The Quest for Cooley is the story of the 40-year search for the identity of the real life figure that DH Lawrence portrayed as the Australian political leader Benjamin Cooley in his 1923 Australian novel, Kangaroo. Through his intensive research in Australia and overseas, Robert Darroch, a former investigative journalist on The Bulletin, discovered that Lawrence ran across an actual secret army in Sydney in 1922, and unmasked it in his novel of Australia. This is a story that many people and interests have tried to prevent coming out. It exposes the fascist underbelly - what Lawrence called "the horrible paws" - of post-WW1 Australian society and politics. This is the first volume of the author's Lawrence's 99 Days in Australia which tells the story of how the 20th-century's most controversial author came to write his most surprising work of "fiction". ROBERT DARROCH, the President of the DH Lawrence Society of Australia, is a journalist, writer and Internet practitioner. His first book about Lawrence, DH Lawrence in Australia (Macmillan Australia), was published in 1981. He and his wife Sandra now run The Svengali Press, a digital publishing company.