-15-

 

Circular Quay/Sydney Cove as it was c.1922, when Lawrence arrived (on much the same
boat as the one shown, tied up at the P&O wharf, where the Malwa
berthed on May 27, 1922). Lawrence would have caught several ferries
like these from "the Quay" on his various Harbour excursions
to Mosman, Manly, Cremorne, etc.

 

TOWARDS THE END of 1976 - my research annus mirabilis - the main focus of the research was switching from what had happened to how it had happened.

My immediate challenge was to place Jack Scott and Lawrence in the same place at the same time - somewhere in Sydney during the first week or so Lawrence was there (and thus afford Lawrence with the opportunity learn about the secret army).

Yet on the face of things, scheduling such a meeting should not have posed an insurmountable difficulty. For in Kangaroo Lawrence himself was recording, in his "fictionalised diary", how these things came about. The answer - all the answers - had to be found hidden in the text of the novel.

My task was to unravel the tangled skein of narrative and separate what was based on fact and what on artistic inspiration, or embellishment. I had to strip away the "fictionalisation" and expose the factual foundations that lay, I was convinced, beneath.

One of the first clues to how it happened came in a letter from someone in Melbourne - his name was Ernest Whiting - who had read my "Mystery of Kangaroo" article in The Australian in mid-1976.

He told me that he knew I was right - Kangaroo was based on fact.

He knew this, he told me, because of a conversation he remembered having overheard as a youth at one of his mother's literary soirees in Melbourne in the late 1930s. His mother was the daughter of the Australian poet, AB "Banjo" Patterson.

He remembered that one of her soiree guests, a leading business figure, had revealed to the gathering that Lawrence had run across an actual secret army in Sydney in 1922.

When asked how such an unlikely event could have occurred, the business figure had replied, according to Ernest Whiting: "To know the answer to that question you must consult the passenger list of the boat that brought Lawrence to Sydney."

And it is here that I should introduce another of the heroes in the long search for the truth about Lawrence and Kangaroo - the Quest for Cooley. His name is John Ruffels, and if Andrew Moore became my Huxley, then John was my Watson, though immeasurably smarter than Holmes's stolid companion.

While I was working as a journalist in London, John - a postman by profession - was my willing and skilled research assistant in Sydney. His abilities as a researcher proved to be of Bletchleyesque proportions.

He, energetically, took on the task of tracking down who could have been on "the boat that brought Lawrence to Sydney" who might have led Lawrence to Scott and Rosenthal.

Three boats brought Lawrence and Frieda to Sydney - the Osterley from Naples to Colombo, the Orsova from Colombo to Perth, and the Malwa from Perth to Sydney.

John obtained the passenger lists of each boat - comprising hundreds of names - and began sifting through them, trying to find who might have been Lawrence's original "contact" with the secret army.