Echoes of home in Oz

WE’LL soon bid a sad farewell to DH Lawrence in Australia, and his great compelling post-war novel Kangaroo, written in a torrent of creativity a century ago, in 1922.

This book looks back to wartime England, too. The Nightmare chapter fictionalises our Lawrences being hounded from idyllic exile in Cornwall, suspected of spying for German by paranoid police and officials. Chesty Lawrence faced undignified health examinations. Could he be conscripted? Or otherwise serve?

At Derby barracks sneering “puppy doctors” gave him humiliating genital and rectal checks. May their eyes “burst”, hands “wither”, hearts “rot”, he cursed, hating the Midlands, the North, the lot!

But soon it’s “like Hardy’s Woodlanders”. Our resilient pair head south west, gathering chestnuts, picking bilberries, collecting “flakes of sweet, pale gold oak”. One senses some survivor guilt – the real nightmare’s mass slaughter at the front.

Back in Oz, there’s a row in town. A riot in fact! At Sydney’s Canberra Hall. Willie Struthers speaks passionately for solidarity between Australian Labour and the world’s workers. Fascistic Diggers start a frenzied fight. Shots ring out. Kangaroo bellows, wounded in the belly. An anarchist’s bomb goes boom! Jack Calcott busts skulls with an iron bar. Brutalised, made bloodlusty by war, murder’s “as natural as lying with a woman”.

Kangaroo dies with Richard Somers refusing to surrender to his “vast white strangling octopus of love”.

On the moonlit shore, the foam rushes like “hissing” snakes. ■■100 years ago, on July 24, 1922, Lawrence receives Achsah Brewster’s letter (sent from Switzerland), replying immediately. He’s glad she’s “rejoicing among the meadows”. Commenting on Louis Berman’s book about Glands Regulating Personality, which Mabel Sterne sent, he says supplying “pituitrin and adrenalin to make a race of supermen is just as absurd as any other panacea”.

Achsah’s artist husband Earl would find “Australia a very attractive landscape to paint”. A gale’s made the sea “loud and hoarse”. He’s “written a sort of novel here” – Kangaroo – but says: “You won’t care for it at all.” If he stayed in Australia he “could pass quite out of the world... really go bush”! “But there is still some fight to fight, I suppose.”

Frieda’s completed the colourful “very nice: shimmery and silky” Buddha embroidery.

They’ll “be penniless” when they reach Taos. He’s learning Spanish, “ready for the Mexicans”