie Street hotel, and takes the Friend car to Taylor's Garage in Grosvenor Street (or wherever). Next day they meet at the station and RMF and Dawdie take them down to Thirroul and install them in W. Later in the week, L comes up for his trunks, meets up with RMF, who takes him to Mosman Bay to meet Scott. Chat overlooking the wharf as per book. L stays night with Scott at 112 (tub-top lookout, etc). Next weekend Scott comes down to T and begins to tell him about the secret army. The rest is history.

I will be quite surprised if this is not what happened. It fits in with all we know and with K. (Callcott being an amalgam of RMF and Scott.) Maybe I don't need the Kings confession after all! (No - I do, for we need proof.)

16/06/04 Bondi: No word back from the enigmatic Wendy. Silence (stunned or otherwise). However, something quite nice has now happened. Got an email from AM last night enclosing (attached) an essay written by one of his honours students. It is about the DT, and cleaves rather firmly to it. (See separate file "AM student".) Most gratifying. The student is actually doing a (I assume honours) thesis on "the Pacific Highway nucleus" of the Old Guard (cf. the Vernon papers). Replete with Friends, etc. Looking forward to reading it. Have thanked Andrew. (Also my Brazilian contact has evaporated. Odd.)

Also the DT gets a bit of an airing in a somewhat sinister publication that has sprung out of the woodwork called The New Citizen. It is apparently the journal of an organisation called the Citizens' Electoral Council of Australia (www.cecaust.com.au). This seems to be a new (new to me anyway) and vaguely right-wing (though the content is overtly anti-fascist) organisation devoted primarily to the beliefs of Lyndon H. LaRouche, an American political figure with stange economic ideas, rather Douglas-Creditish. Anyway, the journal issue Ruffles sent to me (and my own copy of which I later acquired directly from the CEC) contains, inter alia, an extensive précis/review of Drew Cottle's book (which I did not know had been published) on the Brisbane Line. I get a mention (as a "secret army expert") as does Dr William Richards (the "Mad Psychiatrist"). Picture of Scott, etc. And so it goes.

10/9/04 BONDI: I just had a call from Wendy Carlisle of Rewind

she said that they are going to air with a program "about secret armies"

specifically about "the secret army that came out of the first world war"

"going up to the New Guard and the de Groot affair"

(this is the only contact I have had with her since she came here a few months ago and tried to find out what I had

and I gave her copies of the Yeend letters)

she said the "Lawrence" material would be included as a literary intelude

and would canvass the possibility that Lawrence was "prescient"

(ie, the orthodox interpretation)

she said "they" (and I think this meant she) had looked into the matter

but had come up with nothing conclusive

but they had interviewed Joe Davis

and discovered that Joe had found something "interesting"

(I think she implied almost "sensational")

(remember, the primary aim of the series is for the program to do its own research and make its own discoveries, not report others' research)

Joe, she said, had found out that the barber's (George Laughlin's) family had a book with annotations in it!!!!

of course, one's mind begins to boggle

alas, it is not even Frieda's Not I But the wind

(which the lovely Wendy neither knew about nor knew what it was - "What is it?" - so much for ABC research)

it turns out, according to her, that it is a "second edition" of Kangaroo

which George made marginal notes in

one does not want to take the shine off a reported Joe find

so I will not speculate what the notes say

(they could be interesting, if they are more than "That's me")

the other "discovery" is that they have found a letter or something similar from (this might be Joe) members of the New Guard congratulating de Groot
on his bridge work

but the big news is that she went to see Bill Friend at his flat at the Quay

(she pushed a note under his door and he rang her on his return from the UK)

he rang he back and agreed to see her

(she told me nothing of this at the time - she wanted to make her own "discoveries")

Bill, in his late 70s, was polite

and listened to her interest

he expressed surprise at the content of the Yeend letters

(she had rung Yeend, who has Parkinson's, and he was curt and did not want to talk to her)

he said he knew nothing of any possible connection between the Friend family and DHL

nor that their family had anything to do with secret armies

she mentiobed his brother Brian (Yeend letters) but said there would be no use going to see him because he was "out of this world" (implying ga-ga)

(which I do not believe he is)

but he volunteered to go to Kings and have a look in "the Friend papers" and see if there was anothing there

(she did not mention the RM Friend memoir, even though there was a copy of some it its pages in the Yeend letters)

he rang her back some time later and told her he could find nothing in the papers about Lawrence or secret armies

so they decided to drop that line of "research"

OK bulls in china shops, etc

and maybe the memoir was destroyed earlier

or maybe it's still there?

thank God I have nothing to do with the program

(though I will no doubt get a dismissive passing reference)

still, an opportunity wasted

R

----- Original Message -----
From: Mrs Pamela Smith
To: rob@cybersydney.com.au
Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2005 2:48 PM
Subject: Kangaroo

Hi Mr. Darroch,
My name is Pamela Smith and I am a working associate of John Low (Local Studies Librarian Springwood). Actually, John gave me your email address and I hope you don't mind. I am currently writing a short essay 4,500 words for a Uni essay on the Blue Mountains Old Guard. I've read an article written by yourself and some of the info on the D.H. Lawence web site. Also books by Andrew Moore, Cathcart and I have read Kangaroo. So I have a fairly good knowledge of the Old and New Guard.
What I wanted to ask you, were you aware that Aubrey Abbott's brother in law (grazier Charles John Harnett) was married to Dora Scrivener the daughter of C.R. Scrivener?
I came accross this information when I was disecting the layers (Andrew Moore's words) of OG kinship patterns. Given Abbott and Scotts association I wondered if this was any value in confirming the Scrivener Lawrence meeting on the Malwa. Regards Pamela

THAT'S AN INTERESTING PIECE OF INFORMATION

HAVE YOU READ MY SECRET ARMY DIARY ON THE DHLA WEBSITE?

IF SO, YOU WILL BE AWARE OF MY YEARS OF FRUITLESS CHASING UP THE SCRIVENER CONNECTION

(WHICH IS, OR WAS, VERY STRONG - MAINLY BECAUSE OF THE HARBOUR LIGHTS CONNECTION)

BUT I FINALLY DISCARDED IT AS A DEAD END

AND WE NOW KNOW THAT THE CONNECTION BETWEEN THE OLD GUARD AND LAWRENCE WAS VIA THE FRIEND FAMILY AND COLLAROY BASIN (THE SUNDAY MAY 28 MEETING)

BUT I WILL PONDER THIS, FOR SCOTT CERTAINLY KNEW ABBOTT (THE OLD GUARD, OR PART OF IT, HAS BEEN CALLED "ABBOTT'S GROUP")

IF MEMORY SERVES ME, THE CR SCRIVENERS ARE THE MOUNT IRVINE ONES?

PERHAPS WE COULD MEET, IF YOU ARE LOCAL TO THE BLUE MOUNTAINS

AM KNOWS MORE ABOUT ABBOTT THAN I DO (THOUGH I KNOW MORE ABOUT THE SCRIVENERS)

RD

Rob,
These are only a couple of musings arising from my first thorough re-reading
of your Online e-diary re the DT.

Firstly, I think each of the latter coded message from Yeend might have been
semaphoring that the clue was in the bunch of boys who marched from TKS to
Vic Barracks to enlist.Why dont you go and check TKS mag. for 1915/16?
Secondly, in your diary you mention that a "Dr Jim Friend" is Fiona F's
father! I'll bet he is the "Jim Friend" in the TRIPS militaria
exhibition.Somewhere in yr diary it says the Friends left Thirroul or
stopped going there, in 1956(?).How & why?

If he was friends with Helen Boge, then he was friends with the people who
lived next door to WYEWURK! Did Jim Friends parents know "Whiskey" Dawson?
The solicitor relative of Mrs Boge who owned No 5 Craig Street?
I think approaching the story from BOTH ends is the answer.
One, through Fiona to her father, citing your previous contact, and second
through Helen Boge and Paul Tuckerman asking for a photocopy of the
displayed images from the TRIPS display.

Just a couple of suggestions, hope they help.Regards, JOHN R.

PS: I apologise for the tatty draft of my DHL/HEIDE story I have sent
Sandra. Hope you can use it. Cut down or otherwise. Did you know about
Nolan's DHL painting STREAMERS (1982)? (Viewable on the EVA BRAUER website
using Adobe).
Andrew

I have just had a call from Hawaii which will interest you

out of the blue a chap called Doug Arnott, who apparently runs a backpacker operation in Honolulu, said he had found, and read, my secret army diary via Google

he thinks he has information that would be of interest

(he knows nothing of your book)

he is emailing me, and I will onsend

his mother was the daughter of Sir Henry Braddon (and the grand-daughter of Sir Edward Braddon, of blot fame)

his elder brother, who lives in Thornleigh, knows something he is about to divulge

he (the brother) went out with Judy Friend

and went to Kings

his father was an Arnott (rural, not biscuit)

who was a Captain in WW2 - on Ambon!

his paternal grandfather, a Colonel Arnott, was in the Light Hourse and close to Macarthur-Onslow

and knew Colonel Davies

his sister is the family geneologist

the names he spouts we all know

he spoke of a fortified rural property in New England, built for secret army purposes

he says that, according to his brother, Sir HB was being prepared to take over as dictator in the 1920-30s

R

See my Sutherland article in the 2006 issue of Rananim (also the V&G piece, and Sandra's Dada article)

224 Nicholson Road
Subiaco 6008
19 February 2007

Dear Sandra and Robert,

As you know, it was a great delight to meet you at Babette's and to find so much in common. In fact it was quite staggering.

In my first trawl through family photos I find the enclosed but no photo of Jack Scott. The photo called "Sir John Monash and his staff in France, 1918" may well be of most help to you in identifying members of the secret army or it may just be annoying as the quality is poor and they have their hats on! On the other hand, you, with your far greater knowledge, may well pick out key figures - just like that!

For the record. My grandmother was Gertrude Florence Edwards (b. 1875) who was the second wife of Dr Charles Percy Barlee Clubbe (knighted 1927). She was the youngest sister of Barbara Edwards (Kaeppel) always known as 'Barbie'. 'Barbie' had two children, Andre and Carl. Gertrude was Andree's godmother. My mother, Elizabeth Clubbe (b. 1911) was Andree's god-daughter and I was her godson. (see page 4)

Was the family photo taken on the front verandah of their house in The Avenue, Collaroy? When we lived in Onslow Avenue Potts Point I saw Andree almost daily (1948-49) as she lived in Greenknowe Avenue. She was v. Frail trained on Bex. But so full of intellectual energy. She was the first person with whom I had a true intellectual discussion - on flying saucers! When we moved to Vaucluse in 1950 we saw Andree once a week on Sundays. We spent weekends with John at Avalon, Peter at Spencer Street Killara and holidays with Rachel at Moree. I saw Carl only once. He was tragically drunk on a train crossing the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He stood up and shouted, as the sun set "You will never see a greater sight than that. Look at that you narrow minded fools! My grandmother with who I was travelling broke down & cried but would not even acknowledge his presence directly. Jack Scott died before I came to Australia. My grandmother spoke of him with hatred in her voice. The charges did not relate to any secret army but to his stealing money from Andree and his cruelty to her. I asked Andree about this (typical precocious child question). She said that he was "handsome, charming, a rogue and totally amoral" (she then explained what amoral meant).

My grandfather told my mother that "Kangaroo" was a fascinating picture of Australia after W.W.I and that there was more to it than meets the eye - no direct reference to any secret army.

My grandfather arranged the purchase of the Collaroy property in 1920 that became the RAHC Convalescent Home and bought more land so that the garden extended almost to the beach.

I never asked Peter Oatley about Jack Scott but I asked John Oatley. He called Scott a total rogue who won my mother [AAO] over with his charm. He could not believe that she did not see through him, but we all have our blind spots. Again, nothing about a secret army, but, of course, I did not ask the right questions.

Jack Scott was so disliked by my grandmother that I am not at all amazed that we have no photo of him.

You never know what I may turn up though I fear these will only be of little use - merely of interest. Anyway I am showing that I want to keep in touch and do thank you for all your articles and the book, the thesis of which I totally accept.

Yours ever,

Michael

 

19/11/08 (BONDI): It is a long time since I wrote a substantive entry in my diary. I note that I recorded a letter from Michael Preston in February last year, but that was for the record, as it revealed nothing of significance. The one before that was also a letter to Andrew about Doug Arnott (1/5/05) and his Braddon/Arnott connections (I went to school at Cranbrook with him). The entry before that (27/4/05) was a note from Ruffels about Thirroul neighbours. The previous one was an exchange about the Old Guard in the Mountains, and of little interest otherwise. Which takes me back to the last substantive entry, dated 10/9/04 (about that appalling ABC Cathcart "history" program, Rewind). That's more than four years ago. So I should say something now, for I think I do have an item of substantive interest. It is strange (as I say in the associated blog - dated 20/11/08) how you can read over something a myriad times and not pick up its significance (see that blog, and the previous week's one). Especially such an important quote as the "horrible paws" one. That it should have read "claws" never occurred to me. But it has now led to something worthy of note in this diary. As I remark in the second blog, it is clear that Lawrence went to see Rosenthal, almost certainly on Saturday night June 24, to get past his Ballam's Ass. (Because of the two - Frieda's and L's - letters dated Tuesday June 20.) So I think we can date the end of the "Sea of Marriage" chapter to the previous weekend - June 17-18. That was where he was stuck (though probably he had been stuck for some time before that, as the chapters "Volcanic Evidence" and "At sea in Marriage" are just padding, with Lawrence scratching around for something to say). Frankly, his plot - such as it was - had stopped with "The Battle of Tongues" (probably based on a visit from Robert Moreton Friend). In any case, he was desperate for information to take the novel forward. However, he did not immediately use the meeting with Rosenthal, and its subsequent nightmare. Or maybe he did, for following the "At Sea in Marriage" chapter is the cut-out section. We don't know what was in this. (Maybe it was an initial account of the Rosenthal meeting which he discarded for one reason or another.) Instead it seems he recycled an earlier meeting with Scott (when Scott first told him details of the secret army structure) plus, probably a visit by RMF and his wife. This formed the chapter "Diggers". The following chapter, "Willie Struthers and Kangaroo" is the chapter wherein he does record the final confrontation with Rosenthal (followed by the Nightmare chapter). But this starts with a visit to "Canberra Hall" to see Willie Struthers (ie, Jock Garden). It is probable that Lawrence did make such a visit. (Struthers' offer to get Somers to write for them is almost certainly Rosenthal's offer earlier recycled). It may well be that such a Canberra Hall meeting took place before that final Saturday night. In the text L says he went to see Struthers the morning before the Saturday night meeting. If he did see Garden before Rosenthal, and mentioned it to Rosenthal that night (as the text says), then that would have been enough to tell Rosenthal that something was very amiss, and could well have sparked his violent reaction, irrespective of L's possible fishing for more information about the secret army.

 

 

Bondi (02.01.10): A new decade, and going on for two years since my last entry. But I have a substantive titbit that is worth mentioning. I am constructing the third of our CyberXs (CXs), Cyber South Sydney (CSS), as part of our plan to accelerate our now 13-year-old CyberSydney project. I won't go into that, except to mention that it was in the course of this chore that I came across a quite unexpected item of possible interest, or maybe relevance (though it's probably just coincidence). But even if it leads nowhere, which is almost certainly its fate, it shows that, even at this late date, such items can still crop up. It's worth a smile, or smirk, at the very least. I was inserting the MPRO (ex-July 2004 Yellow Pages) material into Gardeners Road when I came across the address: 337A Gardeners Road (Rosebery). The business listed in MPRO at that address stopped me in my tracks. It was "Cooley & Cooley", and their line of work was "lawyers". Today's is Saturday, but on Monday I will give them a ring and see if anyone of that name was around in 1922 (though surely I or John Ruffels would have picked that up if they had been*). It's worth a call, anyway (and I will add to this entry with the result of the call). Meanwhile, while I am adding, I will mention that we, the DHLA, are still going, if not strong, then at least actively. We visited Garry Shead's studio earlier last year and had a nice picnic there (see report in Rananim). We had our spring picnic at Balmain (five of us) but missed the annual get-together in the Botannic Gardens (not enough interest). However, we have an event coming up that is arousing some interest. It's Andrew's Margaret Jones Memorial lecture at Minh's (where we will have our AGM), and he will refute some lady historians allegation that the Old Guard did not exist (and hence the Darroch Thesis could not be correct). We will reproduce this in Rananim. Oh, yes - I should also add that there is a rumour (from Jonathan Long in London) that there will be a DHL International Conference in Sydney in August. That should be interesting.
*they might have been active in some country area we have not trawled though

17.01.10 (Bondi): I think I now have the key to who's who in Kangaroo. The insight came to me as I was writing a Friday blog to coincide with Andrew's talk on Saturday week (January 30) at Minhs Restaurant - see blog, details, and report on our DHLA website. In it I wrote this:

It turned out that he [Yeend] had in his archives a memoir written by Robert Moreton Friend - Walter's younger brother (and the man whom Walter had urged me to contact back in 1981). This memoir, he eventually told me, revealed how Lawrence had found out about the secret army, via the Friend family. It was not Scott whom Lawrence had met that first Sunday at "Hinemoa", but Robert Friend. All these years, I had been barking up the wrong tree.

