The 1962 Ace edition of Kangaroo - showing the Sydney Harbour Bridge 10 years before it was built. This paperback edition was clearly a cheap effort to cash in on the success of the Lady Chatterley court case in London, which had the effect of allowing Lawrence's best-known work to be legally published.

 

THROUGHOUT THE 70s, 80s, 90s and well into the new century, the prime suspect - the main focus of our research - was Jack Scott.

There was no question in my mind - and in Andrew Moore's, too - that he was the main source of Lawrence's information about the secret army. (I think John Ruffels was also convinced of that, as was of course my wife and co-conspirator, Sandra. To give him credit, I believe that Joe Davis now also thinks this.)

Jack Scott was almost certainly the principal Australian character in Kangaroo. He was the sinister Jack Callcott - the very personification of "the scaly back of a reptile, and the horrible paws".

Yet, as intimated above, there is an anomaly, or oddity, here.

Why didn't Lawrence disguise him more?

Why, in particular, didn't Lawrence, as he progressively became aware of the full evilness of what Callcott represented, go back over the manuscript and make it less obvious that his erstwhile "mate" Jack Scott was the co-leader of the Diggers-Maggies secret-army organisation (aka the King and Empire Alliance)?

Why, to use an Australianism, did he "dob him in"?

Indeed, why were there no "backward revisions" at all in the manuscript - the question that had worried me back in the 1970s, when I first saw the holograph of Kangaroo?

Surely Lawrence must have realised the danger he was putting himself into...especially as he well knew that Scott and Rosenthal and the rest would one day soon read the exposé he was writing, literally, behind their backs.

Then the cat - or the scaly reptile with the horrible paws - would be well and truly out of the bag.

One answer might be put down to Lawrence's notorious insensitivity to the feelings of people he portrayed in his fiction.

Neville had remarked on this, and throughout his writing career other examples abound. (How could he, for example, have put the raddled character Lady Hermione Roddice into Women in Love knowing how much it would offend his loyal and supportive patron, Lady Ottoline Morrell?)

It was almost as if there was something in his method of writing - his authorial technique, as it were - that inhibited him from "interfering" with or questioning how he converted fact into fiction, and its "automatic" functions.

Yet there was another possible explanation that was emerging from the research.

Maybe, like Victoria Callcott, the character Jack Callcott was an amalgam of more than one person.

Maybe he was based on Scott plus somebody else.