Andrew followed up that invitation immediately, phoned Yeend, and went to see him at Parramatta.

Yeend told him that NH Wright (Walter Friend's brother-in-law) had told him that "Lawrence, the Lady Chatterley's author, had used material about 'a pseudo-military movement' in his Australia novel Kangaroo".

Wright had told Yeend that he had gleaned this in a conversation with Walter Friend at either the Imperial Services Club or the Schools Club in town.

When Andrew passed this information on to me, I remarked in my diary: "...so Walter, the dirty dog, knew all along! This must be the clue that unlocks it all. Ferrets scattering in all directions. Exciting days, exciting hours!"

Andrew suggested that I contact Yeend myself.

The date of Yeend's interview with Wright especially interested me. It had been (Yeend told Andrew) on the 26th of May, 1974. This was a year before Sandra and I returned to Australia after Ottoline was published, and two years before my first article on Lawrence and Kangaroo was published in The Australian (so, as Andrew observed, this was information "untainted" by anything I had subsequently uncovered or written).

I wrote to Yeend, introducing myself, and enclosing a recent article I had written for Rananim on Lawrence's movements in Sydney in May-August 1922.

He replied on May 22, 1994:

Your article hangs together well but you desperately need to link [Lawrence's activities] to the Friends. Again one has to ask why does it have to be Walter Friend? His father and several brothers have equal claims.

 

He went on:

Now my predicament is that as Archivist I cannot allow access to the Friend material any more, yet I do hold a strong piece of evidence which your thesis needs.

He offered to approach the Friend family to see if they would grant permission for me to see "the strong piece of evidence", using what he described as "the greater good" argument.

Meanwhile, while he was trying to move the Friends, he did his best, in a correspondence that lasted several years, to provide me with some clues derived from what turned out to be an old-boy memoir he had received from the member of the Friend family who had, apparently, personally met and helped Lawrence in Sydney and Thirroul in 1922.

It was soon apparent to me that this particular Friend was "the other half" of the amalgam of Jack Callcott in Kangaroo - the person whose identity Lawrence was trying to hide behind the characterisation of Jack Scott (Scott being, as mentioned above, the "cover" for the person whose real-life persona Lawrence was more intent on "protecting").

Some months later, in one of his letters, Yeend dropped a rather indicative clue as to this person's identity, when he inadvertently referred to Scott as "Bob Scott" (or was that "slip" not-so-inadvertent?).