It was Robert Friend who had introduced Lawrence to Scott and Rosenthal. He was Jack Callcott. It was Robert Friend who had taken Lawrence and Frieda down to Thirroul and installed them in "Wyewurk". Paradoxically - and ironically - Scott was Lawrence's "cover" for his main Australian contact: Robert Friend. This at last explained one of the great mysteries of Kangaroo - why Lawrence so foolishly put such a dangerous man as Scott into the novel without taking any effort to disguise him. For Scott was the disguise for Robert Friend.

And now I think this is true for most of Kangaroo. Each character is two people (I had guessed this long ago - but the full import of that insight only dawned on me today, as I was finishing the blog). The first one is the real person L wants to put in the novel - Friend, his wife, Hum, and so on. The second is the person he is going to use to disguise that original person. Callcott is Robert Friend overlaid with Scott. Scott, in turn, is probably overlaid with RMF. Ditto RMF's wife, and so on. L&F are left intact, and probably Rosenthal too (L could not find an overlay for him). The point about this is that the characters are not merely an amalgam of two people, but a real person and a disguise consisting of someone else. (And L is not trying to conceal the identity of the disguise.) A subtle point, perhaps - but it explains L's thinking, and why he did not take the precautions he should have with Scott. His mind was on trying to protect the identity of his main Sydney contact - Robert Moreton Friend.

20.01.10 (Bondi): Well, well, well. The door has creaked open again. Let me describe what has happened. (This is uncannily familiar to that bust of activity in 1978, just before I was about to depart for London - and eight years away - and I found, courtesy of the wrong electoral roll, where Jack Scott lived in 1922.) But first, let me correct that I said above, and make the add I had intended to make before I met Peter Fay. The previous entry contains an inadvertent error. I wrote: "The first one is the real person L wants to put in the novel - Friend, his wife, Hum, and so on." Yes, he did want to put Robert Friend in, and Scott was the "cover". But not Hum. For Hum was someone else's cover! And I will come to that in a moment. But now let me make this add. What I wanted to explain was the extra subtlety involved with the insight that (and I again quote what I said above) "The point about this is that the characters are not merely an amalgam of two people, but a real person and a disguise consisting of someone else." Again, true. But it is the way, the technique

Lawrence used, to put the two together that is now the crucial point. For he overlay the "real" character with the appearance, etc, of the "cover". Almost as if he were covering them with an animal skin. Just as RMF is overlaid with Scott (and this is why Scott comes through so accurately - he was not being disguised, merely being used as a disguise) - so are some of the other characters...and in this case, Hum. For I am now pretty certain how the third Australian (male) character in the novel is made up, and who he is. He is George Sutherland, overlaid with Hum. So now let me relate what has happened this week.

A week or so ago I was rung up, out of the blue, by a man who said his name was Peter Fay, and though I did not know him, he knew who I was, and wanted to ask a favour of me. He was, he explained, "curating" an exhibition of paintings by someone called Frank Nowlan, a Thirroul artist. The exhibition, which was to be staged somewhere in the west of Sydney a few months hence, contained a number of paintings depicting Lawrence and Frieda in Thirroul. (A few days previously we ourselves had decided to hang an exhibition of Paul's 1975/7 DHL painting in the UUSC to coincide with Andrew's talk on the Old Guard - but Fay had known nothing of this - his approach was purely coincidental). He had heard (from Joe Davis, it turned out) that I had a photocopy of the Kangaroo manuscript. He wondered if I would agree to let him photograph a couple of pages of the MSS to be displayed (as "montage") at his exhibition. (Specifically he wanted the pages that mentioned the subject-matter of several of the paintings - the football match, etc.) I readily agreed, and mentioned that his call had been fortuitous, as we are staging an exhibition of DHL works, and maybe his ones might be suitable to be added to the show. He saw no reason why that might not be possible. He would bring some photos of the pictures when he came to the lunch I had invited him to on Tuesday of this week.

He arrived - a tall gentleman in his early 60s I would guess - carrying a portfolio. Before lunch, he showed us some of the pictures. They were the work of a primitive, untrained artist, rather Sam Burnsish with a touch of Malcolm Lowry. They depicted a number of scenes with L&F, and were rather cute. They certainly would go well in the exhibit. He said he thought he could get their owners to agree to lend them (Garry Shead owned at least one, and I think Joe Davis might have had another.) I showed him my MSS, and the deal was agreed. Then we went out on the balcony for lunch.

I began (as a journalist would) asking about who he was and what he did. In the course of this he happened to mention that he had once been a teacher at Kings. Well, you can imagine how my ears pricked up. Did he know Peter Yeend? Of course he did. He had been quite close to Yeend at Kings (about 10 or 15 years ago, I gathered). So I blurted out my story...about the Friends, Yeend, the clues, the letter from the headmaster - everything. He was most interested. Yeend was still very much alive. He had left Kings and gone somewhere else to be an archivist (Barker?). He was quite frail now (Parkington's), but alert. He met him at the opera occasionally. Would I like him to contact Yeend?

I won't go into detail about our subsequent email and phone contact, but jump to today. On Tuesday - yesty - I sent him my recent "Darroch Thesis" blog. Oh, yes, during the email/phone conversations I had asked him to ask Yeend - to test his inclination to forgive and forget - if George Sutherland was Hum (see above). I explained that Yeend in his correspondence with me had dropped the name Sutherland (in conjunction with the Friends) on a number of occasions. I had suspected that Sutherland was in the novel, disguised as Hum. He then remarked that he knew the Sutherlands, and in fact had taught George Sutherland's grandson at Kings. He rang me this morning to say he had rung Mike Sutherland (the grandson) who lived in Dubbo. He had in fact sent him my blog. He had been most friendly. Were there any Sutherland papers? Yes, GBHS had been an avid retainer of papers. He had a safe he put them in. (These might have been culled in 1985). His aunt, who lived in Cremorne, had the rest, he thought. He offered to put me in touch with Mike Sutherland, whom I rang around 2pm. He was most co-operative, even interested. He had read my blog. He had sent it on to his aunt. I told him about Trewhella and the possibility he might be based on GBHS. I told him about the Thirroul mining connection, and my research that showed GBHS was a engineer whose firm might have been been in mining engineering (like Trewhella). A half an hour later he rang back. His aunt had said that GBHS indeed had a strong or at least substantial connection with the coal mine in Thirroul. She had photos of GBHS in Thirroul.
And that is what happened today. All sorts of possibilities and prospects spring to mind. Could GBHS have written a memoir (like RMF) for Kings? Could he have kept a copy? Is it in his papers? I daren't speculate. Let's hope the door remains open. Who knows? It might creak open even more in the next few days. But at least it seems we will have a photo of Sutherland (aka Trewhella).

29/1/10 (Bondi): Mike Sutherland came to lunch (with his son, who wants to be a journalist, and is at UTS). He was very friendly. He knows nothing about any Lawrence connection concerning his father. But he told me a lot about his father. He promised to read Kangaroo. (I gave him a precious copy of my book.) His father was born around 1903, and did not marry until well into the 1920s. So he would have been a young, single man in 1922 (as would have Robert Moreton Friend). Still, that might be Lawrence disguise, or opposite technique. (But it is worth noting that the three likely candidates for male characters in K were all single in 1922 - Scott, RMF and GBHS...which at least makes Dawdie Friend the most likely as the "original" for Rose Callcott.) GBHS was not a mining engineer, but a civil one. Mike aunt is also reading K. He said Yeend was known at Kings for his indiscretion (his nickname was "Bullshit" Yeend). Either he or Fay told me that the Friend family threatened to withdraw funding for the Walter Friend Gym at the school is Yeend revealed any more. (Later) Mike returned my book and said he was about half-way through K (not further mention of his aunt). I am putting no pressure on him. He is still in touch by email, and friendly. I will follow this up in the next few weeks. (26.10.10 - nothing came of this - no papers, no memory or record of any connetion between Sutherland and Lawrence. Pity.)

26/1/10 (Bondi): The DHLA (Margaret Jones Memorial) lecture went off well (at Minhs). Andrew did me proud. Of course the "Darroch Thesis" (whose parenthood he happily acknowledged) is correct. I gave a little addendum about the new Sutherland connection. (The DHLA, of which this was the AGM, is healthy - about 20 attended, and all office-holders were re-elected by acclamation.) I will write something (as promised) about the talk for Rananim. I told them about the putative DHL International Conference in Sydney next year. Later Andrew said he would consider doing a paper for it, if asked. (I have sent a copy of by UUCS blog - which has yet to go out, as I feel the exhibition opening on March 2 should precede it - to the DHLANA, more as a warning shot than anything else. No reaction.)

17/2/10 (Bondi): A minor entry. I was going though a list of businesses in Rosebery (for our Cybersydney business) when I came across the name of a solicitor in Gardiners Road - a Cooley and Cooley, lawyers. (See above entry.) Maybe, I idly thought, there might have been a Cooley who was a lawyer around in Sydney in 1922. I got in touch and was eventually redirected to a firm of another name in Pagewood. I rang and emailed them asking if they could give me a contact for the Cooley connection. Some weeks later - yesty - a Mr Cooley of Vaucluse rang. He was the retired Cooley who used to be with the firm. His Cooley ancestor came from Philadelphia around the turn of the last century. They were working class grocers. No professional identity until well after 1922. However, he did tell me a bit about the name Cooley, which apparently derives from an Irish legend involving some dispute involving a bull - ie, there is a link between the Irish name Cooley and a bull. Of course, Rosenthal was "as strong as a bull". But I think I will leave it there. (My Cooley contact also pointed out to me that there is a character called Cooley in David Williamson's play, Don's Party - about an election party, no doubt the 1975 one. This Cooley is also a lawyer, and a rather nasty character. Maybe Williamson has read Kangaroo?)


19/2/10 (Bondi): Well, another door has, if not yet creaked open, then at least hove into view. At the club last Monday I was accosted in the foyer by a lady whom I did not know who said she would like to have a word with me. She said she had a friend in Bowral who would like to meet me. It turned out that the friend was the youngest daughter of Eric Campbell of New Guard notoriety. She (the daughter) wanted to have a chat about a memoir she wanted to write (or have written) about her father, rescuing his tarnished (fascist) reputation. She (the lady from Bowral) said the daughter - Helen de Sallis - had "found" something that would allow or help her to do this. We are to meet at the club for lunch on March 8. There are a couple of points here. First, Andrew says that Campbell's papers were reputedly destroyed in a fire many years ago. (Well, we know about that story - cf Ottoline's journal.) Secondly, if there are papers, maybe a decent - so far lacking due to the absence of records - biography could be written. I might take it on, if asked. But thirdly there is the possibility - faint at the moment - that if papers do exist, there might be something in them about Lawrence and Scott (who was, of course, Campbell's "partner in secret army crime" in the 1920s). I have no objection to writing something accurate (ie, stripped of politically-correct, anti-fascist rhetoric) about Campbell, especially if it is in my interest to do so. Watch this space. (Meanwhile, preparations for our March 2 DHL pictures show at the club progress favourably.)

2/4/10 (Bondi): The DHL show at the club went well (over 55 turned up) and we sold quite a few Kangaroo's for the society's coffers. (One of Paul's pictures was stolen but returned, probably by a member of the casual staff). GBHS's two daughters came, and were quite friendly. Janet - my main contact (courtesy of Mike Sutherland) promised to see if there was anything in the family records that might explain Yeend's injunction to follow the Sutherland/Friend connection (26.10.10 - no luck). Meanwhile Geoffrey Sherington (fellow club member, professor of Education at SydU, and GPS historian) promised to contact Kings to see if the new archivist there (a lady) might be more forthcoming re the Friend memoir. (Later: no luck - but he did report that someone from the Friend family had been to see or inspect the memoir...or something similar. He confirmed that the Friends were still adamant that the memoir should not be shown to anyone. Indeed, I believe it has now been removed from the school.) I heard back this week from Janet Walker (GBHS's daughter) that the family had met last week - the "family historian was down in Sydney for a visit - but that they could find no "connection with Lawrence". I wrote a rather terse reply saying I did not expect they would find such a connection, for if there was one, they probably would not realise what it was. This brought some softer responses and promises (from her and Mike Sutherland) to, in effect, keep looking. In this regard, I cited the Cameron Sutherland/Trewhella connection as something they would not recognise as significant. And this in turn led me to try to find out if the Sutherland there could be connected to GBHS, and thus satisfy Yeend's hints. But first I tried to track down where in Neutral Bay Cameron Sutherland was situated (for it might fulfil the description in K of the meeting between Somers, Callcott and Trewhella, across from the Mosman ferry wharf). I Googled up Cameron Sutherland and found some newspaper references to the firm, which turns out to have been a mining machinery company - so fulfils the Trewhella/Thirroul link. This made finding where it was in 1922 more germane. So I went to the Mitchell yesty and tried to find its address. No luck - but what I did find was a piece of land along Mosman Bay in Neutral Bay opposite the ferry wharf called Harriett Park. Well, that pretty well confirms L's presence there - but, more significantly - makes Cameron Sutherland even more important. For there is now little doubt in my mind that someone connected with that company is at least part of the Trewhella character in K. Next week I will initiate two searches, one in the Mitchell (courtesy of Paul Brunton) to see if there is a photo of that side of Mosman Bay - which could show the CS depot or whatever, and in State Records (courtesy of Alan Ventress) to see if we can unearth company or other records of Cameron Sutherland - and in particular who the Sutherland of CS might be. (The Eric Campbell project looks like it will go ahead.) I am a feeling I am close to something. (26.10.10 - alas, I wasn't.)

5/4/10 (Bondi): Bugger! It's not Harriett Park, but Harnett Park. I misread it on the microfiche (an easy-enough mistake). However, it has had the purpose of focussing my attention on that crucial incident in K and its possible genesis. How I am trying to find where in Neutral Bay Cameron Sutherland (and Seward) had their office (and, I hope, harbourside wharf/landing), and, who the Sutherland in the firm was. I still think I am close to something. (26.10.10 - the historian for North Sydney council says there were no timber/coal yards on Mosman Bay - curses!)

25/10/10 (Bondi): I was asked to give a talk to the Marrickville Historical Society last Saturday on Sir Charles Rosenthal (for the text of my talk, see the next edition of Rananim). It went down well. My new helper, Robert Whitelaw, came along and, a la Ruffels, had some goodies for me. He has been very helpful since he learned about my Lawrence and secret army interests at the UUSC (of which we are both members, and dine there together most Fridays). Robert, who used to move in security circles when he was a public servant, has pointed me in the direction of Martha Rutledge, who is as close to the historical secret army action as anyone can be (she is the daughter of a Knox and a Stephens! - even better than Doug Arnott, whose grand-father was Sir Henry Braddon and whose grandfather was the Arnott who was no2 in the northern division of the Old Guard - see previous entries). I have written to Martha - who is a historian of some note (she wrote scores of entries in the ADB) - asking if she can help re knowledge in her family's circles about Kangaroo, etc. If anyone alive knows, she would. She could give me the brush-off (as others like Markie Vernon have), but, being an historian, she just might come good, see the larger interest, and spill the beans.

Of course, this is part of my push to find conclusive evidence for my thesis prior to the DHL conference in Sydney next June - conclusive enough to convince even the most diehard "Darroch Thesis" sceptic. (I am also being helped by the National Archives, who are, most helpfully, delving into ASIO and SIB records for me.) I am also preparing a plea to MI5 in London (for Major Jones, head of our security service between 1919 and 1945. was a MI5 agent, and certainly knew what was going on, and, as a MI5 agent, must have been sending reports back to London). For it may be that, come next June, an opportunity might come my way to prove before the conference that the much-maligned "Darroch Thesis" is correct. (A panel discussion between me and Andrew on one side and Steele and Joe Davis on the other would be the ideal format for such a decisive showdown.) Meanwhile, incredibly, almost 40 years on, I am still stumbling on significant evidence, and this is the justification for this diary entry.

Firstly, my talk, which has something new in it. In writing it, I cast round for a quote to use showing the dark side of Rosenthal. I chose the pre-nightmare chapter telling of the final confrontation between Somers and Cooley (ie, Lawrence and Rosenthal) when L/S tells R/C that he has been to see Willie Struthers (ie, in reality Jock Garden at Trades Hall). The confrontation ends like this, "fictionally":

...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.

When I wrote this - which, of course, I believe reflects an actual event - I suddenly saw the reference to R/C's "two little near-set holes for eyes". Did Rosenthal have such eyes, I asked myself. You bet he did...

