The man who wasn't there - Captain (later Major) GA Taylor (left - he was
quite short of stature, but dapper), discussing military matters with another
officer at an annual militia camp in outer Sydney

WHEN I SAID above that Rosenthal and Scott were the two leaders of the secret army that Lawrence encountered in Sydney in May-June 1922, I had left out their organisation's eminence gris, the principal ideologue of the King & Empire Alliance - George Augustine Taylor.

While Taylor left Sydney a week before Lawrence arrived, his influence pervades the novel. The words and ideas that Lawrence puts into the mouth of Cooley in the novel reflect, to a significant extent, the views of George Augustine Taylor, as advanced in The Sequel.

The Sequel is a diatribe, set at the beginning of WW1, against what he calls "the Humanists" - by which the author meant organised labour. Its "hero" (the aviator Lieutenant Jefson) fears a post-war future dominated by State socialism (which he says had already begun to take over Australia, with State bakeries, State brickworks, and other socialist enterprises).

What was needed Taylor, proselytised in The Sequel, was a capitalistic force that could recapture the "civilised" world from the disasters, the chaos, that would inevitably follow the rule of the working-class. (This was written before the Russian revolution, which event would have alarmed Taylor even more.)

In The Sequel he indicated that his "capitalistic force" would have a secret semi-military (or para-military) core what would have the ability to descend on meetings of "the Humanists" from helicopters (then yet to be properly invented) and wreak some harm on them.

I quote extracts from The Sequel:

 

...men with more highly developed inventive faculties [Taylor, of course, pictured himself as one of these folk], men who wished to cultivate the spirit that inspires the human to ever excel, met in mysterious places and plotted...They felt that the time must inevitably arrive when the unnatural social position the Humanists adopted must overbalance itself, hence they prepared for the impending cataclysm...the spark of invention shone brightly in many covert places...Inventive genius concentrated upon two objectives: first, an ideal method of secret communication between followers; and second, the most efficient fighting machine - a weapon that would only require a minimum of personnel to operate. With such a weapon, a small force, such as the Individualists numbered, would be a match for a multitude.

 

 

 

 

Taylor's "method of secret communication" was obviously wireless, of which he was a pioneer in Australia. His "efficient fighting machine" - a "weapon" that "would only require a minimum of personnel to operate" - was probably his yet-to-be-invented helicopter.

(At the time, Taylor was lobbying the Federal Government to offer a prize for the first Australian-built commercial aircraft, a condition of which competition would be that the aircraft would need to hover.)