This "diary" aspect of the novel had already been remarked on by Lawrence's first post-war biographer, and close friend, Richard Aldington.

In his introduction to the 1948 Phoenix edition of Kangaroo, Aldington had said: "Although some characters and episodes in the book are imaginary or transferred to Australia from elsewhere, much of the writing deals with Lawrence's experiences in Australia - with the unique result that he was remembering and setting down with extreme accuracy and vividness one set of experiences while actually undergoing others, themselves designed to be remembered and written as he found new ones."

...an observation that is, significantly, echoed in a letter Lawrence wrote to his fellow novelist Catherine Carswell on June 22, 1922, when he was halfway through writing Kangaroo: "Myself I like that letter-diary form."

(And it is here, at the outset of my Quest for Cooley, that I must offer an apology - or perhaps a warning - about the mixing of "fact" and "fiction" in what follows. It is my belief - my "thesis" - that Kangaroo is in effect, as Aldington so-perceptively observed, a "fictionalised diary" of what happened after Lawrence and Frieda arrived in Sydney at the end of May, 1922. Inevitably, given this "letter-diary" form of novel, I will have to alternate between "fiction" and "fact" throughout what follows. I will do my best to distinguish between the two, despite their almost-inextricable nexus. I seek the reader's forbearance in this. It will, I believe, prove to be worthwhile in the end.)