Rosie - note the "dark holes" for eyes

I then went on to mention that L had re-used both Rosenthal and Scott again in two subsequent novels (JTLJ and the V&G). It made a nice point, and a nice piece. But, then, something even better emerged.

With an eye to what delegates to the conference might do, I was browsing through these, my online research notes, when I came across a reference to the name Rutledge (see 27/1/90 above) - a name that means more to me today, of course, than it did then. He was Rosenthal's architect partner. What caught my eye, however, was his Christian name - Lovatt. In point of fact, I noted in passing in that 1990 entry that this could imply Lawrence had met Rosenthal before he started the novel. However, this comment was made before I knew some of the things I know today (and I glossed over it). Now that later knowledge (and the work I did on my talk on Saturday) throws a new light on this point.

For it seems significant that L used two names associated with Rosenthal in the novel that he started no later than the Friday after he arrived (and possibly as early as Tuesday) - ie, Somers's wife, Harriett (2xTs), and Lovatt (2xTs) for Somers himself. Moreover, he probably got the name Trewhella also via Rosenthal (as Steele pointed out, there was a funeral in Sydney a few days before L arrived of a Trewhella, a prominent member of the Sydney singing society, which almost certainly would have included Rosenthal, and he was very probably at that funeral), and I am now certain that's where the name Trewhella came from. So - L was using three names associated with Rosenthal before the fictional meeting in chapter six, which was not written for at least a week or more after L went down to Thirroul on the Monday after his arrival in Sydney. The consequence is that L could have met Rosenthal much earlier than I had said, perhaps even that first Sunday at Collaroy. (It would be ludicrous to think - as Steele apparently does - that L got the name Trewhella from newspaper research - especially as the dead Trewhella was the CEO of a mining engineering company, and Jaz Trewhella in the novel is a mining engineer.) Was Rosenthal at that afternoon tea-party? I think there is now a strong possibility, even probability, that he was. He may well have been there with his partner, Lovatt Rutledge (and Rosie's wife, Harriett). Was Scott there? I think he probably was, given Peter Oatley's confirmation that the description of the fictional venue for the tea-party tallies exactly with Hinemoa (though there is some doubt about this - Yeend implies otherwise ("I would be looking in Beach Road") - and, indeed, two houses at Collaroy, one in Florence and another in Beach Road, might have been involved). We know, of course, that Robert Moreton Friend was there (and may have been renting the other Beach Road place), and it was almost certainly he who drove L&F back to town (in the open-topped Friends' Austin, garaged at Taylors garage in the Rocks). Hum was obviously there, and maybe Dawdie Friend. Was George Sutherland - almost certainly the model for Jaz Trewhella - there? Probably. Certainly from this occasion and meeting L must have derived the idea that in these new-found acquaintances were the germs of a novel, the "romance" he told Mountsier he intended to try to write in Sydney. (Indeed, the entire dramatis personae of Kangaroo, Struthers apart, must have been there.) What they all did not realise was the sort of person they were being so friendly to and communicative with, and what his spectacular agenda was to be.

31.10.10 (Bondi) : Following on from my last entry...the more I consider the question, the more it seems likely that Rosenthal was at that Sunday afternoon tea party at Collaroy on the day afterLawrence arrived in Sydney. For surely Scott – and indeed the Friends – would not have mentioned to this complete stranger, just arrived from the UK (as they would have viewed it), such an important, and still highly secret and “sensitive” matter as their secret army organisation, without the knowledge and approval – and perhaps encouragement – (derived from actual acquaintanceship) of its authoritarian leader, Rosenthal. Indeed, they surely would not have mentioned it unless they (Rosenthal and Scott in particular) wanted something from him – help with the onward activities of the K&E Alliance (since the end of the main reason for its existence following the defeat in March of the Dooley Labor Government). For no doubt they realised that the secret army infrastructure that they had so successfully organised behind the facade of the K&E had to be kept “in mothballs”, for they would have believed that it would be called upon again when another radical Labor Government came to power, either locally or Federally. Given that L had in mind (as he had told Mountsier a few days earlier) to write “a romance” while in Sydney, and that he had decided perhaps already to use “the diary technique”, and thus would be in need of “material” for that, it would not have taken much in the way of encouragement from him to lead them on (“you did not try to draw us out? I would have said you did” as Callcott tells Somers in the “Jack Slaps Back” chapter) and give them the impression that he could be of help in, probably, writing or even editing their K&E journal (“you are going to write something for us?” as Cooley says to Somers in the “Kangaroo” chapter). No, the later meetings with “Callcott and Trewhella” (the amalgam figures) must surely have been as a consequence of, a) that initial Collaroy meeting, and b) subsequent discussion between Rosenthal and Scott to explore the possibility of much-needed help with the continued existence of the K&E, and thus its shadow secret army infrastructure.

By the way, National Archives have reported back that they could find no “secret army” files in Melbourne (where, apparently, the pre-Canberra files of the SIB are kept, to the extent they have survived) on the K&E. Bad news. However, they have yet to see if the Sydney NAA archives have anything, and promise to report further. (I have made some helpful suggestions to them in this regard, such as contacting MI5 in London to see if they still have reports from their man in Australia, Major Jones). Nevertheless, they have found a reference to a K&E file that, apparently, once existed – ie, it was created (I think, in 1920). So at least we know, “officially” as it were, that they thought the K&E was something to keep tabs on. No word from Martha Rutledge, however, which is most disappointing. Either she is dead, or disinclined to help. (Also I contacted the DHLANA re the coming conference and offered help – in response from a suggestion that I might contribute something – proposing a panel discussion, should they wish to open “that can of worms”. No reply yet.)

 

1.11.10 (Bondi): This little burst of activity, brought on by the looming DHL conference, has sent ferrets scattering in all directions. My chief ferret at the moment (and I hope he won't mind that description) is Robert Whitelaw, and his latest email to me has led to yet another reappraisal of that much-scratched-and-buffeted portmanteau, the "Darroch Thesis". Robert has found the military records of Walter and Robert Friend. Robert enlisted in late 1918, and we know from Yeend that he was one of a group of Kings boys who marched from Parramatta to Victoria Barracks to enlist. They did this after they finished their last year at school. So Robert could not have been any older than 17. Which means he was 21 or 22 in 1922, when he (according to Yeend) met L in Sydney in May 1922. He was not married. So it would seem that he was probably not the "physical" model for Callcott, who was at least 28 or 30 (if not older) and married (though this is probably mostly disguised Scott). It is unlikely this is a portrait of RMF. Yet L must have met someone that fits Callcott's description, at least to provide some element of the Callcott amalgam. I am beginning to wonder if that element could have been RMF's older brother, Walter. Which would make sense, and also make Victoria Walter's wife-to-be, Edna (who would have been about 21 in 1922), Callcott's young and flirtatious future wife, Victoria (Edna, apparently, was thus). Walter was certainly around Collaroy and Thirroul in 1922. More pertinently, he had (according to Edna, interviewed in the mid-1990s by Sandra) a motor-cycle, and he and Edna used to ride down to Thirroul on it (see 15/1/94 et seq). This fits with the first Thirroul manifestation of Callcott (the young couple next door) whom L depicts as wheeling a motor-cycle out of the garage next door. Rank speculation at this stage, but worth a passing thought, and following up. (Geoff Sherington, who knows the archivist at Kings, is making some discreet inquiries - it is very handy being a member of the UUSC.) Also, I should add here, vis-a-vis the speculation re Walter Friend, that Yeend once said (see 13/6/02 above) that I was (re my speculations re George Sutherland) "on the right track...George Sutherland leads straight to Walter Friend". Not, it should be noted, to Robert Moreton Friend. Hmmmm..

2/11/10 (Bondi): Well, well, well. Something new and significant has emerged from this reassessment, or revisiting, of my research notes. This will be a long entry - in fact it deserves a separate article - so be patient. It is, to say the least, an interesting story.

However, it behoves me, because it is such a long and complex tale, to flag its significance up-front. So I will give it a heading..." FROM WHERE DID LAWRENCE GET THE NAME COOLEY?"

This has long been an unanswered, but significant, question. I do not say I know the answer. But I think - and how this develops in the next few days and weeks will be interesting, for I have my ferrets going off in all directions - I am getting warm...perhaps very warm.

But let's start by going back to the departure point. This was an entry in my research diary in May, 2002. Now, the point here is that this was the month in which I switched from the written diary to the online one. And in re-reading the diary this morning, I realised that something was missing, probably due to the dislocation, or change of medium. So I was, this morning, of a mind to put in, as I have done on one or two occasions before, a retrospective entry, for the missing information was, even when it was generated (let alone what has happened to it now), of interest and significance, and should have been recorded.

At that time (as the May 2002 entries show) I had become interested in George Taylor, whose name had been brought to my attention by Andrew (Moore). In point of fact, though I did not note it in my diary at the time (and maybe this was the reason for that omission), I did write a substantial article in the May 2002 issue of Rananim about it. And so that article (which is on our DHLA website) is the departure point, rather than my research notes, for this new and belated (but now considerably updated) entry.

My 2002 Rananim article ("THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE") started with some observations about aviation and Kangaroo (Taylor had been an Australian aviation pioneer). It then went on to quote Andrew's email to me about an article he had just come across by a University of New England lecturer, entitled (provocatively) "The Taylors, Sir Charles Rosenthal and Protofascism in the 1920s".

The author, Elizabeth Teather, had somehow come across a book Taylor had written c. 1915 (The Sequel) in which he had used the name Cooley - twice. Given (as she had observed) that Taylor had rather fascist views, and that he was close to Rosenthal (in a number of ways), could this have been the genesis of the name Cooley in Kangaroo?

In that 2002 article I examined this question, and ended up, inconclusively, with this observation:

[as Taylor was not in Sydney when Lawrence was here] "...it could not have been him who suggested the name Cooley to Lawrence. So who - or what - did? Was this just co-incidence? Surely not. If not, what is the connection?"

And that's where I left it, hanging, as it were. But today (and all this has taken place in the last 24 hours) I decided to see if I could take that unanswered question any further.

Of the two Cooleys mentioned in Taylor's 1915 book, The Sequel, he identifies (see my Rananim article) one as "Stoughton Cooley" - a distinctive name - whom he describes as "a great writer". When I wrote the article in 2002, I googled that name in, and came up with a reference to Henry George, of single-tax fame (cited in the late 1800s as one of the three most important people in America, alongside Twain and Edison). Though there was some link between Henry George and Stoughton Cooley, here was nothing to independently connect that Cooley to Australia, Rosenthal or Kangaroo (or to Lawrence and Henry George, for that matter).

But since then (I speculated today) the internet and Google have advanced further. So I thought it worthwhile this morning to key in Stoughton Cooley again, and see what it turned up.

Bingo!

The first thing that came up was a reference to "the Cooley House" in America. Any reference to architecture and Cooley (cf. Rosenthal) was obviously worth following up. Fortunately, there was a long article on the internet about the Cooley House. The first point that caught my attention is that it was designed (around 1908) by Walter Burley Griffin. So, immediately, there was a possible "Australian connection".

The next thing that clicked in was who the Cooley was who commissioned Walter Burley Griffin to design the Cooley House. This was George Brian Cooley, who was a Mississippi river-boat captain (in the days when running a Mississippi gambling boat was no doubt a profitable business).

(Still no hint of a Lawrence connection - had we been talking about Henry George's mate, Mark Twain - another sometime visitor to Sydney - we would have been closer to the money.)

However, riverboat Captain Cooley had an elder brother, whose name was Stoughton Cooley

Was this the same Stoughton Cooley that Taylor lauded in his (rather fascist) book, The Sequel?

I now think it must be.

This Cooley himself wrote a book (around 1919), The Captain of the Amaryllis, which is set on the Mississippi (the Amaryllis is a riverboat steamer).

(...remember, his brother George owned a Mississippi steamboat)

And, as my 2002 Rananim article pointed out, the probability is that George Taylor knew Stoughton Cooley (cf. the favourable review in The Public of one of Taylor's books, no doubt by courtesy of "that great writer", Stoughton Cooley).

And, being a town-planner, and married to a Sydney architect, Taylor would probably have known Griffin, and perhaps his Cooley House project.

The Cooley House, as it was originally built, and now preserved by the Walter Burley Griffin Society and the Cooley Society in America

Rosenthal, of course, was close to Taylor (see Rananim) and also, probably, to Griffin when the latter was in Sydney (the practice in which Griffin was a partner designed the Holy Trinity Church in Dulwich Hill where Rosenthal was choirmaster - see my 25/10/10 diary entry above)

But there was an even closer connection (as Ruffels pointed out to me last night). The Cooley family in America had, apparently, links with the American Protective League, the daughter of one of whose Chicago co-founders (Frey) was married to a Cooley (Stoughton's brother, I think - or maybe to Stoughton himself).

As well as that, Stoughton was closely linked (via The Public) to President Wilson's Secretary for Labor, Louis Freeland Post (they had co-founded The Public), who, among other things (though he was a "liberal") was involved with the suppression of the "Red Scare" in America, and particularly in New York, in 1919-20 (Post was in charge of the subsequent deportation of foreign-born radicals). We know (from Joan Jensen's excellent book on the American Protective League, The Price of Vigilance) that the "Red Scare" was almost the main "work" the APL was involved in before it was disbanded (or morphed into Hoover's FBI).

(By the way, the second "manifestation" of Cooley in Taylor's The Sequel was probably a portrait of Taylor himself - he seemed to particularly identify with Stoughton Cooley.)

So, where does that leave us re Lawrence and the origin of the name Cooley? A bit closer to the truth, I think.

Certainly we can show that Taylor knew the name Cooley, which he derived (and identified with) from Stoughton Cooley in America (whom he probably met on one of his trips to America).

We can show that Taylor and Rosenthal were close. It is reasonable to deduce that Taylor was part of the K&E and its secret army (he was among the audience at its launch in the Sydney Town Hall in July 1920, and later edited the principal veterans magazine in Sydney). It is even possible that Taylor provided part of the local APL-K&E link back to the APL in America via Stoughton Cooley.

Given that Taylor and his wife were closely involved with architecture, it is a reasonable deduction that Taylor was familiar (again via Stoughton Cooley) with Griffin's Cooley House. If so, then it is highly probable that Rosenthal was, too (ie, Taylor is a sufficient link between the Cooley House and Rosenthal). As well, there is a significant possible link between the K&E in Sydney and the APL in America, also via Taylor and Stoughton Cooley.

Thus we can bring the name Cooley to Sydney and up to Rosenthal's door. But how might Lawrence have learned of this, and the Cooley name-link with Rosenthal - sufficient to provide him with Rosenthal's "fictional" name Cooley in Kangaroo?

We do not know, and it is idle in the absence of further evidence to speculate. There is no hint either in the novel nor in Lawrence's Australian correspondence (nor Frieda's) of any architectural interest (despite the fact that Wyewurk was an architecturally-important building, derived from the Californian bungalow design that the son of its first owner brought back from America).

The truth may not involve architecture at all. The origin of the Cooley name may prove to have been political or even philosophical (via Stoughton Cooley, Frey or Henry George).

However, if I may be excused a parthian shot, we now have a more likely origin than Bruce Steele's speculation that the name Cooley might have been derived from the ex-Premier's name, Dooley.

08.11.10 (Bondi): A correction and an addition. I erred in my last entry saying that someone connected to the American Protective League had married into the Cooley family. I had got this information from Ruffels, but he has since told me it is incorrect. It was not a Cooley or Frey in Savannah Louisiana (or wherever) but in Savannah Illinois. (Still, I think there may have been a Cooley House in Illinois – I must check that). The addition comes from my further investigation about the Cooleys. It seems that Lawrence might have – no, might conceivably have – got the Benjamin of Benjamin Cooley from a US Cooley source, too. As the Cooley family website reveals, the original Cooley in New England (in the 16th century) was called Benjamin Cooley, and since then many Cooleys in America adopted that Christian name. So a Cooley called Benjamin in Lawrence’s novel should not be automatically sheeted home to suspicions about Rosenthal’s reputed Jewishness (as I did).

09.11.10 (Bondi): An exchange of emails yesty with Ruffels seem (as he remarked) to be bringing us to the verge of something...how Lawrence learned of the link between Rosenthal and the Cooley House, and thus where he got the name Cooley for Kangaroo. As I said above, we can show how the Cooley House name might have come to Australia (via George Taylor and/or Walter Burley Griffin). We can see how it might have come up to Rosenthal’s door via either his role as an architect or, more probably, via Taylor (Ruffels has dug up a photo of his wife shaking hands with de Groot). Now I am beginning to suspect it might have cropped up at that Sunday tea-party at Collaroy (where so much else of the novel comes from). If we are right, then somebody at that tea-party probably (may have? possibly? inconceivable as it might seem?) mentioned architecture and the Cooley House. Who that person was I feel we may be on the verge of discovering. As I told Ruffels yesty, I am beginning to suspect that the link has something to do with Roy Irons, the architect of Wyewurk (and whose father was, or had been, part-owner of the garage in the Rocks where the Friends garaged their two Austins – cf. “the garage”, the nickname of the real K&E secret army). (By the way, there were two Cooley Houses, the original one in Savanna Illinois, built by George and Stoughton’s father, Captain Stoughton Cooley, and the second one that Cooley jr commissioned in Monroe Louisiana from Walter Burley Griffin – and built later by his “young Australian architect”. It would, as I remarked to Ruffels yesty, surely too much to hope for that that “young Australian architect” was Roy Irons.)

