Aspects of Degeneration in Kangaroo – “A Novel, Shot with a Wayward Beauty”

Lawrence wrote the bulk of Kangaroo in “only six weeks” (K, xxxv), and much of the novel’s power derives from its innovative style and autobiographical immediacy. In Kangaroo, the vision of a “working man’s paradise,” ¹ mentioned in the previous chapter, and which had coloured perceptions of Australia in the late nineteenth century, has been realised – to the nation’s detriment. We find a young Australia still connected to its recent colonial past whose inhabitants display a strange mix of arrogance and uncertainty. In Kangaroo, rather than presenting a new world society as a home of fresh ideas and exemplary vision, Lawrence evokes an Australia that is inward looking, fearful and quietly slipping backwards. Australia’s culture is stagnant to the point of degeneration. It is only in the non-European Australian landscape, which the protagonist Richard Somers struggles at first to perceive, that the novel offers the possibility of promise.