In Australia in 1922, novelist DH Lawrence had a number of nightmares that were to haunt his novel, Kangaroo, which he started writing in the coastal village of Thirroul in May, and completed in Taos in America four months later. The most famous one provided a chapter ("The Nightmare") in his Australian novel, touched off by a scarifying encounter with the leader of the secret army Lawrence ran across in Sydney. "It was as if the silvery freedom...