12.11.10 (Bondi): Well it wasn’t Irons. It was (as Robert Whitelaw has pointed out) a young rising modernist Melbourne architect Henry Pynor, who had been working with Burley Griffin (presumably in Sydney). He supervised the building of the second Cooley House in Monroe, Georgia, around 1925. So we can rule that avenue out. On the other hand, Robert also drew my attention to the ADB entry on George Augustine Taylor, which tells us some interesting things about the man whose statue stands next to the lagoon at Narrabeen. (No, Lawrence did not see it – it was put up many years later.) What is germane to us is his strong connection to many of the things of interest re Lawrence and Kangaroo. He must have been a member of the K&E (he was at its launch in 1920) and closely associated with Rosenthal (but we know that). He was extremely interested in modernist domestic architecture in Australia, and was a firm disciple of WBG, whom he obviously knew personally (he championed the cause of the new capital in Canberra and WBG). Clearly he would have known about Wyewurk and the Californian bungalow, and thus Irons. He would have known about WBG’s at that stage unbuilt Cooley House. The probability is emerging that the link between Lawrence and the name Cooley is via Taylor. But what is that link? Had he been at the Sunday tea-party, we would know the answer. But, according to Ruffels, he was overseas on another trip to America. I wonder what his departure date was? John?

15.11.10 (Bondi): Actually, a Taylor departure date in early 1922, prior to Lawrence’s arrival in Sydney, might, perversely, help the Cooley cause. Let’s assume (as I of course do) that Kangaroo is largely factually-based (cf. the “diary technique”). Then let assume that, as the novel implies, Scott and Rosenthal wanted L “to write something” for them. What could they have had in mind – or, more pertinently – what had Lawrence in mind when he wrote this? There is nothing in the K&E journal that smacks of the sort of thing L might have written, or been expected to write. It’s all very low-key stuff – newsletterish. In fact the sort of stuff Taylor might have written...and perhaps he did. Maybe he was the editor of the K&E. Given his journalistic activities and experience, not to mention his later editorship of Soldier (presumably for Rosenthal and the RSL), that is a strong possibility. (Who else?) So if he had just departed on his overseas trip, the K&E would be lacking an editor. And now Lawrence pops up Sydney, looking for work (why else would he have a letter of introduction to Bert Toy of the Bulletin?). But by the time of his arrival, he had, I think we can now safely assume, given up the idea of journalism in Sydney, and instead was looking for material to write his pseudo-diary “romance”. What better way to do that than to make out to two likely sources of information that he might consider their (presumed) suggestion that he take on the temporarily-vacant post of K&E editor. (There was a publishing company on the same floor as Rosenthal’s rooms in Castlereagh Street – Pinkie Publishing, I think.) OK, that’s all very, very speculative, and may be entirely wrong. But that’s where we are at the moment – in the realms of speculation, trying to find the link from Lawrence to Rosenthal via the Cooley House. I certainly think we can say that the closest journalist – qualified editor – to Rosenthal was George Augustine Taylor. So that’s now another ball in the air.

But there might be something else. Consider…why did Lawrence, not only catch the tram from Manly to the terminus at Narrabeen – a good 20 or more blocks beyond Collaroy, where, we now assume, he had a rendezvous with Hum - but then walk the eight or nine blocks (a good 15-minute trek) to the lagoon beach at North Narrabeen? Why there? Who told him there was even a beach there? I have always assumed it was to look at possible cheap holiday houses to rent (and, indeed, the text backs this up). Even so – why there? Well, there was something else there. It was the precise place where Taylor (in the company of Rosenthal) conducted his gliding experiment (see my May 2003 Rananim article for pictures, etc) back in 1908, or whenever (as the statue of Taylor and its commemorative plaque outside Woolworths presently testify to). Coincidence? One is beginning to wonder.

Robert Whitelaw reports that when in Canberra on the weekend he looked up some books on WBG. There is no doubt that, initially, Taylor and WBG were very closely associated. R says that Taylor met WBG’s arrival boat in 1914 and took him to stay with him at his home in Cremorne. (He was especially interested in WBG’s ideas on domestic architecture.) They fell out around 1916, however, and WBG later moved to Greenwich and later Melbourne. (I wonder where Taylor lived in Cremorne?)

18/11/10 (Bondi): Both Ruffels and Robert Whitelaw have been busy looking into “the Taylor connection”. But, first, R clarifies the Savanna Illinois Cooley matter (and a possible family link to the APL via a Frey). The Frey lady married an Elmer Cooley of Savanna. However, we do not know the Frey/APL link, nor the Cooley connection. So it’s just a possibility that there is a link between the APL and the Cooleys. (And even if there was a link – which is probable – it doesn’t tell us much.) Robert, bless his heart, went to the Mitchell yesty and did quite a bit of research on the Taylors. Points to note: the Taylors lived in Bannerman Street Cremorne, which is one down from Florence and thus a stone’s throw from the Canberra Flats on the corner of Murdoch (which address L had on his letter to Bert Toy of the Bulletin). So we have enhanced propinquity. (Their office, and later residence, was in Loftus Street, just down from the Union Club in Bligh.) However, the real gem in Robert’s research is the date of the Taylors’ departure from Sydney in 1922. It was May 1922! They left on the RMS Ormutz, or whatever, for Europe via Ceylon. It is unlikely their paths could have crossed with L (though, intriguingly, that’s like the same-day arrival/departure in Colombo of Mrs Friend and L). However, it does lend a bit of weight to my (mad?) speculation that Taylor might have had a hand in the editing of the K&E Journal, and his departure might have left a vacancy that L might have been asked to fill (see above). As I remarked to Sandra, there might have been two ghosts at that Sunday afternoon tea-party – Trehwella and George Augustine Taylor. (If we only had a medium who could take us back there.)

As a sidelight, Richard Blair of the Marrickville Historical Society sent me his 1996 article on “DH LAWRENCE AND CAMPERDOWN” (which I had asked for). It’s quite nice and has a few extra facts that I was unaware of, and is illustrated by one of the Forrester post cards (addressed to 206 Australia Street Camperdown, where the Forresters were living) got via Joe Davis. He also sent me the latest issue of his society journal, which has an article on my Rosenthal talk. The author did not think much of my “thesis”: “I find this idea [that Rosenthal is Cooley] strange because Rosenthal had a very warm relationship with the diggers he led…The character ’Kangaroo’ is a hideous, malevolent person…with eyes close together…” I suppose I should send her the famous “reptile” quote…”It was as if the silvery freedom suddenly turned, and showed the scaly back of the reptile, and the horrible paws.”

Oh, yes, one other minor thing. Robert (bless him) tracked down the birth record at the Granville Historical Society of Thomas Roy Irons (the architect of Wyewurk). He was born (at Granville) in 1889. Rather amusingly, the Society lists (on its website presumably) names of people with some ”family history” connection to the suburb. One of the names cited is “Lawrence, DH”. Not something, however, to get very excited about, for under that entry is “Lawson, Henry”. One suspects their connection with Granville might have been via a local bookshop.

24/11/10 Bondi: There is now little doubt that George Augustine Taylor was either editor of the K&E journal, or a substantial contributor to it. His publishing company might well have produced it for Rosenthal (the registered address of the K&E was Rosenthal’s office at Mendes Chambers, 8a Castlereagh Street). Having just gone through the 36 monthly copies of the K&E (January 1921 to December 1923) I can report that it reeks of GAT influence and interests (aviation, wireless, planning, etc). My best guess is that it was a joint effort by Rosenthal and Taylor - as I think The Soldier (contemporary with the K&E Journal) was. R might – probably was – the “titular” editor, but I think Taylor did all the journalistic work. I think he also sold the ads, for it is full of building supplies ads (eg, WS Friend and Co). A major element of its editorial content was an almost obsessive interest in promoting aviation – Taylor’s main interest at this time. It has an article about a visit (no doubt by Rosenthal) to Taylor’s aircraft factory at Mascot, urging its value to, for example, the defence of the Northern Territory (a need Taylor expressed in his 1916 novel, The Sequel). More significantly, in the October 1923 issue is a major article about a visit to Canberra led by Rosenthal, who was then President of the NSW Institute of Architects. In the party were GAT and his wife. (It is probably that GAT wrote this article.)

However, I could not find what I was looking for, which was some sort of editorial break around May 1922 when GAT left for Europe and America, and Lawrence hove into view. Yet I am just as certain that when in Kangaroo Cooley asks Somers “Are you going to write something for us?”, this reflects an actual approach by Rosenthal to Lawrence to contribute in some way to the K&E. There is a well-written editorial in the July issue that includes some literary quotes, and it is conceivable that this might have been contributed by Lawrence, but that is drawing a very long bow. And still no link to the Cooley House (though we are circling closer – for example, Walter Burley Griffin, architect of the Cooley House, started a club in Melbourne while he had an office there: the Henry George (of single-tax fame) Club, the “hero” of Stoughton Cooley in America, and GAT’s “great writer”). Incidentally (though I have noted this before) reading through the K&E there can be little doubt that the K&E Alliance is Lawrence’s Diggers organisation (comparing, for example, his description of “Cooley” organisation in the Diggers chapter (p. 147 Heinemann) with the K&E organisation, most especially the date in both accounts of its starting date – mid-1920). Oh, yes – I should add here that a passage in the earlier “Cooee” chapter mentions that a new branch can be formed by “30 or so” members of one branch going off and forming a new branch. This is precisely what is reported in the March 1921 issue of the K&E when 50-odd members of the Epping branch of the K&E break away to form the new Thornleigh branch.

26.11.10 Bondi: A somewhat seismic email from Robert Whitelaw yesty. He has discovered that there is an end house at Narrabeen, and a rather significant one too. Some days ago in an email I asked the question (of Robert and Ruffels) why did Lawrence go to Narrabeen, and in particular why did he walk the 10 or so blocks from the tram terminus at Narrabeen to the lagoon beach where he and Frieda sat on the sand and watched the “thick legged boys” frolicking nearby. It’s a long walk – 15 or 20 minutes. Previously, I had somewhat glossed over this, treating it merely as a prelude to the more important tea-party at what I had assumed was Collaroy and Hinemoa (I had assumed that Lawrence had been early for an afternoon-tea appointment, had gone to the terminus, and was looking around for possible housing before catching the tram back to Collaroy). I had assumed that the St Columb bungalow, described by Lawrence as “the end house” and later as a house “sideways facing the lagoon”, was Hinemoa – the end house in Florence Street, Collaroy. Peter Oatley’s evidence seemed overwhelming and irrefutable (despite Peter Yeend questioning it...“I would be more interested in Beach Road”). Not to mention Scott’s association with Hinemoa and the Oatley family (see earlier diary entries). But the intrusion of George Augustine Taylor and his aviation experiments in 1909 at Narrabeen (and his general intrusion on the matter via the Cooley House) redirected my – and Robert’s – attention back to Narrabeen. Hence the question – why there? What was, or rather could be, the connection with Taylor? Well, Robert has come up, not only with a possible answer, but something that has the potential to change my whole Darroch Thesis scenario – at least so far and Collaroy and Narrabeen are concerned.

But before that, I re-read the text and, again, I had glossed over something. L&F got off the tram (according to the text), bought some pears and fizzy drink, then walked up what must have been Albert Street to where there was “a ridge of sand” over which they walked to the ocean beach (North Narrabeen). It was there they sat in the sand and peeled their pears (not the lagoon beach). They then, apparently returned to the (unmade) road – Ocean Avenue, and walked along it the 10 or so blocks to the lagoon beach, no doubt looking at houses (as the text says) on the way (Stella Maris, “4-sale”, etc). Then they sat in the sand and watched the boys, etc, as the text says. However, it is what happened next that is now changed. (Again, I had assumed they walked back to the terminus and took the tram back to Collaroy.) But that’s not what the text says. And I will quote it:

Harriet sat up and began dusting the sand from her coat--Lovat did

likewise. Then they rose to be going back to the tram-car. There was a

motor-car standing on the sand of the road near the gate of the end

house. The end house was called St. Columb, and Somers' heart flew to

Cornwall. It was quite a nice little place, standing on a bluff of sand

sideways above the lagoon.

There, according to the text, they encounter Mrs Callcott, who invites them to come to tea in the end house which is, the text says, owned or occupied by her sister. And that, says the text, is where the tea-party and everything else happened. Not a few miles back to Collaroy and Hinemoa, but at Narrabeen. But I did not know what we know now, courtesy of Robert’s excellent research. I had assumed there was no end house in Ocoan Avenue, hence no car, no Mrs Callcott, no sister (“Rose”) and no tea-party (hence no meeting there with Scott or the Friends). But there was an end house!!! It apparently (and Robert is checking further) was (as the text says) standing sideways facing the lagoon. It was owned by a Mr and Mrs Shultz (certainly not a name I have ever come across). And it was a substantial house, with servants. But – and here’s the vital part – it has a crucial Taylor connection. For Taylor apparently stayed there when he was conducting his aviation experiment in 1909 over the sandhills nearby. Not only that, but Mrs Shultz actually flew in one of the flights. (Her maiden name was Emma Brookes, R tells me).

Well, isn’t that something. Precisely what we do not yet know. All sorts of possibilities come to mind. And Robert is delving deeper. But it does strengthen the Taylor perspective, and may give us a reason why L&F amde that long trip from Manly and went that long walk along Ocean Avenue (or Road) that first Sunday at Narrabeen. Watch this space.

--
Bondi (06.02.11): Sandra’s Lost Girl paper has been accepted by the organisers of the DHL conference, which is excellent news. (I proposed, in response to a second call for papers, an uncontroversial paper on Lawrence in Ceylon – which would have rather helped their “post-colonial” theme – but have received no reply yet.) Meanwhile I wrote a long article on the name Cooley and George Augustine Taylor that I also sent off to the conference organisers, ostensibly to show what I was doing to help promote the conference. I have offered the article, as an introductory piece on the conference, to The Australian’s literary supplement (again, no reply yet). However, that is not the reason for this entry, which is to remark (again) on the role co-incidence plays in all this (eg, the tennis party at Turramurra after my first Lawrence article was published at which Sally Oatley told us that her father was Scott’s stepson). I have remarked before on the role of coincidence in Kangaroo. Now it’s happened again. We – Robert Whitelaw and myself - have been trying to track down the origin of the name Cooley and had focussed on Taylor and his flying experiments at Narrabeen in 1909 (which is what I led off my article on). In the course of this research Robert came across (at the RAHS library) a monograph on Taylor written by David Craddock, among other things (he’s ex-president of the Royal Society in NSW) a historian of aviation (he actually reconstructed Taylor’s experiments at Narrabeen a year or so ago). Robert suggested we should meet and have a chat with him, which we are going to do next week. However, in replying to my invitation Craddock said he finds that he has another, quite separate link with our interest in Lawrence, Taylor, etc. His wife is a Southwell! An aunt sold Wyewurk! Her family let Wyewurk to Lawrence! So on Tuesday week we will have more than aviation to talk to Craddock about.

 

BONDI 1.03.11: Robert (Whitelaw - now my right-hand) and I are leaving no stones unturned in our quest to find the clinching evidence that will show what really happened to Lawrence in Sydney and Thirroul. Our interviews with the surviving descendants of the Irons and Southwell families have yielded much valuable "background" material, yet so far nothing conclusive. But we still have some stones left to turn, and I think we both believe that we will soon uncover something reasonably convincing, if not the proverbial "smoking gun". (The key, we now believe, is who was at that Sunday tea-party at Narrabeen - and we think we can get close to answering that vital question before the Sydney DHL conference kicks off in June.) Meanwhile, I have composed an article which I hope to use as the basis of an eventual article. Here, for the diary, is its latest draft. It is provisionally entitled:

THE RIDDLE OF THE SANDS

Outside the post office at Narrabeen stands a monument. It displays, in bas-relief, the face of George Augustine Taylor. What, you may well ask, did George Augustine Taylor do to be accorded the signal honour of being cast in bronze and placed on a plinth outside Narrabeen Post Office?

