The "confidential" letter from acting Prime Minister Watt to Herbert Brookes about the formation of the Australian Protective League - the forerunner of the secret organisation that Lawrence encountered in Sydney in 1922

THUS MID-WAY through 1976 - the first full year of what turned into a more-than-35-year quest for the truth about Lawrence and Kangaroo - I was reasonably sure on whom Lawrence had based his two principal Australian characters, Benjamin Cooley and Jack Callcott.

Rosenthal was Cooley and Scott was Callcott.

I was also reasonably certain that Cooley and Callcott's fictional "Diggers Club" organisation in Kangaroo had been based on Rosenthal's and Scott's "real-life" King and Empire Alliance.

But what about "the Maggies" - the secret para-military organisation that lurked behind the Diggers Clubs in Kangaroo? Was that based on reality too?

Given what Eric Campbell had said about the "Old Guard" in 1925 - a mere three years after Lawrence had been in Sydney - it seemed likely. (Particularly given that in 1923 - less than 12 months after Lawrence was in Australia - a hitherto-secret para-military "citizen's auxiliary" called "the White Guard" had come out of the woodwork in Melbourne during a police strike. It offered its assistance in "helping to protect essential services" while the police were absent from duty.)

However, at the time I was looking into this - early 1976 - the existence of secret armies in Australia was virtually unknown, at least in public, and in mainstream academic circles.

Yet among younger historians, particularly those on the left, there was an emerging belief that behind the standard histories was an untold story of semi-secret far-right organisations, some of them para-military in character.

One day in the Mitchell Library in late 1976 I put in a slip requesting some papers from their manuscript collection. The librarian looked at my slip and said: "Do you know that someone else has been asking for those boxes?"