ALTHOUGH
BY the end of 1976 I myself was convinced that I had
found out how Lawrence had come to write Kangaroo
- and base it on a real secret army active in Sydney
in 1922 - a daunting task lay ahead of me if I were
to expect this to be accepted, initially by other Lawrence
scholars, then by the wider literary world.
What my colleague Andrew Moore later christened "the
Darroch Thesis" was a very radical hypothesis.
Moreover, if it turned out to be true, it would pose
some serious questions in Lawrence circles, which had
been going down a very different path for some considerable
time. Resistance to its acceptance would be strong.
For not only would I have to establish - and big theories
need big proofs - that this was how Kangaroo
came to be written, but, more challengingly, I would
have to demonstrate, to everyone's satisfaction, how
it came to pass...
...how Lawrence (of all people), a political ingénue,
could have turned up in Sydney in late May 1922, a casual
foreign tourist, knowing almost no one locally, and
not only immediately happened on a real secret army,
and been told its innermost secrets - and even been
asked to join it! - but had gone on to write a major
novel exposing its leadership and activities it to all
and sundry.
Moreover,
this extraordinary, and intrinsically improbable, set
of events - contrary to all existing knowledge (and
common-sense) - had hitherto remained undiscovered for
over half a century.
Indeed, a daunting prospect.