It turns out that the monument is not so much to him, but to what he did at Narrabeen in 1909. For the dunes of nearby North Narrabeen beach were the site - 101 years ago - of Australia's first heavier-than-air flight. Taylor was our equivalent of the Wright Brothers.
But Taylor was not the most famous person to frolic in the red-tinged sands of Narrabeen...
...and next June, if some current research bears fruit, there might be charabancs of international literary scholars debussing outside the post office to pause and look at the face of George Augustine Taylor, then trudge the six blocks or so down nearby Ocean Avenue to Narrabeen lagoon to pay homage to that more famous face that turned up at Narrabeen 13 years after Taylor first took to the air in his box-kite.

The monument to Taylor outside the post office

The scholars will be descending on Sydney from all parts of the globe for the 12th International DH Lawrence Conference, which will be held, mainly in the Mitchell Library, from June 26 to July 1. It will be the largest gathering of overseas literary scholars ever to assemble on our remote shores.

(Our DHLA president John Lacey and secretary Sandra Darroch will be attending the conference - and Sandra will deliver a paper at the conference on Katherine Mansfield and The Lost Girl.)

Here in Australia we like to think that our native-born novelists and poets are of global standing and repute. Yet few outside Australia have even heard of them. Apart from Patrick White - and him decreasingly so - Australian authors do not figure prominently in the canon of world literature. In fact, to face the truth, hardly, if at all.

Yet DH Lawrence unquestionably does, and the reason for the conclave in Sydney next June is to mark his visit to Australia in May-August 1922, which constitutes a significant episode in his life and works.

Lawrence - to some the most important English writer of the 20th century (not the least, to Patrick White himself) - wrote 10 major novels, and one of them, Kangaroo, (his eighth) is set in Sydney.

(Actually, he co-authored another Australian novel - The Boy in the Bush - and had more than just a finger in a third - Eve in the Land of Nod - though that was left unfinished...a not-inconsiderable outcome from a visit that lasted little over three months.)

At one point in our literary history, Kangaroo was regarded as a major work of Australian literature. Indeed, one professor in the 1940s described it (only half-jokingly) as the only major work of Australian literature. (And a decade or so later, an editor of the Sydney Morning Herald described Kangaroo as the most profound book ever written about our country.)

Even today, when Lawrence is no longer the giant - or ogre - of 20th century literature he once was (Lady Chatterley and all that), Kangaroo remains the best-known, and most-read, international literary work set in Australia...if only because it was written by Lawrence.

Yet Kangaroo is a bit of an embarrassment to Lawrence scholarship. Not for any risqué content, but because of its plot, which is a sharp departure from Lawrence's usual themes of love and relationships, set in what he called "the country of my heart" - around Nottinghamshire, in the English Midlands.

Kangaroo, by contrast, is a polemical novel, and its highly-political plot is about "leadership". (It is categorised by Lawrence scholars as the second of his three "leadership" novels: Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent.)

And it is that leadership theme that most troubles literary scholars today...for, at least in the case of Kangaroo, "leadership" could well be replaced by the German term, "Fuhrerprinzip", and we all know what that refers to.

Yet Kangaroo, notwithstanding accusations from the left, is not really a fascist novel, and it has no Nazi over-or-undertones. Indeed, in the end, it is the right-side-of-politics which fares worse, reflected in the novel's climactic quote:

"It was as if the silvery freedom suddenly turned, and showed the scaly back of the reptile, and the horrible paws."

(note that Lawrence wrote "paws", not "claws" - for he had in mind, not a reptile, but a marsupial).

Kangaroo is, essentially, a novel of its time - and that time is Sydney in the early 1920s. Yet, as a bonus for Australians, it also happens to be the best account we have of local secret army activity between the wars (and one must admit this has fascist implications).

That Kangaroo is autobiographical everyone concedes. Lawrence made no effort to disguise the identity of its two chief characters. He himself he portrayed as Richard Lovatt Somers, the English "author of essays", just arrived by boat from England, Italy, Ceylon and Perth. Somers' wife Harriett is just as obviously Lawrence's own wife, Frieda (nee Baroness Richthofen - cousin of the "Red Baron").

However, it is the identity of the three main Australian characters in the novel - Benjamin Cooley, Jack Callcott and William James Trewhella - that pose the problem. Are they real, or are they fiction? It is here that, if you will excuse the literary terminology, the plot thickens.

And what a lively plot it is too, with lots of very unLawrentian action.

Briefly, Somers/Lawrence arrives in Sydney, and the next day (this we can deduce from the text) goes up to Narrabeen, where he attends an afternoon tea-party. There he encounters two of the novel's three leading Australian characters, Jack Callcott and "Jaz" Trewhella.

Callcott takes a shine to Somers/Lawrence and invites him to meet the leader of a secret organisation of "Diggers" and "Maggies", of which he is a member. This leader is Benjamin Cooley, the novel's principal Australian character, whom everyone calls "Kangaroo" or "Roo" (hence the title of the novel). At a subsequent meeting in Cooley's city office, "Roo" asks Somers/Lawrence to write something for their Diggers organisation.

(My main contribution to all this is the identification of Cooley as the prominent Sydney architect, politician and soldier, Major-General Sir Charles Rosenthal - though current Lawrence scholarship is reluctant to accept this.)

The Bulletin lampoons Rosenthal's King and Empire Alliance - here called "League" (a Digger asks a patriot for a spare coin)

It turns out that Callcott is Cooley's 2-i-C, and, after escorting the English couple down to Thirroul and settling them in a bungalow by the sea (an actual house called "Wyewurk"), he indiscreetly tells Somers/Lawrence about the military force that is being marshalled behind Cooley's Diggers "cover" organisation...the highly-illegal - indeed, treasonous - black-and-white-uniformed "Maggies".

Swearing Somers/Lawrence to strict secrecy ("This is absolutely between ourselves, now, isn't it?") Callcott explains that the Diggers/Maggies are being got ready, secretly, to take over Australia in the event of "a bust up" - i.e., a left-wing, or Communist, revolution . (After one of these one-on-one "briefings", Harriett asks the two men what they had been talking about, and Callcott replies: "Politics and red-hot treason".)

Callcott (the most distinctively Australian character in the novel) invites Somers/Lawrence, under the sacred bond of mateship, to join the organisation (as, perhaps, its ideologue - a "job offer" repeated by Cooley "I hope you are going to write something for us" over lunch in his city chambers).

There are a lot of comings and goings between Thirroul (called "Mullumbimby" in the novel) and Sydney as Somers/Lawrence dithers about joining in. Meanwhile he flirts with the main socialist figure in Sydney...a Scot called Willie Struthers - undoubtedly a portrait of the real-life local union boss, Jock Garden (who later remembered having encountered Lawrence at the Sydney Trades Hall).

When Cooley learns of this, he accuses Somers/Lawrence of treachery, and threatens to kill him (Lawrence originally wrote - in the holograph version - "I could have you killed"). This sparks the most well-known section of the novel - the "Nightmare" chapter, when Lawrence recalls, starkly, his persecution by the military authorities in wartime England.

Yet after that, with the novel little over half-finished, the plot trails off - as if Lawrence had run out of inspiration...or information...except for a highly-coloured account of a "Row in Town", when Callcott's Maggies "count out" Struthers and disrupt a Labor meeting in "Canberra House" (again, clearly, the Trades Hall), and at which, somewhat improbably, Cooley is shot.

The only other "political" action in the second-half of the novel comes in the chapter "Jack Slaps Back" which describes, chillingly, a visit to Thirroul by Jack Callcott when he, too, threatens Somers/Lawrence, accusing him of trying to "draw him out" about the secret army, and extracts a promise from him ("...we want some sort of security that you'll keep quiet, before we let you leave Australia...") that nothing of what he had learned will ever be divulged (which must rank as the greatest broken promise in 20th-century literature).

Did Lawrence make this up? Or could it be a thinly-fictionalised account of what actually happened to him in Sydney and Thirroul between May and August 1922?

That is the Damoclean question that hangs over the forthcoming 12th International DH Lawrence, and one which my colleagues and I in the DH Lawrence Society of Australia are presently trying to resolve. And it is here that George Augustine Taylor, of Narrabeen notoriety, and (improbably) a house in Monroe, Louisiana, USA, might play a decisive role.

During his life, Lawrence showed little interest in buildings. He was not into property. An article about Lawrence and architecture would be hard put to run to more than a couple of sentences. The general index of all his letters contains only four references to architecture, and three of them are about art and architecture.

Therefore it is more than a little odd that Lawrence apparently chose for the name of his main Australian character in Kangaroo - Benjamin Cooley - the name of a house in Monroe, Louisiana.

Lawrence, it is generally recognised, was "realist" novelist, and almost incapable of inventing things. Most of his "fiction" is real-life refashioned, reworked, for a new fictional project.

This is especially true of his characters and names. He seldom, if ever, makes them up. His almost invariable practice was to borrow "real" people and places from actuality, give them a twist - often a distinctive twist - and put them to work in what he was currently working on.

Take Kangaroo. Almost every name in it can be traced back to something that Lawrence saw, heard or read (or something from his past). Callcott was the name of the local estate agent in Thirroul. Trewhella was a name he could have overheard in conversation (see below). The name of the military head of the Maggies - Colonel Ennis - came from Ceylon. And so on.

Similarly with house and place-names. "Mullumbimby" he probably picked up from a local newspaper. (He kept "Woolloomooloo" for The Boy in the Bush). "Murdoch Street" was probably on the envelope of a letter-of-introduction he was given in Perth. "Torestin" - his name for "Wyewurk" (itself a typical Lawrentian name-pun) - also came from Ceylon. And so on.

So where might the name "Benjamin Cooley", the secret-army leader in Kangaroo, have come from?

Bruce Steele, the "authorised" editor of the main edition of Kangaroo currently in print (the Cambridge University Press edition) speculated that it might have come from two possible sources: a play on the name of a former NSW Labor Premier, James Dooley, or perhaps a pun on the word "Coolie" (viz: "In so far as Kangaroo represents the Christian 'love ethic', he could be in neo-Nietzschean terms be considered a 'slave' and so a 'coolie'.").

I think even Steele - who thoroughly demolished what he calls "the Darroch Thesis" in his introduction to the CUP edition - would concede that this Nietzschean reference is drawing a rather long bow. Yet Lawrence must have got the name from somewhere.

The first clue to its possible origin came in an article written in 1992 by a University of New England academic in the apparently unconnected context of town-planning. Elizabeth Kenworthy's article later caught the eye of my colleague, Professor Andrew Moore, who brought it to my attention.

The article was provocatively headed: "The Taylors, Sir Charles Rosenthal and Proto-fascism in the 1920s."

Kenworthy had been doing research into the history of town-planning in NSW, and had focussed on one of the pioneers in this field, our George Augustine Taylor (and his collaborator, his architect-wife Florence). Kenworthy had discovered that Taylor - who was a journalist and cartoonist, as well as an aviator and balloonist - had written a novel in 1915 called The Sequel. And into this novel Taylor had put a character called "Cooley".

She commented:

"It is intriguing that Taylor has a character named "Cooley" in The Sequel and that, so far, researchers have not been able to find a source for this name, although many names used in Kangaroo were borrowed by Lawrence from locations he visited and people he met."

She then pointed out that Taylor was a close friend of Charles Rosenthal (together they formed the first flying association in Australia, and were its joint secretaries). She went on:

"Did someone - maybe Rosenthal - lend Lawrence a copy of The Sequel? Did Lawrence find a copy of his 1915 novel in the library he is known to have used in Thirroul? Or is it a coincidence?"

At the time I first saw this article - around 2002 - I tried, unsuccessfully, to find some connection between Taylor, Cooley and Rosenthal on the one hand, and Lawrence and Kangaroo on the other. It seemed highly improbable that Lawrence had read The Sequel - and Taylor was not even in Australia when Lawrence was here, so he couldn't have had any personal contact with him.

Taylor's 1915 novel, The Sequel (he almost certainly provided the cover illustration)

In The Sequel Taylor actually has two Cooleys, and to one - "Stoughton Cooley" - he attached a footnote calling him "a great writer". In 2002 I had googled up the name "Stoughton Cooley" and found that a Stoughton Cooley had indeed been a writer in America around the turn of the last century.

He was a disciple of Henry George (of "single tax" fame - the American economic visionary, who was once regarded as the most famous person in America after Mark Twain and Edison). Yet Google could find nothing remotely connecting Stoughton Cooley with Australia, or secret armies (even though The Sequel features its own secret army).

However, the Internet and WWW had progressed considerably in the nine years since 2002, and recently - preparing for the DHL conference in June - I googled up "Stoughton Cooley" again.

Bingo!

It now turns out that Stoughton Cooley had a younger brother who was - believe it or not - a riverboat captain on the Mississippi. In those days (1900-1914) being a riverboat captain was, apparently, a profitable business. So Captain George Cooley was well off - well off enough to commission a prominent American architect to design a house for him.

That architect was Walter Burley Griffin - a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, and a pioneer of the Prairie School of architecture in Chicago - and the house he designed for Captain Cooley has since become known as "The Cooley House".

The Cooley House in Monroe Louisiana

Originally designed around 1910 - before Griffin won the international competition to design Australia's capital - the Cooley House was not built until 1925 (supervised then by a young Australian architect, Henry Pynor). It stands today near the banks of the Mississippi as a monument to Walter Burley Griffin, for it was the last building he designed in America, and one of his major surviving works.

In the absence of an alternative provenance - and given Griffin's strong connection with Australia (he spent much of the rest of his professional life in Sydney and Melbourne) - the Cooley House is at least a candidate for the origin of the name Benjamin Cooley...

...especially as it may have been attached by Lawrence to a leading Australian architect (and not the least because the first-name Benjamin is traditional in the Cooley family, who were English non-conformists who had emigrated to New England in the 17th century).

And although Taylor had recently left Sydney for London on one of his regular trips to Europe and America, the suspicion must also be that his use of the name Cooley in The Sequel is somehow connected with Lawrence's use of it in Kangaroo.

(Taylor was closely associated with Griffin, and in fact met him on the wharf when he arrived in Sydney in 1914 - though the two later fell out. Additionally, he had a close relationship with Stoughton Cooley, who, in a Henry George magazine he co-edited in America, gave The Sequel a good review.)

The full story is still being unravelled (and I do not discount that the name Cooley could have come directly from Stoughton Cooley, via Taylor) but the key to all this, we now believe, is what happened to Lawrence the day after he arrived in Sydney.

For next day - 24 hours after he disembarked - Lawrence did something exceedingly odd...indeed, in the context of his current circumstances, something well-nigh incomprehensible.

It must be remembered that Lawrence was not well-off, by any means. His trip to Australia was being partly financed by what remained of a literary prize he had won for his sixth novel, The Lost Girl, plus a few small royalties from earlier works. He had no other income.

After a week in Perth (waiting for the next ship east), and staying there in hotels and guest-houses, he must have been, by the time he arrived in Sydney, down to his last hundred pounds or less . Yet he realised he would have to stay in NSW until more funds arrived from America (where his scant income now largely came from - mainly royalties from his recently-published Women in Love).

Upon arrival, he had apparently been put up in what must have been a fairly-expensive guest-house in Macquarie Street. His almost desperate need then must have been to find longer-term, and cheaper, accommodation (he did not even have the money to book his onward journey to America - he was financially trapped in Sydney).

So, what did this impecunious stranger - he knew, as far as we know, only one Australian east of Perth - do the day after he arrived?

For this we have to rely on the text of Kangaroo. However, we have no reason to doubt that what the novel says Somers and Harriett did that following Sunday morning was what was what Lawrence and Frieda also did (for he could not have made up the events described - they must have been experienced first-hand).

Around 9 or 10 Somers and Harriett catch a leisurely ferry across the Harbour to Manly. Then they wander up the Corso...

...you land on the wharf, and walk up the street, like a bit of Margate with sea-side shops and restaurants, till you come out on a promenade at the end, and there is the wide Pacific rolling in on the yellow sand...

They buy food and eat it "by the sea" (so it must have been around lunchtime by now). Then Harriett/Frieda feels chilled, and they go into a cafe - it's still there! - for a cup of soup (and where Harriett/Frieda loses her scarf).
Then they decide to catch the tram north to distant Narrabeen...

...the tram-car ran for miles along the coast with ragged bush loused over with thousands of small promiscuous bungalows...

None of which, however, the homeless Lawrence shows any interest in, even though Harriett/Frieda "had declared she could not be happy till she had lived beside the Pacific".

Instead, after the long trip to the Narrabeen terminus (by now it must have been close to 2pm), they buy some fizzy drink and some pears and wander up the slope to the ocean beach, where they peel their pears and sit in the sand (for perhaps another half-hour or so...as if they were killing time). Still no overt interest in any accommodation possibilities nearby.

Then they get up and begin the long walk down Ocean Avenue to the lagoon. Only now do they (according to the text) show any interest in house-hunting...

...Harriett absolutely wanted to live by the sea, so they stopped before each bungalow that was to be let furnished.

But Somers/Lawrence wouldn't have any of it. "He would have died rather than have put himself into one of those cottages". (Beggars, one might comment, shouldn't be so choosy.)

