In the event, Lawlor, after consulting Australian historian Brian Fitzpatrick, assured Aldington that no such proto-fascist body as that described in Kangaroo - the Diggers organisation and its shadow secret army, the Maggies - had ever existed in Australia.

(Ironically, Brian Fitzpatrick - Andrew Moore tells me - was actually a member of the White Guard in Melbourne in 1923...so either he had a very poor memory, or he felt he was still sworn to secrecy. More likely, however, he did not even know he had been a member of the White Guard, and had merely given a promise to be "ready" if called upon, and thus his name had been put on its secret membership list. Ninety-nine percent of those "enlisted" in secret-army activity in Australia never knew or realised what in fact they were agreeing to be involved in.)

So Aldington (after also questioning Frieda about it - see above) reluctantly dropped the matter.

Consequently, for the next quarter century or so, that was the standard interpretation of Kangaroo…that there was no element of truth or fact in its secret-army plot.

Aldington eventually wrote in his Introduction in Kangaroo that the politics in the novel had to have been a reflection of Lawrence's observation of fascism in Italy. This "line" - that the political content arrived on the boat with Lawrence - was faithfully followed by subsequent critics and biographers (down to today, with Bruce Steele and David Ellis).

Interestingly, however, another acquaintance of Lawrence - the American writer Witter Bynner - had earlier had an experience analogous to that of Aldington's at Port-Clos (as he described in his book about Lawrence, Journey With Genius [Peter Nevill, London 1933]).

While in Chapala in Mexico with Lawrence in 1923, he and the rest of the party were awakened early one morning by an almost hysterical Lawrence shouting "They've come!" after someone had, apparently, tried to break into his room.

Bynner and the others assumed "they" were local bandits, which they may well have been.

But that may not have been what Lawrence was referring to.