ABSTRACT
I hope in this study to have shown the richness and diversity of Lawrence’s engagement with Australia, and the importance of Australia in his works and in his life. In his early works, Australia, epitomised by its “bush,” figured as a strangely remote and convenient point of disappearance from the conventional world of Europe. Lawrence understood Australia’s role as a destination for British migrants hoping for a prosperous future, but was critical of the commonly held economic motives for migration. His own utopian search for Rananim was, by contrast, a spiritual quest, as well as a hope for new community. Lawrence came to see Australia as a place of great promise and his interest in Australia intensified with his “Australian period.” Beginning with The Lost Girl and ending with St. Mawr, the four-and-a-half-year period illustrates the broad shifts in Lawrence’s attitudes to Australia. While at times his imaginings of the continent, his “dark gods” and “lords of death,” are uniquely and obscurely Lawrentian, his visions and anxieties may also be seen as a response to broader discourses and concerns which occupied many modernist authors in the first decades of the twentieth century. Lawrence, perhaps more than any other author of his time, attempted to articulate human relations and relationships in terms of their degenerative or regenerative characteristics. Modern industrial society in Australia at the edge of empire, like its counterparts in England and America, ultimately failed in Lawrentian terms. It failed as an environment where people might live creatively, simply and honestly, and it failed as a site for his Rananim. Nevertheless, Lawrence’s evocations of Australian landscape are amongst his most vivid and poetic representations of place. And just as Somers in Kangaroo “wearied himself to death struggling with the problem of himself, and calling it Australia” (K, 28:19–20), D. H. Lawrence’s Australia is as much about Lawrence as it is about Australia.