In any case, whatever interest the Somers/Lawrences might have had in house-hunting terminated when they got to the end of Ocean Avenue.

The road ended on a salt pool where the sea had ebbed in....Two men in bathing-suits were running over the spit of sand from the lagoon to the surf. Somers and Harriett lay on the sandbank.

...as if they hadn't a worry in the world.

For what must have been some considerable time, Somers/Lawrence lies among the dunes observing the people around him ("they seem to run to leg, these people") while pondering about the difference between Europe and Australia...

...freedom is in the very air, he feels. The sky is open above you, and the air is open around you. Not the old closing-in of Europe. He contrasts "the surfeited dreariness of English Sunday afternoons" with the "raw loose world" he sees about him. But he gives up the struggle of coming to terms with his new surroundings, and probably has a bit of a snooze. Finally...

...Harriet sat up and began dusting the sand from her coat - Lovatt (Somers) did likewise. Then they rose to be going back to the tram-car...

...and the long trip back to town.

Still little effort to address their pressing, almost desperate, need for accommodation. They had wasted, if the text is to be believed, almost the whole of their second day in Sydney indulging in idle sightseeing. For a man as practical as Lawrence, keeping track of every penny he had, this dereliction of economic reality is as bizarre as it is inconceivable.

Clearly, something is wrong with this "fictional" account. It cannot reflect what actually happened...

...for why would Lawrence have come all that way to such a remote place? Why, of all places he could have gone to, did he choose Narrabeen? (Bondi would have been much more convenient, and the nicer beach)...

...and why had they trekked the long distance from the terminus to the lagoon? There were plenty of other more attractive walks in the vicinity, even in godforsaken-Narrabeen.

No - they had come there, to that precise place, at that particular time, for some very specific reason - and that reason had to be concerned with accommodation.

Lawrence must have known that at end of that day-trip was the prospect - almost the assurance - of finding somewhere cheap to stay while he was in Sydney (else he would not have wasted his time going).

So did he? (find some accommodation?)

The text continues...

There was a motor-car standing on the sand of the road near the gate of the end house....It was quite a nice little place, standing on a bluff of sand sideways above the lagoon.

A woman whom they recognise emerges and invites them in for tea. They accept. Inside they find a group of people who are talking about Australia and its problems. At dusk, one of them invites the visitors to go back to the city in his car. The next day this new friend takes them down to Thirroul and settles them in Wyewurk, where they stay for the remainder of their time in Australia - about 12 weeks.

Lawrence working in the front yard of Wyewurk in July 1922 - not on Kangaroo (for it was already on its way to New York), but probably on his translation of a Sicilian short story by Giovanni Verga

It was there, at Thirroul, in Wyewurk, that Lawrence wrote - in the next six weeks, c. May 30 to July 12 - his famous novel of Australia.

(Around 150,000 long-hand words in 45 days ...hardly any time for research, so either he made it all up, or else put down each morning what had happened to him the previous day - the "diary technique" he advocated in a contemporary letter to a friend in London. "Slap down reality," as he advised another writing acquaintance.)

We now believe that it was that afternoon tea-party at Narrabeen - to which Lawrence must have been earlier invited - which not only gave Lawrence the germs of his secret army plot, but most of the Australian characters in the novel - and where, we now believe, he also heard the name "Benjamin Cooley".

So, who could Lawrence have met at the tea-party?

According to the novel, two Australian couples - the Callcotts and the Trewhellas. But we now think that, in reality, it was a much larger gathering than that.

For in 1922 there was indeed an "end house" standing above the lagoon at the end of Ocean Avenue, Narrabeen. (An elevated house - the text says Harriett "looked up" at it.)

It was a two-storey house called "Billabong" and it was owned by the wife of a leading Sydney master-builder, George Shultz. ("My wife owns the end house.") And it was from here, in December 1909, that George Augustine Taylor conducted his first experiments with heavier-than-air flying in Australia (he later kept his plane - a box-kite glider - in the Shultz garage).

Rosenthal, we know, was a regular visitor to this house. Being so heavy, he could not have flown in the glider, but he certainly flew with Taylor when later an engine was added. For Rosenthal was just as much an aviation pioneer as Talyor - and the Shultzes - were. (The Shultzes and Taylor's architect-wife Florence - plus the future Sir Edward Hallstrom - also took to the air over the dunes of Narrabeen.)

Taylor airborne above the dunes at Narrabeen

We also think that it is very likely that Rosenthal was at that Sunday afternoon tea-party in the end house at Narrabeen. It could even have been - though we have no evidence of this - that Walter Burley Griffin, or someone associated with him, was there, too...

...for Griffin had an office in Sydney and was involved in numerous projects there - including his now famous Castlecrag estate - and he, or one of his local staff, may well have had business with a master-builder like Shultz, and mutual interests with a fellow architect like Rosenthal.

We certainly know, as mentioned above, that Lawrence could have derived most of the names of his characters in Kangaroo from who else may have been at that tea-party.

For example, we now think it likely that Rosenthal's partner, Lovatt Rutledge was there - which could have been where Lawrence got the middle name of his leading character - himself - Richard Lovatt Somers. We think Rosenthal's wife, Harriett, was there, too (which is where he may have got Frieda's character-name for the novel).

Earlier in the week Rosenthal had almost certainly attended the funeral in Sydney of a fellow member of the Sydney Liedertafel, Joshua Trewhella, which is almost certainly where Lawrence got the name of his character "Jaz" Trewhella (a borrowing made all-the-more-likely because Lawrence had known in Cornwell another chorister called Trewhella).

Lawrence may well have borrowed Jaz's Christian names - William James - from another guest who was probably present - William John Scott , who was the real-life model of Jack Callcott, Cooley's deputy (and in reality Rosenthal's deputy in the King and Empire Alliance).

But the tea-party may also have been notable for someone who was not there - George Augustine Taylor, who had sailed off to England about a week earlier.

For his name may well have been mentioned, not only because of his flying exploits nearby, but because his departure may have left a gap in Rosenthal's King and Empire Alliance. For Taylor had been, almost certainly, the editor, or publisher, of their magazine, King and Empire.

George Augustine Taylor - town-planner, journalist, aviator and secret army aficionado

Therefore it is quite possible that during that afternoon tea-party the "fictional" writing job mentioned in Kangaroo might in reality have been offered to a cash-strapped visiting writer...

...who already carried in his pocket a letter of introduction to a journalistic contact at the Bulletin (so we can assume he was on the lookout for some writing work).

There are far too many "probablies" and "maybes" and "no-doubts" here. We cannot, at this distance, be sure who was at that tea-party, still less what was said (for that we only have Kangaroo to rely on - though we now think that is pretty good evidence).

However, if we can show, with some degree of credibility, that Lawrence derived the name he gave Rosenthal - Benjamin Cooley - from that Sunday afternoon gathering at Narrabeen, then much of what is presently presumption might gell into something closer to actuality.

And that is what our current research is hoping to achieve.

 

Bondi (06.04.11): The Narrabeen “end house” – the Schultz House - scenario is firming up (but is as yet by no means a certainty). Following Robert’s “discovery” that there was indeed an “end house” opposite the lagoon at Narrabeen, we have interviewed David Craddock (re George Augustine Taylor’s presence and activities at North Narrabeen) and now relatives of both Taylor and the Schultzes. Robert went down to Cooma on Saturday to interview a granddaughter of GAT and his wife Florence, and yesterday we went to Clifton Gardens to interview Michael Schultz, the grandson of Charles and Emma Schultz, who built and owned “Billabong”, the “end house”. Our aim was to see if we could connect what Lawrence says in Kangaroo about “his” end house, and the Schultz House. (The Cooma GAT relative had some useful snapshots of the lagoon, but little else).

Firstly, we got some useful pictures and other information about the Schultz house (including a nice watercolour of it by GAT). It occupied the whole block bounded by the lagoon, Ocean Street, Lagoon street (its actual address-frontage), and Malcolm Street (on the Ocean street corner of which was “Tres Bon” – mentioned by Lawrence in K). It seems it was almost an estate – certainly containing the most substantial (two-storey) house for miles around. Michael could add nothing from his own knowledge to help us connect the novel to the house (though he did remember the house and property, which he visited as a child). Otherwise he was most helpful, and had a small pile of photos and other documents that he thought (following Robert’s approach) might be of interest. Crucially, he had a picture of the house itself (and its surrounds), and he described its interior and aspects. He confirmed it had a large lounge-room with smaller rooms and verandahs off it (confirming L’s description – though Wyewurk would fit it just as well). He told us about his family, who must have been very well off, owning considerable property elsewhere in Sydney. Master builder Charles Schultz was clearly a man of substance and repute. Michael confirmed that it was a place – a weekender – that others flocked to. It had, for example, something at the rear of the property that could have been an extra cottage, and later there was certainly a separate flat attached to the main house. Clearly, it could have afforded accommodation for friends and acquaintances (even casual travellers). Most crucially of all, he had a reproduction of a photo of Rosenthal and Taylor in the grounds (with a Major McLeod). It clearly dated from around - no, probably before - WW1.

So, what can we draw from all this? It is now quite feasible that this is L’s “end house” (but see caveat below). Indeed, had we not previously identified L’s “end house” as Hinemoa in Collaroy, we would have said it was certainly the “end house” in K. It fits the “looked up” quote in K (as Hinemoa does not). It is the end house next to where we know L went that first Sunday. Significantly, it is unquestionably “sideways facing the lagoon” (we had to stretch Hinemoa to be “facing the lagoon”). We can place Rosenthal there, if not on that Sunday, then as a regular visitor (so he could have been there that Sunday). It was owned by Emma Schultz (“my sister has the end house”), and that does not apply to Hinemoa. It was a house associated with building and architecture (giving us a possible – remote - explanation for WBG’s Cooley House connection). It is conceivable – just – that an architect named “Louatt” was there (which L could have made into Lovatt, though that is drawing a very long bow). However – before I get on to the caveats – its main claim to being L’s “end house” is that it provides a reason why L made his otherwise inexplicable trip – trek - that Sunday to North Narrabeen. It now looks as though he went in order to go to that house, either for reasons of possible accommodation, or to see Rosenthal re a K&E writing job (a possibility that is also firming in our minds). Hinemoa lacks all this. (Robert has also found a possible link between the Schultz house and the houses in St Cloumb in Cornwall.)

But, worringly, it goes against the Yeend material (and we must concede that Yeend knows the truth – for he had read RMF’s crucial Kings School memoir). In our exchange of letters, Yeend seemed to be quite certain that the meeting with the Friends took place in Collaroy – indeed, specifically in Beach Road, Collaroy. (Though it is conceivable that Yeend could have mixed Beach Road up with Ocean Street Narrabeen.) Just as crucially (though not fatally) we have no known Friend connection with the Schultz house – except that WS Friend & Co was a hardware supplier that builder Schultz would certainly had business with (and which advertised each month in GAT's journal).

But there is no explanation – yet – of the other “clues” L drops – the Cornish connection, the Trewhella relationships (married his friends widow, etc – while this could be true (via the Oatley connection) of Hinemoa), the “settles” round the (bay) windows, the framed picture, etc, etc. Also we have nothing to place Gerald Hum there or thereabouts (Ruffels found that the Hums stayed in the Collaroy basin area on school holidays – just a stone’s throw from Hinemoa). Hum is our only Cornish connection (but now see below*) at the moment (Mrs Delprat remembers her cousin Hum being called “a typical Cornishman”). The only person we know of who could have arranged a visit by Lawrence to the northern beaches area Collaroy or Narrabeen is his shipmate Hum (and his is the only Sydney name in L’s address book). Problems.

Nevertheless, I feel we are homing in on the truth. Robert is pursuing the various lines of research (did Emma Schultz have a sister? Was she well-off? Why did she part-own other Schultz property? etc). (LATE NEWS – Michael Schultz reports that Emma had a sister – Robert is chasing this up.)

Meanwhile some MI5 files were released in London earlier this week. We are trying to find out if there might be available MI5 files on Major H Jones which might also be accessible (for he would have told his MI5 superiors in London what was going on in 1920-22 - as the US consult Norton did to Washington).

So the quest continues.

*of course, the more likely incident that touched off in Lawrence a memory of Cornwell was his hearing the name "Trewhella" at that afternoon tea-party. As Bruce Steele pointed out in his CUP edition of Kangaroo, a few days before L arrived in sydney a funeral was held for Joshua Trewhella, the manager of Cameron Sutherland, a firm of engineers who repaired mining machinery. Trewhella (who lived in Neutral Bay) was a member of the Sydney Liedertafel, or choir society - a group that Rosental was almost certainly a fellow member of, and whose funeral he was most likely to have attended. Our speculation is that this funeral and the name Trewhella was mentioned at the tea-party - no doubt by Rosenthal (or, if he was also present, "Walter Friend's good friend George Sutherland", whom Yeend urged me to connect to the Friend family and Kangaroo). Trewhella was a name L would surely have recalled from his time in Cornwall, for the nearest village to where he was staying in Higher Tregarthen was Zennor, whose church commemorated a legendary mermaid who, so myth went, had lured a local choirester, Mathew Trewella to his watery death because she was entranced by his singing. (Zennor in Lawrence's transformation process could well have become St Columb Major.) So we don't really need Hum's Cornish typicality (however, we still need his "stuggy" appearance for the fictional Trewhella).

BONDI - 14.06.11:

THE MAN WHO WAS JACK CALLCOTT
(AND JACK STRANGEWAYS)

Until recently, we only had a couple of very poor images of Jack Scott - the man who was Jack Callcott in Kangaroo (and Jack Strangeways in the second version of Lady Chatterley's Lover).

Now my colleague and fellow-researcher John Ruffels has found two more, and much better, photographs (see above).

The one on the right was published in the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) on December 18, 1918.

It shows Scott in military uniform and it accompanied a report of him being awarded a DSO (Distinguished Service Order) during the campaign in France.

The one on the left, held in the archives of the Australian War Memorial, dates from some time earlier, and shows Scott outside a dugout on the Western Front in France.

Thus we now have two photographs of Scott about four years before he encountered Lawrence in Sydney in May 1922, as well as (see below) one taken about 15 years later in the 1930s, and an even later one in the 1940s.

It is particularly useful to have these earlier ones, as they show Scott closer to as he is depicted in Lawrence's portrayal of him in Kangaroo (and four years later in John Thomas and Lady Jane).

There is no doubt that he was handsome, and well deserved his reputation of being "a lady's man". Indeed, the second snap shows a remarkable visage, with a particularly striking set of eyes.

(Also note his big ears - averred to in John Thomas and Lady Jane as his "over-large posterior" - also see below.)
Oddly, SMH caption referred to him as "Captain William Rendell Scott", omitting his second name, John, by which he was always known (in the form "Jack").

Rendell was a Street family name - his mother was a Street. (Scott's third wife was also, by marriage, a Street, one of Australia's most prominent politico/legal families.)

Both of Scott's brothers were also officers in WW1. His youngest brothers Leigh won the Military Cross, and his second brother Humphrey was one of the stars of the AIF, becoming one of the youngest battalion commanders in the war, before being killed in action.

Scott, who was badly shell-shocked in France (which may have rendered him impotent - a matter averred to in both Kangaroo and John Thomas and Lady Jane), was Rosenthal's 2-i-c during the repatriation of the Australian troops back to Australia in 1918-19.

It was no doubt the organising skills he showed then that led to Rosenthal choosing him as his 2-i-c in the King and Empire Alliance, and thus Cooley's deputy in Kangaroo…the sinister Jack Callcott.

(I append a copy of the feature on Scott's ears that we published in Rananim 5/3/1997.)

BONDI (17.6.11): The key person in all this, I am beginning to think, is Jaz. Hitherto I have concentrated on Jack Callcott and Ben Cooley. Yet the clue to it all may be the true identity of Jaz. (Of course, I have touched on this before. But now I am reassessing the evidence.) This new appraisal was inspired by re-reading (for the purpose of fashioning a map of “Lawrence’s Sydney” for the DHL conference) the “Sydney” parts of K. In tracing L’s Sydney footsteps, I happened upon L’s last few days in Australia, which obviously entailed another trip up to Sydney and an overnight stay somewhere in the city or suburbs prior to embarking for NZ and America. I noted L’s final remarks, as his ship sailed down the Harbour and out the Heads (wrongly excised from the CUP edition). He recalls his trip to Narrabeen, where he first met Jaz. (Not, he implies, Jack Callcott.) This reference, I now believe, adds some primacy to the character Jaz and whom he might be a portrait of. After all, Jaz if anything plays a larger (though less gaudy) role in the novel than Jack Callcott (whom, we assume, is based on an amalgam of Jack Scott and Robert Moreton Friend). So let’s turn the spotlight on Jaz – William James Trewhella - and see what we can make of him and whom he might in reality be based on.

