(Lawrence's letters have always been a primary source of biographical information. The CUP's The Letters of DH Lawrence [volume IV, Cambridge 1987] contains 52 letters written during his 13-week Australian sojourn.)

So the first substantial information about the time Lawrence had spent in Australia came in 1932, a decade after he left (and two years after his death) with the publication of The Letters of DH Lawrence [Heinemann, London], with an introduction by Aldous Huxley.

It contained a number of letters to and from people Lawrence had met in Australia - but again, none to or from anyone in Sydney, where he had spent 10 of the 13 weeks of his time in Australia…a puzzling (and worrying) lacuna that continued to cloud our research efforts throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.

Heinemann's Letters also contained two photographs of Lawrence taken in Thirroul in 1922. How Heinemann obtained these rare snapshots is a bit of a mystery. They were taken by Dennis Forrester, an English shipboard acquaintance - an immigrant - who was also travelling to Sydney on the Malwa.

One can only assume that Forrester had duplicates made of his snaps which he, or more probably his wife, sent on to Lawrence and Frieda, and that Frieda then supplied these to Heinemann.

Frieda's unreliable memoir, Not I But the Wind, published three years later, contained some more Forrester photographs, taken by Dennis Forrester during a weekend-trip to Thirroul in late July 1922. A number of these snaps remained unrecognised in the Forrester family album until John Ruffels and I visited the Forrester home in Sydney in the early1990s (see, eg, the Botanic Gardens photo above).

Lawrence's first post-war biographer, Richard Aldington, made considerable efforts to look into Lawrence's time in Australia. (As we shall see, he entertained strong suspicions that the plot of Kangaroo was not entirely fiction.)

Additionally, Sydney journalist Tom Fitzgerald had, as mentioned above, made an effort in 1958 to find out about Lawrence's time in Thirroul and "Wyewurk".

Yet by far the major pre-1970s research effort had been carried out under the instructions of Edward Nehls, when he was compiling his three-volume DH Lawrence: A Composite Biography [The University of Wisconsin Press, 1957].

His volume 2 contained a number of useful - priceless - memoirs by Australians who had encountered Lawrence and Frieda during their Australian stay.

One of them, Mrs AL Jenkins, had met Lawrence on board the Osterley between Naples and Colombo, and her name turned out to be one of those Lawrence recorded in his "Australian" address-book - noted there, in all probability, because while on the boat to Colombo she had suggested to him that he could travel on to Australia, and from there to America, and offering help should he decide to do so.

But what was now of most interest to Ruffels and me was that there was - at last! - a Sydney name in the address-book.

More significantly, it was the only Sydney name Lawrence recorded in his "Australian" address-book.

It was of a "DG Hum", and his name, too, turned up on the Osterley (Naples-Colombo) passenger-list.

Was this the name of the person on "the boat that brought Lawrence to Sydney" who had been, several sources had now told us, the original contact between Lawrence and the Rosenthal-Scott secret army?