Soaring Down Under
SOME chance meetings prove so productive, they seem almost pre-destined. When DH Lawrence and Frieda boarded RMS Osterley at Naples, bound for Ceylon, in February 1922, the head steward seated them at the table of Mrs Anna Jenkins, musician daughter of the attorney general for Western Australia, heading home following her trip to England.
During their first meal together, Anna told them of a book she intended reading during the voyage – Sons And Lovers. “Oh! That’s my husband’s book,” Frieda exclaimed. Anna answered questions about Australia, facilitating their visit there en route to America.
Arriving at Fremantle in May, on the same boat as social reformer Annie Besant, Anna greeted them. She showed them Perth, and the Booklovers’ Library which stocked Lawrence’s works. Amazingly, the library of Perth Mechanics Institute had copies of
Lawrence’s banned novel The Rainbow. Lawrence bought one, incognito, for five shillings!
Anna found them a room at the guest house of nurse and writer Mollie Skinner, 40 miles away at Darlington. Lawrence found it “kindly and quite lovely”. Frieda loved the “amethyst atmosphere”.
Our restless literary lion held court with his adoring German countess. Mollie found Frieda “beautiful, beaming and most fascinating”, but Lawrence seemed in “a contrary mood” following “his anguished years defying the war”.
At bedtime Mollie watched him walking alone “up the track in the brilliant moon-light” making “acquaintance with the Australian dark god”.
Lawrence analysed Mollie’s work constructively, urging she write about Australian settlers creating their homes, “falling in love with each other”, making her war-veteran brother, Jack, the hero. Mollie felt no-one would read it, that she must earn her “bread and butter” by nursing. Lawrence exploded: “You have been given the Divine Spark, and would bury it in a napkin!” He offered detailed advice on writing.
Mollie began writing The House Of Ellis. During their subsequent collaboration, Lawrence rewrote this novel as The Boy In The Bush, lifting Mollie from obscurity. ■■100 years ago, on May 15, 1922, Lawrence tells Baroness Anna how Australian air is “blue and new as if no-one had ever taken a breath from it”. They sail to Sydney arriving on May 27. Earl Brewster learns of the “hoary unending bush with a primeval ghost in it”. Lawrence quotes Flinders Petrie to Curtis Brown: “A colony is no younger than its mother-country.” He tells William Siebenhaar and Anna Jenkins of the departure, arranging a farewell lunch at the Savoy.