"Jock" Garden, the Communist leader of the NSW Trades and Labor Council, whose Sydney office was in the Trades Hall ("Canberra House") in Dixon Street, Haymarket

YOU DO NOT have to look far in Sydney in 1922 to find whom Lawrence had in mind when he put "Willie" Struthers into Kangaroo.

Certainly not past "Jock" Garden.

"Jock" Garden was by far the most prominent union leader in Sydney in 1922. He was secretary of the NSW Trades and Labor Council - the peak union organisation in NSW - whose headquarters was in the Trades Hall, near Sydney's fruit and vegetable market (the Sydney equivalent of London's Covent Garden).

Almost the first thing Lawrence did on arriving in Sydney - on the Saturday he arrived, in fact - he and Frieda went for a long walk down to the market area, Haymarket:

in Sussex Street he almost wept for Covent Garden and St. Martin's Lane

 

It may be that someone in Perth, probably the IWW activist William Siebenhaar, had given him an introduction to his fellow IWW activist in Sydney, "Jock" Garden, and Lawrence was checking to see where the address was.

(Around this time, Garden was, as historian Ian Turner relates in his book on the IWW, Sydney's Burning [Heinemann, London 1967], leading a campaign to free from jail a group of IWW activists - a cause that Siebenhaar was also involved in.)

In any case, we have (as we shall see in a moment) other evidence that, not only did Lawrence base Struthers on Garden, but that the two almost certainly had a meeting in the Trades Hall, and discussed the political situation in Sydney.

In his explanatory Notes to the CUP Kangaroo, Dr Steele said that Garden had been "proposed" [by me in my 1981 book] as the model for "Willie" Struthers, but that such an identification was "unlikely", for Garden "did not physically resemble" Struthers.

His guess was that Struthers was based mainly on Siebenhaar (ie, same initials, WS), with a touch of "Willie" Hopkin - Lawrence's political mentor in Eastwood - thrown in.

And, indeed, Dr Steele may be right about the initials. However, Siebenhaar was Dutch, and "Willie" Struthers is clearly a Scottish name. (The surname Struthers is also relatively common in Scotland.)

The name/nationality-transposition ["Jock"="Willie"] is an obvious one, but the name "Struthers" might also have been transposed - an "opera-switch".

There is a minor character in Lawrence's previous novel, Aaron's Rod, who is also called Struthers.