Like everything in K, we are faced with the dilemma of untangling Lawrence’s disguise techniques. We have to try to strip away what is disguise (or deconstruct the amalgam) and what might be real. It might help in this endeavour if, instead following Jaz from Narrabeen through the text, we start at the other end of the novel – L’s departure – and read backwards – for his various disguise techniques tend to slip and the novel progresses.

Jaz is either married or associated with a female who plays a prominent role in L’s association with local Australians. Somers is seen off at the wharf (broken streamers, no less) by two women (no men, note – probably because of either alienation or work – more likely the latter). Moreover, he had clearly stayed with someone the previous night, and he implies (because of the ferry reference) that this was north of the Harbour (indeed, Jaz is always portrayed as living north of the Harbour). One of these women is very probably Jaz’s wife, for the people he stayed with would be the most likely to see them off. The “other” female could be anyone – Mrs Hum, Mrs Forrester or Maudie Friend – I would bet on Mrs Hum. (But I don’t think L&F stayed with the Hums at Chatswood, for that is not a likely destination of a ferry-ride across the Harbour.)

We have good reason to believe that Jaz is also an amalgam. His outward guise is almost certainly Gerald Hum (Cornish*, stuggy, etc). (By the way, it could not have been Hum who drove L&F back to Sydney from Narrabeen – for he would have had to remain with his family, either at a holiday cottage in Narrabeen or nearby, or at his home in Chatswood. No, that car back was almost certainly driven by a Friend – for the Friends garaged their cars at Taylor’s garage in the Rocks, and L says the car had to be dropped off.) So who was “the other half” of Jaz?

(* though the Trewhella name – derived from Joshua Trewhella’s Wednesday funeral - is sufficient for a “Cornish connection”)

Note that on that trip back, someone had to be dropped off in North Sydney, before the vehicular ferry across the Harbour. I had thought this was Scott, but I am now convinced L did not meet Scott until a later trip up to Sydney – at Mosman Bay. The “drop-off” had to have been Jaz or/and his wife. So, we can speculate, whoever Jaz and his wife were, they lived north of the Harbour, most likely within walking distance of Mosman Wharf, which implies the Neutral Bay/Cremorne area. (The complication here is that Jack Scott lived in Wycombe Road Neutral Bay. and L certainly went there – cf. the “tubtop” lookout at 112.)

Jaz takes L around Sydney and to the Trades Hall (and to Willie Struthers/Jock Garden). L implies he is a union official (most unlikely) – this on top of his “coal and wood merchant” and mining engineer personas. He is clearly a member of the secret army, and a very prominent one. (So he should have known Rosenthal). And there is the initial connection with “the end house” at Narrabeen.

Then there is that later visit to Neutral Bay, where L clearly catches the ferry to Cremorne, the tram up to Florence street, and then apparently walks to where Jack/Jaz lives. I had always assumed this was Scott’s flat at 112 Wycombe Road, but it is more likely to be where Jaz lived, probably nearby.

Finally, still working backwards, we come to the first-Sunday trip up to Narrabeen, and the tea-party in “the end house”, where L first encounters “Jaz”.

Here things must be heavily disguised. According to the text, Jaz is young, recently married, with a wife better off than he is, and has some sort of eye complaint. There also seems some sort of mix-up in L’s description of Jaz’s family arrangements (indeed, Somers confesses he can’t follow it all). Some inter-marrying is hinted at.

There is also little doubt that Jaz is connected with Thirroul and the coal industry there. This, of course, points to George Sutherland and his firm of engineers (and suppliers/maintainers of mining machinery) and Joshua Trewhella, the late general manager of Cameron Sutherland. And Yeend definitely pointed me in the direction of Sutherland (“Walter’s good friend”).

So, what is real, what disguise, and what “fiction”?

Here we must keep Occam’s Razor in mind, and not multiply characters unnecessarily. Is Jaz someone we already know, or someone yet to be identified? The latter seems unlikely. Sutherland was not married in 1922, so it seems unlikely that he is Jaz (despite the Thirroul mining connections – and the Trewhella name associated with his company).

Indeed, my latest information from Mike Sutherland seems to rule out any involvement by George Sutherland. He was still at uni, doing engineering, in 1922 (third year), and was only a lad. He cannot be Jaz. Yeend must be referring to a later connection with Walter Friend.

Then is Jaz a Friend? The car/garage reference would argue so. Could he be Robert Moreton Friend (the bits not attached to Jack Callcott)? That is the best-looking fit at the moment.

Clearly, his address in Sydney in 1922 is crucial. I will look into this further.

Meanwhile, the full program for the DHL conference has come out. Amazingly, no mention of Kangaroo or Lawrence’ time in NSW. One wonders why they have bothered to come to Australia at all. (Perversely, however, it might be taken as a back-handed compliment to the dreaded Darroch Thesis – though I can hardly take comfort from that.)

 

BONDI 20.06.11: This is probably an item for Rananim, too. But I’ll start it as a diary entry. It was sparked by something that John Ruffels (bless him!) sent me, the result of his ongoing research into Lawrence references in Australian newspapers going back to 1922 and beyond. What he sent was a 1950 review in The Argus in Melbourne of the then recently-published 1950 Heinemann edition of Kangaroo, with that so-influential introduction by Richard Aldington. The Argus’s 1950 review (by Geoff Hutton – maybe a misprint for the litterateur Geoff Dutton?) praised the novel, but highlighted Aldington’s introduction’s comment that, although it was written as the product of L’s daily experiences in NSW, its secret army plot was, on the other hand, entirely fictional, being merely some possible reflection of L’s time in Italy and his experience there of Italian fascism. (The review mentioned the 1930-32 New Guard, but only to dismiss any connection between Eric Campbell’s private-army and L’s secret army of Diggers and Maggies.) My purpose in commenting on this now is that it indicates again how much even knowledgeable Australians – who were aware, unlike overseas critics, of Campbell’s New Guard – relied on Aldington’s interpretation and comments on the novel. Now, I have written something about this, both in a diary entry in 1992 (see above), and more extensively in Rananim 3/2 (June 1995). This was sparked by a letter my colleague Professor Andrew Moore had recently (in 1995) come across in the Adrian Lawlor papers in the Victorian State Library. Lawlor, a minor literary figure and artist in Melbourne, is mentioned in Aldington’s Kangaroo introduction as “an Australian friend Mr Adrian Lawlor” who, although he had never been to coast south of Sydney, had said that “after reading Lawrence, God! I’ve been there”. Professor Moore could not copy the letter, but told me that it was about Kangaroo, so I was anxious to read it myself to see what Lawlor and Aldington might have discussed. The Lawlor letter proved to be of considerable significance, and indeed showed how Aldington no doubt arrived at his conclusion that the secret army plot (what he called in his correspondence with Lawlor “the spy episode” – a reference to Jack Callcott’s accusation that Somers had been spying on his Diggers organisation) was invented by Lawrence, or else imported from Italy. (Which is, by the way, the current anti-Darroch-Thesis interpretation.) Aldington was referred to Lawlor as some sort of local expert by a mutual acquaintance, Alister Kershaw, an Australian expat who was living in France (and who later became Aldington’s literary executor). Apparently Aldington had spoken to Kershaw in 1948 when he was preparing to write his major post-war biography of Lawrence A Portrait of a Genius But... and the subsequent Heinemann introductions. It seems that Kershaw had passed on Aldington’s queries to his friend Adrian Lawlor in Melbourne, who had responded with some information. Aldington then wrote to Lawlor himself:

Dear Adrian Lawlor

Alister sent me your interesting notes on DHL, and I write to ask if you will allow me to quote from them, making all due acknowledgement. You will see at once the importance of Australian confirmation of DHL’s insight and even prophetic vision...

Prophetic? That was probably a reference to Lawlor’s “notes”, which mentioned the 1930-32 New Guard (see text below). Aldington in his letter to Lawlor was critical of a pre-war Lawrence biography written by Hugh Kingsmill which had dismissed Kangaroo as “invented twaddle”. Aldington apparently had a special interest in “the spy episode” (ie, the novel’s secret army plot), for he went on:

Then the “spy” episode. Oddly enough, that followed him about everywhere. Even on the island of Port Cros in 1928 [where Lawrence and Frieda were staying with the Aldingtons] we were visited by three staff officers from Toulon who were most pertinacious in enquiries about Mr Lawrence and in wanting to see him...If that “spy” scene between Somers and Jack is invented [in the “Jack slaps Back” chapter], I should be surprised. There is real rage in it, which I don’t think Lorenzo could have worked up over an imaginary incident....I have long thought that Lawrence’s departure from Australia was precipitated by that “spy” episode.

Aldington’s interest in “the spy episode” was neither casual, nor recent. Two years earlier Aldington (researching his biography) had asked Frieda about it. We do not have his letter, but we have Frieda’s reply, dated 20/11/48:

...I think Cooley was a mixture of Dr Eder and Kot[ielansky] – no Lorenzo never went to political meetings – Jack and Victoria something like them were on the boat – No the spy story did not happen. The only paper Lawrence read was the Sydney Bulletin.

So, two years after Frieda had categorically stated that the “spy stary” was fiction, Aldington still believed otherwise, and had “long thought” so. Moreover, Aldington was still pursuing the matter of “the spy episode” even after he read Lawlor’s “notes” sent to Kershaw. In those “notes” Lawlor was equally categorical that “the spy episode” was invented. Fortunately, we now have those “notes” and can see where the “no factual basis” conclusion Aldington eventually settled on came from. The “notes” come in the letter from Lawlor to Kershaw, dated 30/12/48:

[Lawlor, who was no historian himself, had consulted two people he thought might know about such matters – the historian Brian Fitzpatrick and an ABC producer called Norman Robb – and he outlined what they had told him about the New Guard, concluding that there was nothing in its reality of any relevance to Kangaroo. He then went on]...The coincidental resemblances between the “action” of Kangaroo and that of the New Guard shennanikans [is] merely another proof of the baffling prescience of Genius...Indeed, the only point in my retailing all this deracinated gibble-gabble about the New Guards and all that is that L. anticipated, in Kangaroo, and in 1922, what did come to happen in 1930.

Despite his previous and persistent suspicions that there was more to “the spy episode” than Lawrentian invention, Aldington eventually took Lawlor’s – and his Australian contacts’ – assurances, and dismissed from his mind, and his Kangaroo Introduction, (and his biography of Lawrence) any possibility that Lawrence had run across a real secret army in Sydney in 1922, and that there was any “reality” in the politics in the novel. Yet why was he so persistent? Very few other literary critics or biographers have been so reluctant to accept the plot of Kangaroo as anything other than invention. Did he know – or suspect – something that others did not know? Consider the sentence in his letter to Lawlor “....I have long thought that Lawrence’s departure from Australia was precipitated by that 'spy' episode”. Why should Aldington have “long thought” that? No other literary critic or Lawrence biographer has thought that, even for a passing moment – indeed, quite the contrary. So where could Aldington have got the impression, indeed belief, that “the spy episode” – the secret army plot – was real enough to oblige Lawrence to leave Australia, hurriedly? He could have got it from only two sources – Lawrence or Frieda. Aldington was present when the three staff officers from Toulon visited Port Cros in 1928, asking “pertinacious” questions, after which Lawrence fled the island. Might Lawrence have said something then that linked that incident to his hurried departure from Australia?* It would certainly explain Aldington’s persistence about “the spy episode”. In retrospect, one wonders what Aldington might have written had he had the advantage of reading a year later in 1951 Witter Bynner’s memoir of Lawrence, Journey with Genius, an account of a trip the American poet made with Lawrence and Frieda to Mexico in 1923, just after Kangaroo was published. In it Bynner recounts an incident when he was staying with Lawrence in a Mexican village and someone apparently tried to break into Lawrence’s room at night. Lawrence was clearly terrified, and came running to the rest of the party, crying: “They’ve come!” Maybe Lawrence was remembering Jack Callcott’s threat in “the spy episode” in Kangaroo...

...we want some sort of security that you’ll keep quiet, before we let you leave Australia.

Perhaps the “we” in Jack Callcott’s sinister threat may have been the “they” Lawrence was so afraid of in Mexico, and probably in Port Cros too.

(*And it may indeed have had to be a hurried departure, for Lawrence might have found himself in considerable physical peril if he had still been within reach of Callcott's Maggie squads when a copy of Kangaroo reached Australia, following its publication in London and New York in September 1923. Lawrence may well have remembered what Cooley says to Somers in Kangaroo: "I could have you killed.")

BLACKHEATH - 26.06.11: No, no, no. It’s not Jaz who is the key to it all, but Victoria Callcott. (But maybe Jaz too.) I suddenly realised this on the way up to our place at Blackheath this morning (hence the bucolic dateline). Sandra and I were discussing “the end house” at Narrabeen and whom might have been there at afternoon tea that last Sunday in May (the 28th). In my previous entry, written yesty, I had got L&F from the Malwa up to Narrabeen (at the invitation or urging of Hum). The question we were discussing was whose sister (as the text says) owned “the end house” that was “sideways facing the lagoon”? We wondered if this could have been a reference to Mrs Shultz’s sister (presumably nee Brooks, whom Robert Whitelaw is currently trying to trace – the house, “Billabong”, being in her name). I in turn wondered if Lillian Hum had a sister (maybe Ruffels and his famous cardboard computer might be able to tell us). Sandra then remarked that we must be careful to factor in L’s Perth experiences, for that was (she added) where L got the superficial details for Victoria Callcott - from the newly-married Maudie Cohen, wife of Eustace, whom L had talked to on the verandah of Leithdale in Darlington (see diary entry 29/8/94 above, where I first raised the Maudie/Dawdie parallel). Suddenly, it struck me…Maudie? Isn’t there some echo of that name in Sydney or Thirroul? Yes! Of course – Dawdie Friend! Now, to appreciate how L could have “transposed” (see my various Rananim articles on L’s transposition techniques, eg Rananim 5/2) Maudie [Cohen] to Victoria [Callcott] via Dawdie [Friend] it must be understood (as I point out in those articles) that L was almost incapable of inventing things (as Lawrence’s childhood friend, George Neville, had pointed out in his memoir of L, The Betrayal). Habitually, he would deploy a complex associative process to come up with a fictional place or character name that he needed for his “fiction”. Thus the real name Dawdie could have reminded him of the similar-sounding name Maudie, and thus Maudie Cohen. And so he could have transposed Maudie’s various characteristics to Dawdie, thus disguising Dawdie’s real details. Which is why (as Sandra discovered in Perth) Victoria Callcott resembles Maudie Cohen - yet is (we now believe) actually Dawdie Friend. Once this is accepted, a lot of things tend to fall into place. Keeping in mind my new Occam’s Razor stricture (not multiplying people L could have used in Kangaroo more than those we already know he met), everything which Victoria Callcott does in the novel (with some discrete exceptions) could have been in fact done by Dawdie Friend. It was probably she who took Lawrence and Frieda down to Thirroul the next day (Monday, May 29). It was she who went to the local house agent, Mrs Callcott, and got the key for Wyewurk (which she would have known had just become vacant, as her aunt had owned the house opposite, Wyuna). It was she who lived nearby (in the Friend Thirroul “compound”) and who had a younger brother (the lad of 17 mentioned in chapter v), and whose father (the Friend patriarch WS Friend) was a keen fisherman. As the eldest, she was “the mother of the family” mentioned in chapter ii, “Neighbours”. And it was she who must have seen the Lawrences off (with Lillian Hum) at the wharf on August 11 when they left on the Tahiti. And it was no doubt she who was the recipient of Frieda’s presentation copy of Not I But the Wind mentioned by the local barber to Tom Fitzgerald in 1952 (see “The Beard of the Prophet” article in Nation). It may even be that we do not need Robert Moreton Friend. The Kings School memoir (see above) may merely have been his reminiscence of what his older sister got up to in between May and August 1922 (and thus gets rid of the problems of linking RMF to the character Jack Callcott…age, marital status, job, etc). (Occam’s Razor again.) Also she was a member of the Harbour Lights Guild. All very speculative, of course. However, it has something important going for it. When I was still on good terms with the Friend family, and being greatly assisted by Fiona Friend (whom we had employed – she provided me with the Friend “family tree”) she reported that she had mentioned to her father Colin Friend my speculation that Dawdie Friend might have provided some of the ingredients for Victoria Callcott in Kangaroo. Fiona told me (and I diarised this on 21/9/93) that her father told her that Dawdie might indeed be “the lady you are looking for”. Specifically, I remember Fiona telling me that she said to her father words to the effect: “Could she really have been involved with that?” and he father replying “Yes she could.”

