Nevertheless, it came as no surprise that, in his Introduction to the new CUP edition of Kangaroo, Dr Steele repeated his denial that Kangaroo could have been based on the existence in Sydney of a real secret army, and Lawrence's contact with it.

Steele bestowed praise on Joe Davis, whose account of Lawrence's time in Sydney and Thirroul had also rejected the Darroch Thesis.

Steele cleaved to Davis's contention that the novel's secret-army plot, such as it was, could have derived from casual conversations Lawrence may have picked up during his stay, possibly in Thirroul (where most of his time was spent).

In his DH Lawrence at Thirroul, Davis had written:

"...the realistic Australian political details and 'feel' of Kangaroo are just as likely to be the fruit of Lawrence's ability to swot up on some back and current issues of the local press, have a few incidental conversations with local acquaintances, and come up with a portrait of the Australian political scene ..."

Dr Steele went along with this:

Rawson's suggestion [put forward in his 1968 Dissent article] was...adopted and extensively pursued by Robert Darroch who alleged that Lawrence was actually approached by a secret political movement on his arrival in Sydney, that he several times met with its supposed leader, Rosenthal, and his associate in the King and Empire Alliance, Colonel W.J.R. Scott, and that much of the Somers-Callcott material is reportage. This theory gained some credence, [but] it has now been shown to be without foundation.

Steele did little to back up his assertion that the Darroch theory had "now been shown to be without foundation", except to cite Joe Davis (Steele accorded Davis a cue-title in the CUP edition), and then to put forward his own alternative explanation of how Lawrence arrived at his secret-army plot, which in turn largely consisted of Lawrence bringing with him to Australia some combination of Mussolini's Blackshirts and Walt Whitman's League of Comrades.

Yet he added:

But concentration of this kind of 'fact' in Kangaroo has too often overlooked the nature of Lawrence's fiction and the raison d'etre of his characters. Somers's involvement with the leaders of the Diggers and Socialists had its roots in Lawrence's intellectual and imaginative grappling with the claims of the right and the left in politics and the problem of the writer as activist - a problem that had preoccupied him at least since 1915

 

(Hence the standard categorisation of Aaron's Rod, Kangaroo and The Plumed Serpent as Lawrence's three "leadership" novels..."the writer as activist".)

Dr Steele specifically denied that Kangaroo's Benjamin Cooley resembled Charles Rosenthal, either physically or otherwise (though he did concede that Rosenthal's King and Empire Alliance had been involved in left-right political clashes in 1920-22).

He went on:

If Lawrence used an individual Australian as model for Kangaroo in his role of highly-regarded military leader, it is most likely to have been General Sir John Monash (1865-1931)...He had received immense publicity in London in the months following the Armistice, and, as a reader of newspapers, Lawrence could have well known of him even before he left England.

 

While various scholars round the world were in the process of editing other Lawrence works, and establishing their "authorised" texts, the Cambridge University Press was also preparing a new, three-volume definitive biography of Lawrence.

Its final part, The Dying Game 1922-1930 [CUP, Cambridge 1998], was written by English Lawrence scholar Dr David Ellis and published four years after Steele's edition of Kangaroo.

Ellis in turn also cleaved, resolutely, to Steele's account of Lawrence's Australian sojourn and his analysis of Kangaroo. Yet he too conceded that the novel's political plot might have had some local input:

In the seventeen years since Darroch first published his book more and more evidence has continued to emerge of para-military groupings associated with right-wing organisations such as the 'King and Empire Alliance'

but he added:

yet in all that time there has been a singular lack of support for his main thesis.

Ellis's explanation of how such "groupings" might have impinged on Lawrence and Kangaroo largely followed Dr Davis's and Dr Steele's alternative theorising. Ellis wrote:

Lawrence may have picked up from casual conversation in Thirroul and elsewhere information about secret movements...but no convincing evidence has been found to suggest that, while he was in New South Wales, he became even remotely intimate with the leaders of a group of that kind.

 

I bear no animosity to Ellis, Steele or anyone else in the Lawrence world, which has since almost universally followed Dr Steele's, Dr Davis's and Dr Ellis's views on how Kangaroo came to be written.

Many of the points Steele made in his Introduction and scholarly footnotes were well taken, and he picked up several mistakes I had made in my 1981 book.

Creditably, he himself made some effort to undertake some local research into Lawrence's time in Australia. For example, he came up to Sydney and personally visited 112 Wycombe Road, where he picked up the fact that I had - as had Lawrence - confused the South Head lighthouse with the Macquarie light.

I knew, of course, he was wrong - egregiously wrong - about where Lawrence had got the plot of Kangaroo. But he was justified in pointing out that the Darroch Thesis was still, at that time, mainly speculation (though, I feel constrained to point out, particularly well-grounded speculation).

However, given Dr Steele's "rubbishing" of the Darroch Thesis, I can I hope be excused from deriving a tincture of satisfaction (if that is the right word) from an error Steele himself made in his "authorised" CUP edition of Kangaroo.

For in that text he got the ending of the novel wrong.