Major-General Sir Charles Rosenthal - Lawrence's physical model for
Benjamin Cooley, the secret-army leader in Kangaroo. (Note his "close-set eyes", referred to by Lawrence.)

THE SECOND-LAST loose-end that remains to be tidied up, before we can reach some finality to the Mystery of Kangaroo, is where Lawrence obtained the name of his main Australian character in the novel - Benjamin Cooley, the "Kangaroo" of the title.

(That, after all, is a major objective of The Quest for Cooley.)

On February 13, 2002, I received another letter from Andrew Moore. He had been tidying up his papers and had come across something he thought might interest me.

It was an article that had been written 10 years earlier and published in The Australian Planner [University of NSW, 1993] - as an unlikely a Lawrence source as you could possibly imagine (although the last piece of Lawrence's before he died appeared in a Swedish architecture journal).

The article Andrew had found had been written by a lecturer in (of all things) town-planning at (of all places) the University of New England at Armidale, in northern NSW. Her name was Elizabeth Kenworthy Teather.

Her article certainly had a title that would have attracted Andrew's interest. It was headed "The Taylors, Sir Charles Rosenthal and protofascism in the 1920s".

The article (its introduction explained) "summarises the evidence that George and Florence Taylor, prominent advocates of town planning in NSW...had fascist views and connections".

Much of the political content in the article turned out to have been derived from things either Andrew or I had written earlier. However, Elizabeth Kenworthy Teather did have something fresh.

Apparently, in the course of doing research on the Taylors - a husband-and-wife team who were prominent in architectural and planning circles in Sydney in the 1920s - she had come across a novel written in 1915 by George Augustine Taylor called The Sequel.

What attracted her attention - being familiar with what Andrew and I had written - was that in the novel there is a character called Cooley.

The Sequel is a somewhat picaresque tale set in WW1 which mentions, among other things, a secret para-military force that might be organised to take on the socialist element in society - the organised working-class.

It most definitely had, as Elizabeth Kenworthy Teather remarked, fascist overtones (see more about The Sequel and Taylor's fascist tendencies below).

In her 1993 article, Teather wrote: "Did someone - maybe Rosenthal - lend Lawrence a copy of The Sequel? Did Lawrence find a copy in the library he is known to have used at Thirroul? Or is it a coincidence?"

Good questions. It was certainly no coincidence. But before we try to answer her questions/speculations, we can bring the Taylors much closer to the action in Kangaroo.