When he wrote to Mabel Dodge on June 9, he had prefaced his assertion that nobody knew who he was with these words: "I want you please not [his emphasis] to tell anybody we are coming [to Taos]. I want to be really apart from most people - same as here."

He explained the reason for this "anonymity" in a letter written the same day to his American publisher, Seltzer: "I should very much like to write an American novel, after this Australian one: on something the same lines."

In Perth he had not kept his literary identity a secret. Far from it. He had held court in Mrs Zabel's Booklovers Library. Much of what was then literary Perth knew he was there, and many had made an effort to meet him. He was something of a local celebrity.

By the time he reached Sydney, however, he had decided to write a novel based on his new diary technique. (He apparently made that decision on the Malwa, either just before, or just after, the boat stopped in Melbourne.)

And for that to work, those he would be meeting must not know who he was or what he was doing (else he would lose the "spontaneity" or ingenuousness he was hoping to "tap into", or exploit).

The only news of the arrival in Sydney of a "literary lion" (OK, cub) was a small paragraph in The Bulletin, which was much more interested in the other two celebrities who had recently turned up in Sydney - Agatha Christie, the young author of the Mysterious Affair at Styles, and Annie Besant, the travelling celebrity Theosophist.

(How did The Bulletin know of Lawrence's arrival in Sydney? Probably via a letter Mrs Jenkins wrote to Bulletin staffer Bert Toy alerting him to the imminent arrival in Sydney of the English author, and the likelihood that Lawrence would be in touch re some writing work. Toy must have wondered why Lawrence did not contact him.)

As long as Lawrence avoided contact with the local intelligencia and literary elite, he probably felt he would be safe to go about his writing business, in literary mufti.

When Fred Esch interviewed the daughter of the local estate agent who let "Wyewurk" to the Lawrences, she told him: "My mother, Mrs. Alfred Callcott, did not know Lawrence was [an] author until she made a visit to Wyewurk soon after he left the cottage, and found a number of English magazines [that revealed who he was]."