Thus I was introduced to Andrew Moore, a young history graduate then at La Trobe University in Melbourne who was researching a PhD thesis on far-right political organisations in NSW.

He, too, had been the beneficiary of serendipity.

After completing his BA degree, he had joined the NSW Education Department and was dispatched to a small town in the mid-west to begin his teaching career. He had always been interested in history, so he joined the local historical society.

When he evinced interest in the 1930-32 New Guard, someone told him he should go and see an old lady who lived out of town. "She knows something about all that," he was told.

Andrew went to see her. It turned out that her father, a Colonel Hinton, had been involved in anti-Lang activity in 1930-32.

(In November 1930 a new Labor Government came to power in NSW under JT Lang, who had been Treasurer in the 1920-22 Storey-Dooley Government and Premier in 1925-27 during a time of union unrest. In May 1932 Lang was dismissed as NSW Premier by the State Governor, Sir Phillip Game, for defying Commonwealth law.)

"Would you like to see his box of papers?" Miss Hinton asked Andrew. She told him she had found the box in her father's Sydney flat after he passed away. It did not take Andrew long to realise that he had happened upon a substantial cache of secret-army records.

Hinton had been entrusted with some of the nominal rolls and other papers of the secret organisation Eric Campbell had referred to in The Rallying Point as "the Old Guard". Against strict instructions to destroy all such papers, Hinton had kept them, and now Andrew had access to them. He had the names of virtually every member of the Old Guard, at least in western NSW.

(As we shall see below, those involved in Old-Guard activity - like Jack Scott and Colonel Hinton - were quite proud of their role in such matters, and not-a-little irked by the secrecy that went with it...as Eric Campbell, for instance, had been when he "went public" in 1930.)

Colonel Hinton had in fact been Jack Scott's equivalent in "the Western Division" of the Old Guard, referred to by Hinton's secret-army compatriots as "The Country". (Such clandestine organisations eschewed "formal" names and so were given, by those involved, apparently innocuous pseudonyms. The metropolitan division of Jack Scott's Old Guard was nicknamed "the association" or "the garage".)

Andrew was not my only source of information about Australia's secret armies, though he did become my expert in Old-Guard matters. I think it was Andrew who put me in touch with his fellow-historian Humphrey McQueen.