The 1923 American Seltzer edition of Kangaroo (note the streamers - also see Sidney Nolan's painting "Streamers" below - cf. the concluding words of the Seltzer and CUP editions of Kangaroo, see also below)

AN IMPORTANT development occurred two years later with the publication of the Cambridge University Press edition of Kangaroo [CUP, Cambridge 1994], edited by Dr Bruce Steele.

It was important for a number of reasons.

Not only was it intended to provide the definitive or "authorised" text of the novel, but it would also - through its Introduction and textual apparatus - establish, for the world of Lawrence scholarship and the wider literary world, the truth or otherwise of "the Darroch Thesis".

For it would also give an outline of how the novel came to be written, and how Lawrence might have arrived at its theme or plot.

The term "the Darroch Thesis" had been coined by Andrew Moore during an exchange with Dr Steele in the Australian literary magazine Meridian in 1989.

In an article, itself a précis of a talk Steele had earlier given at the Australian Defence Academy in Canberra (where Paul Eggert lectured in English), Steele had dismissed my research and the "thesis" I had put forward in my earlier book, DH Lawrence in Australia [Macmillan, Melbourne 1981].

What particularly irked Dr Moore was Dr Steele's denial that a secret army had been operating in Sydney in 1920-1922. "There is not a shred of evidence," Steele had written. "...it is all speculation."

In a robust riposte published in the same journal, Dr Moore - the acknowledged expert on secret armies in Australia - contradicted that assertion.

(In deploying the words "not a shred of evidence...all speculation", Dr Steele was being more than a trifle disingenuous, for he himself, in a Note to the text of the CUP Kangaroo mentions Rawson's 1968 article in Dissent in which Rawson had, not only raised the possibility of a secret army being active in Sydney in 1921, but had ventured that it could have had connections with Sir Charles Rosenthal's King and Empire Alliance.)