BONDI 27.06.11: Ruffels’ cardboard computer tells me this morning that Lillian Hum’s maiden name was Reynolds (not, alas, Brooks). However, he has also come up with what could be a gem. His newspaper research had revealed that Mrs Shutlz organised a function at the Queen Victoria Club in Sydney in 1921 which had a “Mrs Cooley” among its list of attendees. He adds that she may have been the wife of a Dr Cooley who had some connection with the St George Hospital in Hurstville. (I think I have mentioned this Cooley before.) Moreover, they had a son, Max, who was probably a school age in 1922, and thus would have been on his school holidays that May weekend. Narrabeen is a long way from Hurstville, but the fact that this Mrs Cooley might have known Mrs Shultz of Narrabeen is a promising lead. (We had the visiting DHLNA president Nancy Paxton and her husband to lunch at Bondi yesty – the DHL conference opens on Wednesday. No talk of Kangaroo or the Darroch Thesis, but a pleasant occasion. Robert Whitelaw also came, and an ailing John Lacey rang to apologise for his absence, and spoke to Nancy). Also my letter to the SMH protesting about Joe Davis’s description in Friday’s letters page of Kangaroo as “whacko” was published this morning. (It usefully gave the conference a bit of publicity, as I tied JD Pringle’s description of K was being one of the two “most profound books ever written about Australia” to the opening of the conference at the State Library this week.)

 

BONDI 5/8/11: The DHL Sydney Iinternational conference has come and gone, and, despite my caveats and non-attendance (so I would not be a disruptive or negative element), it must be deemed a success from our DHLA point-of-view. (Though the fact that John Lacey was too ill to attend was a bit of a downer.) The high point for us was Sandra’s Katherine Mansfield/The Lost Girl paper, which went down well (and which she has sent to the DHLR). Also we organised a post-conference tour up to Narrabeen for delegates (about 40 came), led by Sandra and Robert Whitelaw, and that was a success, too. Added to that was our pleasant and amicable Bondi balcony lunch for the DHLNA’s Nancy Paxton who helped (with David Game) organise the event. So, apart from the non-mention of Lawrence in Australia, the Darroch Thesis, and Kangaroo, and similar germane topics, it all went well – though one does wonder why they bothered to come all this way and omit to discuss such things. (However, that very omission spoke volumes.) Nevertheless, the DT did surface, briefly, when Melbourne former DHLA member John Lowe delivered a paper on whom Cooley/Kangaroo might have been based on. He firmly rejected (Sandra, who attended, told me) any suggestion that Rosenthal was the model and instead came up with a mix of Jewish “ingredients” including the usual suspects (Kot and Dr Eder) and a new one, Benjamin Disraeli, somehow linking the Derbyshire Bentincks, who helped Dizzy to power, and Lawrence. I am glad I was not there to bridle at such tosh. Later, post-conference, I decided to send a copy of my 1988 Quadrant article (“The Man Who was Kangaroo”) to him to show how wrong he was, especially about Cooley’s “Jewishness”. He was not a bit abashed, and said he had read the article in preparation for his paper! There are none so blind as those who will not see the obvious when it is put in front of their very eyes. However, very few others will have seen that Quadrant article, so for the sake of completeness, I have appended the text below*. Since it was published, of course, we have placed Rosenthal physically at the “end house” at North Narrabeen, which Lawrence mentions specifically in Kangaroo. (We have a photo of Rosenthal in the garden!) All we need now is a snap of him shaking hands with Lawrence as afternoon tea is served (I joke!). Meanwhile Robert is tracing Mrs Schultz’s sister (who seems to have a husband who might be of interest to us.)

Quadrant article on "The Man Who was Kanagerro". please click HERE.

 

CLEVELAND STREET 5/8/11: (I am writing this in the office.) Something very exciting has happened. As I was polishing my previous diary entry, ready to be put up (on the DHL conference, etc), came an email from Mike Sutherland, and a rather momentous one at that. Potentially it could herald the end or culmination of my 40-year quest. (Actually it was from his aunt, Janet Walker, onpassing it to me.) It is so important, it is worth quoting at length.

Michael,

I spoke with Jim Friend this morning. He knew about Lawrence and Kangaroo.

He said his grandfather’s brother Adrian was a supporter of the King & Country League but did not believe he would be plotting to overthrow the government. Somewhere he has seen a record of a donation to the league.

His Uncle Walter was indignant about the inferences and as you said Brian has just died and I believe he was the last of the family historians. Walter had a house at Collaroy. Jim had not heard of Billabong at N Narrabeen.
He suggested the King’s (TKS!) archives??

It appears Rob and Sandra know Fiona McGuinness (nee Friend). This is one of Jim’s daughters, who has just returned to journalism after many years child raising.

I’d suggest leaving it to Rob and Fi.

I have Jim’s phone numbers.

Love J

Well, I took that as a friendly (sorry!) response from Fiona’s father. The fact that Brian (“the last of the family historians”) has passed on might open the door again. At the very least I might be able to ask the Friend family to remove the ban on the RMF memoir (or allow Yeend to tell me what’s in it). But much bigger thinks could beckon. This was my reply to Mike:

4/8/11

Dear Michael/Janet

The news you send today cannot have raised my spirits (and hopes) more.

I know Fiona McGuiness nee Friend very well. She used to work for us (our 1980s media company) in both Sydney and London, and she has been very helpful in the past. She provided me with a Friend “family tree” and spoke to her father, Jim Friend, in supportive terms (around 1994).

Most particularly, she mentioned to her father my belief and one of the female Friends, “Dawdy” Friend, might have met the Lawrences and indeed put them into Wyewurk, she saying (words to the effect) “It couldn’t have been Dawdie, could it?” and her father replying “Yes it could.”

However, I made a serious error a few years back when (in frustration) I tried to put pressure on the Friend family (especially the late Brian Friend) to allow me to see the Kings School memoir that Robert Moreton Friend wrote for the school archives in which (according to Peter Yeend) he revealed how Lawrence had come across the secret army information he used in Kangaroo from the Friend family (maybe via Walter Friend, Robert’s older brother, too).

After that the Friend family broke off contact, and that included Fiona, much to my regret and now great sorrow. (For I would very much like to hear how her journalistic career has gone since we last met.)

So the chance that I may be able to mend some bridges now is one that I would warmly welcome.

What I had put to the Friend family in the mid-to-late 1990s (mainly via Yeend to Brian and his country-based brother - both sons of either Walter or Robert Moreton Friend)was that if they “co-operated” I would ensure that the information I published would not denigrate the Friend family, and in particular (and this was their great fear) that I would not say or imply that the Friend family (ie, Walter and RM) were engaged in illegal or treasonous activities in their involvement (revealed by Lawrence in Kangaroo) in the King and Empire Alliance (the “cover” organisation behind which the real 1920-23 secret army was marshaled).

I told them that if they allowed me to do it (tell the true story), I could not only handle the matter sensitively but also protect the Kings School (which held the vital memoir).

Now, however, that Brian is deceased, the sensitivities and fear of any exposure might have receded to the point that I could pursue my suit afresh. Anything that you can do – such as onpassing this to Jim Friend – to this end would, I believe, be now in everyone’s interest.

For it is a spectacular story, and its unveiling (if properly done) will rewrite not only Lawrence studies world-wide, but have a considerable impact on literature and history in Australia.

I believe that the Friend family, if they co-operated in this, would become heroes, not villains, for I can write it in a way to ensure this (for I have no other aim than to get the truth out).

To be frank, they could feel proud that they would be making an important and far-reaching contribution to world literature.

To emphasise my sincerity in this, I would point out that last year Eric Campbell’s daughter, Helen de Salis, approached me to take on the task of writing a biography of her much-maligned father, putting into the context of the times (ie, that he was one of many flirting with authoritarian ideals in the 1920-30s) what happened re the New Guard, etc.

She approached me because she had been told that I knew this 1920-30 period perhaps better than anyone else in Australia, and so could strip away the polemics that left-wing historians have put on the activities of the New Guard and her (essentially naive) father.

If I can be trusted to do that, the Friend family should hold no fears.

R

That went off yesterday, and Mike asked Janet to send it on to Jim Friend. Fingers crossed!

CLEVELAND STREET 22.10.11: This is probably the most important diary entry I have ever made, or am ever likely to make (unless Jim Friend comes up with the Kings RMF memoir, and it reveals something dramatic or unexpected.) I believe I now know, at last, what happened. But first, I should report that my new book - now entitled ABOUT KANGAROO The Search for the Truth about DH Lawrence's Australian Novel, Kangaroo - is all but finished. And, indeed, it was in the process of completing it that the final crystallizing breakthrough came. I am currently revising the text, and making some editing embellishments. In doing so, I have made some minor "discoveries", or rather points to add to it. For example, I have added that I believe I now know where Lawrence's choice of the name Struthers for Jock Garden came from - Aaron's Rod, where there is a character also called Struthers whom Lawrence associates with the opera and Covent Garden (Covent Garden=Jock Garden=Willie Struthers.) Also I recently became convinced (where I was merely speculating before) that the meeting with "Trewhella" at Mosman Bay was in fact a meeting with Jack Scott. In my new text I wrote that this would explain an anomaly about Ernest Whiting's remark about being told that my description of Jack Scott matched the description he had been given of the "man who met Lawrence at the wharf and took him to stay on the North Shore for three days". I now believe that this was the first time Scott met Lawrence (and that the wharf was not at Circular Quay, but at Mosman). It then occurred to me that Lawrence must have come back to Sydney that first Friday to retrieve his trunks (I bet that ferry collision in the Harbour, mentioned in Kangaroo, occurred that Friday). That was when someone took him - probably RMF - to see Scott, having previously told Scott of Lawrence's arrival in Sydney and his possible availability as a fill in for Taylor. I then went on to "deduce" that, after the interview, Scott had invited Lawrence up to his place at 112 Wycombe Road, where Lawrence mounted the summer-house and stayed the night. The "second meeting" with Callcott at 112 probably occurred later that same day - when Lawrence returned in the evening by ferry and tram, as per the text. (Next morning - Saturday - L and Scott no doubt walked back down Neutral Bay/Cremorne to Mosman wharf to catch the ferry into town and thence the train at Central.) Scott and Lawrence must have gone down to Thirroul on that Saturday. Then it clicked that that then was when they watched the football game on the field opposite the station (and so I inserted Paul's picture of that game in the text). Finally, the truth of what happened had dawned on me….
Lawrence arrives on Saturday, May 27. Next day he is invited to go up to Narrabeen where the tea-party meeting occurs and L if beFriended by RMF and Dawdie. Next day the (or perhaps Dawdie herself) take L&F down to Thirroul and install them in Wyewurk. On the following Friday L returns to Sydney to collect his trunks. Rendezvous with RMF, who takes him to Mosman Bay to see Scott (re a writing job on the K&E). Scott is very impressed. Decides or arranges to take Lawrence to see Rosenthal on Monday. Next day - Saturday - accompanies L down to Thirroul, and that evening (most indiscretely) tells him about the secret army, etc. On Monday they return to Sydney and have lunch (or whatever) in Rosenthal's chambers. But by then L does not want a job, but material for the book he is already writing. Acts vague about a reporting/writing job (as per the Garden interview), but Rosenthal realises that Scott has blabbed. Scott is warned not to say any more. But L has enough alrerady for the Cooee and Diggers chapters. He does not see either of them again until, in Rosenthal's case, the meeting after the visit to the Trades Hall, and in Scott's cas, until his trip down to Thirroul to issue a Draconian warning to L (and that terminates Lawrence's hope of obtaining any more information about secret armies, etc)…
Now comes the new breakthrough - this scenario tells us, at long last, who Trewhella is. The answer (I now think) is…nobody. Or nobody we don't know or have already met. He is in fact- unless the RMF memoir shows differently - RMF himself. Lawrence got double duty from RMF. He is part of Jack Callcott, and then does double duty as Trewhella (who is RMF with a "cover" of Hum - just as Scott is RMF's cover as "the other half" of Jack Callcott). This scenario, which I will be very surprised is wrong - solves a lot of problems and anomalies in K. For one thing, we don't have to look for Trewhella elsewhere - not to George Sutherland or Wilbur Wright. It also explains another thing that has worried me - the "sex" scene in the "Jack and Jaz" chapter. That did not fit in with what we knew about Scott - and RMF was still a teenager in 1922. No (I am now reasonably sure), was Maudie and Eustace Cohen being frisky - as honeymooners tend to be - at Leithdale. The scenes re Trewhella in Thirroul are also RMF (when he explains such things as the make-up of the Diggers/Maggies - architects, etc). We simply do not need another person in the plot (Occam's Razor comes into its own). A great day for Lawrence research, or at least my research. (It could even be that it was RMF who sang Larboard Watch Ahoy at a Rawson Institute function.)

BONDI 20.01.12: Some months since my previous diary entry last October, and since then a lot has happened. I have written a book – on my now 40-year “search for the truth about Kangaroo” – and in doing so have made, or found, many new insights into my “Quest for Cooley”. (Not the least of which was the discovery of Sidney Nolan’s Kangaroo series of paintings, and thus the illustration for the cover of the book, which will be entitled THE SCALY BACK OF THE REPTILE AND THE HORRIBLE PAWS. The cover shows Nolan’s Kangaroo, its arms caked in dried blood.) In fact, I am writing this now in the belief it will be the last entry in this diary and follows on my answer the question I was asked at that literary salon back in 1975 – “What is Kangaroo about, Mr Darroch?”. The answer I finally came to is that it is about Lawrence’s discovery that behind Australia’s “silvery freedom” is something “horrible” – the insipient fascism of its extreme right – as personified by Scott and Rosenthal and their secret army organisation. However, I want to use this occasion to reveal – or knit up - what I think (short of reading the RMF memoir) is the last remaining “loose-end” in my long quest. It came to me this morning as I was polishing the text of my book. For some time I have been worried about the explanation I give about where that Sunday afternoon tea-party in “the end-house” was held, and who was at it. I was obliged to agree with Robert Whitelaw that it must have been held at the Schultz house (“Billabong”) at North Narrabeen. (The photo of Rosenthal and Taylor having tea in its garden is very hard to ignore.) But there were some unexplained – and significant - anomalies here (which I mentioned in my text). Let me list them:

1. Scott’s stepson – Peter Oatley – said the description I read out to him over the phone in 1979 of Lawrence’s “end-house” matched his memory of “Hinemoa” – where, of course, we can place Scott in May-June 1922 (the settles around the window, and the framed prints and medal on the wall of the “first Trewhella” – clearly a reference to the late Major Oatley, Scott’s “best mate”). That is very difficult to put aside in favour of “Billabong” (which is equally unassailable now we know about Taylor and The Sequel).

2. We can place Hum at the Basin (“Red Beach”), probably in Seaview Parade, a block away from “Hinemoa”.

3. Vitally, Yeend said the “house you are looking for” was not, repeat NOT, “Hinemoa” but in Beach Road. (“You mention Seaview Parade,” he wrote in a letter dated May 24 1994. “I’d be more interested in Beach Rd. A check on the owners of cottages there might be very productive.”)

4. Then there are Yeend’s repeated mentions that the Friends rented a cottage in the Basin.

5. Additionally, he said that RMF holidayed in Beach Road with his children in the 1920s

This is too strong to ignore, especially as most of it comes from Yeend, who had read the RMF memoir.

So – what can the explanation be?

Let’s look at the pieces of the jigsaw and see if we can put them together and make some sense of it all.

Piece 1 – Lawrence describes the interior of “Hinemoa” (which he could only have seen that first Sunday).

Piece 2 – Yeend goes out of his way to tell me that the Friends had a cottage in Beach Road. (“A check on the owners of cottages there might be very productive.”) Moreover, he does not mention Narrabeen at all.

Piece 3 – Someone drives L&F back to the city at dusk that first Sunday. (That would be about 5pm, or even later.)

Piece 4 – on the way they drop someone off north of the Harbour, before “Callcott” takes the car to a garage in the city.

Piece 5 – The car that leaves Narrabeen is almost certainly driven by Hum ("If you like to crowd in," said Jack, "we can take you in the car. We can squeeze in Mr. Somers in front, and there'll be plenty of room for the others at the back, if Gladys sits on her Dad's knee.")

Piece 6 – But Hum was probably not the driver of the car that went back to Sydney, for he and his family were almost certainly staying at the Basin, probably in Seaview Parade, around the corner from “Hinemoa”.

Piece 7 – The driver of that car was probably Robert Moreton Friend.

This is what I now think happened...

Scott was at that afternoon tea-party (the “Callcott” in that exchange of conversation can only have been him). He was in the car that drove back, and he was (as per the text) dropped off at 112 Wycombe Road. Hum drove the party back to the Basin where he was staying. Robert Moreton Friend was staying in Beach Road in the Friend cottage in Beach Road with the Friend family Austin. Scott took L&F to Hinemoa to meet his future wife, Andree Adelaide Oatley. They stayed there until Scott went and got RMF, who he knew was driving back to town. (Or Dawdie Friend did – for she was almost certainly at the tea-party, and had been the one to tell L+F about “Wyewurk”.)

This is the picture that emerges from putting the jigsaw pieces together. It fits in with the novel, with Yeend, with Peter Oatley, and with the timing and logistics of the afternoon-tea. And it solves the problem I had with the Narrabeen end-house scenario.