Paul Delprat's sketch of Lawrence (and Frieda) in "Wyewurk", drawn for my first "Mystery of Kangaroo" article in The Australian in May 1976 (the illustration spread over two pages and was later stuck together with sticky-tape). Paul depicted Lawrence reading some of the old newspapers that were kept in "Wyewurk" for fire-lighting purposes.

THROUGHOUT the 1980s and into the 1990s and beyond, our research advanced in fits and starts.

There were gaps of many months in my research diary when there was nothing of note to record. Yet on other occasions, when the trail grew warm again, there would be several entries a day - such as in early 1979, when I found "Hinemoa" in Collaroy and Jack Scott's address in Wycombe Road, Neutral Bay.

A major disappointment had been our failure to identify who was, or might have been, the person on "the boat that brought Lawrence to Sydney" who had been responsible (according to various sources - including, latterly, the daughter of Australia litterateur Walter Murdoch) for involving Lawrence in Jack Scott's secret army.

A big step forward came in 1988 with the information that the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley held, among other papers left by Frieda, an address-book that Lawrence had kept during the period we were interested in.

I managed to obtain a photocopy of its contents. This was a crucial development in our research. So...whose Australian name and address might we find in it?

As it turned out, there were several, so we set about cross-checking them with the names on the three passenger-ship lists that Ruffels had obtained, and already partly-processed and collated in his unique "cardboard computer" database.

An immediate disappointment was that the Bancroft address-book did not contain the name of anyone who had been on the Malwa (Perth-Sydney) passenger-list whom we could link with the Rosenthal-Scott secret army, now that we had ruled out Captain Bertie Scrivener.

The Orsova list (Colombo-Perth) was similarly unhelpful. (It included a Melbourne name - J Elder Walker - but that meant nothing to us.) However, on the Osterley list (Naples-Colombo) we had better luck.

***

When Dr Roberts said that little work had been done on Lawrence's time in Australia, he was not quite right. Significant work had been done, by a number of people.

As well, a good deal of factual information about Lawrence's time in Australia was to be found in the various collections of his letters that were published after his death in 1930.