ABSTRACT

On 18 January 1915 Lawrence wrote to William Hopkin: “I want to gather together about twenty souls and sail away from this world of war and squalor and found a little colony” (ii. 259). In Chapter 2 I discussed the importance of what Lawrence came to call his idea of community, Rananim. In The Boy in the Bush, published in 1924, we find an exploration of the quest for this vision in fictional form. Jack Grant asserts that in the north-west of Western Australia he “wanted to make a place on earth for a few aristocrats-to-the-bone” (BB, 308:12–13).