He is an artist and he appears at an opera performance either at the Coliseum in St Martin's Lane or the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden ["Jock" Garden=Covent Garden="Willie" Struthers].

Co-incidentally, a member of the club I belong to in Sydney, Robert Douglass, happened to be related to "Jock" Garden. Garden was in fact his great-uncle.

Rob confirmed (in an article written for Rananim [vol 2, no 3, 1994] - see our DHLA website) that Lawrence's portrait of "Willie" Struthers matched Garden, down to the church he belonged to and "his abnormally thick hands".

In point of fact, in Kangaroo Lawrence specifically describes Struthers' hands as being "thin". Rob Douglass was in error here. However, this may well have been - and probably was - a standard Lawrentian opposites-transposition. Garden, formerly a manual worker, had abnormally thick hands (as Rob Douglass confirmed), so Lawrence - almost automatically - makes Struthers' hands "thin".

(Yet I realise what dangerous waters we get into in trying to correlate transposition and reality. The transpositions are indicative, not prescriptive, and we have to live with that uncertain equation.)

In his Rananim article Rob concluded:

If Uncle Jock was not the model for Struthers, then there is no other Labor figure in Australia who is a more likely candidate....Ockham's Razor would argue that we conclude that Struthers is based, first-hand, on Jock Garden.

For me, however, one of the most indicative things about Lawrence's portrayal of Struthers is that he is Scottish, when most other major Labor leaders in Australia at that time were, almost to a man, either English or, more often, Irish. (Not too many Irishmen are called "Willie".)

What seals the matter from an historical point of view, however, is the rhetoric Struthers uses in his harangue in Kangaroo's "A Row in Town" chapter.

Any student of Australian history and politics knows that in the 1920s the Labor movement was resolutely wedded to what was called "the White Australia policy".

It was one of the major planks - if not the major plank - in the Labor Party policy-platform.

The purpose of the White Australia policy was to keep non-European labour (particularly Asian, and specifically Chinese) out of Australia, to protect the jobs of Australian "white" workers. This was holy writ across the entire Labor movement.

(On the masthead of The Bulletin, which was a fiercely nationalistic publication, was the magazine's motto: "Australia for the White Man, China for the Chow".)