Lawrence may not - in fact did not - intend it as such, but that is what it turned out to be.

The King and Empire Alliance - and particularly its secret-army inner-core, "the garage" - was, by any definition, a fascist organisation. (No wonder the Friend family are so reluctant to be associated with it, even though of course they were up to their necks in it.)

The Alliance's leadership - and in particular Jack Scott - acknowledged its anti-democratic and illegal nature ("red-hot treason" Callcott called it), as did Lawrence himself. The following exchange in Kangaroo gets as close to classical fascism as is possible without the traditional salute and click of the heels:

 

"…we jolly well know you can't keep a country going on the vote-catching system" [said Callcott] "…ideal democratic liberty is an exploded ideal" [Somers responded, adding:] "You've got to have wisdom and authority somewhere, and you can't get it out of any further democracy."

 

 

Scott and Rosenthal - together with Herbert Brookes, Brigadier-General Macarthur-Onslow, Colonel Hinton, Sir Henry Braddon, George Augustine Taylor, and all the others along the line (including Gerald Hum, members of the Friend family, and probably most of the Kings School's old-boys), were prospective bedfellows with people like Eric Campbell, Sir Oswald Mosley, and, had it come to it, probably Marshal Pétain too.

Humphrey McQueen's "mad psychiatrist", Bill Richards, believed that there was in Australia in the years running up to WW2 a Vichy element that was prepared to surrender Australia below the "Brisbane Line" to the invading Japanese [see my 21/8/76 entry in my Secret Army Research notes].

In WW2 Jack Scott was named as a possible Japanese collaborator in a prosecution involving PR "Inky" Stephnsen, who was interned in 1940 because of his association with an Australian fascist group, the Australia First Movement.

(Somewhat ironically, it was Stephensen who gave Kangaroo an almost "rave review" in a newspaper in Brisbane 1924, and who later in London, when he ran the Franfrolico Press, published a book of Lawrence's paintings. Today, one wonders which part of the novel "Inky" most admired.)