Andrew Moore's book, The Secret Army and the Premier, a copy of which Peter Yeend (see below) bought in the bookshop of the State Library of NSW in 1993

 

NOT ONLY DID Andrew Moore, at every opportunity, enter the lists on behalf of the Darroch Thesis - which term he coined - but he passed on to me useful titbits gained from his own ongoing research into right-wing politics in Sydney and New South Wales.

One such titbit was in a note he sent me in November 1992.

Andrew had been doing research in a library at La Trobe University in Melbourne and had come across the papers of the local writer (and literary critic) Adrian Lawlor.

Lawlor was a name known to those interested in Kangaroo, for he is cited in the Introduction to the Heinemann Phoenix edition of the novel, written by Lawrence's friend and biographer, Richard Aldington.

In that Introduction Aldington had dismissed any possibility that the political plot of Kangaroo had any element of reality in it. He wrote:

Where did he get the vivid scenes of political contest between the Diggers and the socialists? Not from his favourite periodical, The Sydney Bulletin, for at that time no such political violence occurred in Australia.

It was that assertion - "at that time no such political violence occurred in Australia" - which significantly influenced subsequent attitudes to Lawrence and Kangaroo.

It "set the tone" for, not only most post-war interpretations of Kangaroo, but also post-1945 biographical accounts of Lawrence's period in Australia, Sydney and Thirroul, for biographers had little else to go on, as at that stage Aldington's Phoenix Kangaroo Introduction, together with his biography, Portrait of a Genius But...,were almost all they had, apart from a few Lawrence letters published in the 1930s, plus Frieda's Not I but the Wind.