Lawrence and Frieda (with kangaroo and rainbow) at "Wyewurk",
depicted by Garry Shead in his Kangaroo series (painted in 1992)

 

EARLY IN 1976 I was at an Australia Day party at a fellow journalist's home in Sydney when I found myself sitting next to local finance writer Tom Fitzgerald.

I knew he had written an early article on Lawrence in Australia ("The Beard of the Prophet", Nation, Sydney 1958), so we began chatting about my current project.

"I'm running across a surprising number of correlations between the text and what was happening in Sydney at the time," I told him. "I'm even beginning to entertain the possibility that the secret-army plot might have some reality in it."

"Strange you should say that," said Fitzgerald. "I interviewed Eric Campbell before he died. Campbell asked me: 'Do you know why we called ourselves the New Guard?' When I said no, he said: 'Because there was an Old Guard.'"

Fitzgerald said to me: "I would look into that if I were you."

Next day I re-read The Rallying Point (Melbourne University Press 1965) Eric Campbell's autobiographical account of the New Guard. From this it was clear that there were predecessors to his 1930-32 New Guard, going back into the 1920s.