Introduction

On 30 April 1922, while on board R. M. S. Orsova sailing between Ceylon and Western Australia, D. H. Lawrence wrote to Lady Cynthia Asquith:

We’re going to Australia – heaven knows why: because it will be cooler, and the sea is wide. Ceylon steams heat – and it isn’t so much the heat as the chemical decomposition of ones [sic] blood by the ultra-violet rays of the sun. I don’t know what we’ll do in Australia – don’t care. The world of idea may be all alike, but the world of physical feeling is very different – one suffers getting adjusted, but that is part of the adventure. I think Frieda feels like me, a bit dazed and indifferent – reckless. – I break my heart over England when I am out here. Those natives are back of us – in the living sense lower than we are. But they are going to swarm over us and suffocate us. We are, have been for five centuries, the growing tip. Now we’re going to fall. But you don’t catch me going back on my whiteness and Englishness and myself. (iv. 234) ¹