ABSTRACT
In Kangaroo Lawrence, for the first time, evokes an Australia that draws on his personal experience of the country. Lawrence and Frieda’s stay in Australia was short-lived – a little over three months – and Lawrence wrote the bulk of Kangaroo at Thirroul on the coast south of Sydney, completing the final chapter in America. Significantly, Lawrence in Kangaroo depicts a modern Australia existing in a global context. The novel engages the political, social and racial anxieties of the day – the rise of communism and fascism, gender relations, and the future of Britain and its empire in the post-war period. With the publication of Kangaroo, readers in England, America and Australia, notwithstanding the novel’s celebration of the Australian landscape, were presented with an Australian society characterised as urban, which contrasted sharply with the “bush” locales and themes which had hitherto predominated in Australian literature. 1 Lawrence’s Australia in Kangaroo is not the Australia of Rolf Boldrewood, Joseph Furphy, Henry Lawson, Barbara Baynton and Katharine Susannah Prichard. In her 1924 study of Australian literature, the Australian critic Nettie Palmer notes: “In an appreciation of Lawson’s stories, the English critic, Edward Garnett, said that they expressed a continent.” 2 In the light of Garnett’s comment, Kangaroo may be seen as a new, modernist expression of the Australian continent – a continent in which most people’s daily life centred around the city rather than the bush.
