HOWEVER, this was not to be the only diptych involving Lawrence and Kangaroo that was to trouble Patrick White.

In October 1982 Sidney Nolan, then perhaps Australia's most famous living artist, painted a series of eight works which he called his "Kangaroo series".

These have only been exhibited once, briefly, in a gallery in Perth, Western Australia, late in 1982. The series included a diptych.

The events which led to the creation of this diptych are harrowing, and involve a suicide, a broken friendship, a trust betrayed, a wounded reaction, and a brutal response.

Before that, Nolan and White had been, to all intents, good friends.

Nancy Underhill, who is writing a biography of Nolan, told me: "Patrick White first saw Nolan's works in 1949 at the Macquarie Gallery in Sydney, and was much taken by them. White wrote to Nolan asking him to do the cover for Voss [White's most famous novel]."

However, White and Nolan did not meet personally until 1956 in, of all places, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

The Nolans - Sidney, Cynthia and her young daughter, Jinx - were on vacation in America, while White and his lover Manoly Lascaris (whom White had first met in Alexandria, after being demobbed from the RAF), were visiting Manoly's sister Anna in her "claustrophobic" house set "in a mangrove swamp, on a road leading from nowhere to nowhere, in other words, the rest of Florida" (as Patrick White, inimitably, described it).

Subsequently, for a number of days, White and the Nolans toured around Florida's mangrove swamps, gas stations and hamburger joints, forging a "meeting of minds" that was to last until 1981.

White was particularly taken with Cynthia, whom he categorised as "steel" to Nolan's "elastic".

Whenever they were together in the one country, they made a point of seeing one another.

Nolan went on to illustrate the covers of a number of Patrick White's novels.

Such close friends did they become that when White was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, he asked Nolan (who was living in England) to accept the Prize on his behalf, not wanting to make the long trip to Stockholm himself.

During this period White kept up a regular correspondence with Cynthia, describing her as "one of the women I have admired most" - a particular compliment, coming from Patrick White. (Nolan himself was not a good letter-writer, so communication between the Nolans and White was via Cynthia.)

Then, in London in 1976, Cynthia committed suicide.

White was deeply upset. Just how deep did not become apparent until five years later, when White's autobiography, Flaws in the Glass, was published.

The book contained a personal attack on Nolan, accusing him of "treachery" for re-marrying too soon after Cynthia's suicide.

He didn't blame Nolan for Cynthia's suicide. It was the re-marriage that appalled him. "What I cannot forgive is his flinging himself on another woman's breast when the ashes were scarcely cold," he wrote.

(Actually it was 16 months later, and Nolan had known Mary Boyd - a member of a distinguished Australian artistic family - for much of his life. At the time of writing, Lady Nolan is still very much alive, and living in England.)

"If it had not been for Cynthia I doubt Nolan would have reached the heights he did in his best period," White wrote. "He would have drowned much sooner in the sea of flattery which sucks so many artists of importance under."

Nolan was not, by any means, the only Australian criticised in Flaws in the Glass. In it White also made a scathing attack on Joan Sutherland. The book soon came to be known in Australian literary circles as "Claws in the Arse".