So it is extremely odd - and, I would submit, highly indicative - that, in his harangue, Struthers advocates the introduction of "coloured" labour into Australia:

"What's the scare about being mixed up with Brother Brown and Chinky and all the rest: the Indians in India, the niggers in the Transvaal, for instance? Aren't we tight mixed up with them as it is? Aren't we in one box with them, in this Empire business? Aren't we all children of the same noble Empire, brown, black, white, green, or whatever colour we may be?"

This is not the sort of rhetoric that you would expect an Australian union leader - or any Australian political leader for that matter - to say to a crowd of workers in Sydney in 1922, unless...

...unless that union/political leader happened to be sympathetic to the ideals of the IWW - the Industrial Workers of the World, the "Wobblies".

"Jock" Garden was just such a union leader (moreover, he had just, the year before, formed the Australian Communist Party, which also advocated solidarity with "the world's workers").

Now listen to what Struthers says in his "A Row in Town" speech:

"Join hands with the workers of the world: just a fist-grip, as a token and a pledge. Take nobody to your bosom - a worker hasn't got a bosom. He's got a fist, to work with, to hit with, and lastly, to give the tight grip of fellowship to his fellow-workers and fellow-mates, no matter what colour or country he belongs to. The World's Workers - and since they ARE the world, let them take their own, and not leave it all to a set of silly playboys and Hebrews who are not only silly but worse. The World's Workers - we, who are the world's millions, the world is our world. Let it be so, then. And let us so arrange it."

 

 

Those words in Sydney in June-July 1922 could have issued from only one mouth - that of "Jock" Garden.

In the novel Lawrence has Somers going to the Trades Hall (which he transposes to "Canberra House", no doubt via a place-switch from the Canberra Flats at 51 Murdoch Street, Cremorne [Canberra Flats=Canberra House]) in the Haymarket to meet and talk to "Willie" Struthers, who offers him a job as editor of their Labor newspaper.

Lawrence describes the environs of the building accurately:

Jaz took Somers to the famous Canberra House, in Sydney, where the Socialists and Labour people had their premises: offices, meeting-rooms, club-rooms, quite an establishment. There was a lively feeling about the place, in spite of various down-at-heel malcontents who stood about in the passage and outside on the pavement.

 

While I was working in London, John Ruffels tried to find out more about "Jock" Garden.

Among other inquiries, he contacted Frank Hardy, a left-wing writer in Melbourne (who wrote Power Without Glory [self-published, Melbourne 1950], a fictionalised biography of John Wren, a Victorian Labor power-broker in the between-wars period).

Ruffels asked Hardy if he himself knew anything about "Jock" Garden and Kangaroo. (In Power without Glory, the Wren figure is portrayed as being close to Archbishop Mannix, and thus anti-conscription - and so Herbert Brookes's sworn enemy.)

In a letter dated 16/2/83, Hardy told Ruffels that he remembered a conversation he had with "Jock" Garden around 1947-48, when he was researching Power Without Glory. In the course of the conversation the question of Lawrence and Kangaroo came up.

In his letter to Ruffels, Hardy wrote: "Garden told me that Lawrence had visited the Trades Hall while in Sydney asking questions about the political situation." He added that the memory of what Garden had said to him was now very vague, but he thought that Garden did recall that Lawrence had shown some interest in the political position of the returned soldiers.

Garden's biographer, Arthur Hoyle, also told Ruffels in March 1983 that he was "reasonably certain" that the character Struthers in Kangaroo had in fact been based on "Jock" Garden.