Geoffrey Dutton - poet, author, publisher, and eminent all-round man-of-letters - was enamoured of Lawrence from an early age, and even made a pilgrimage to the Villa Mirenda near Florence where Lawrence had written Lady Chatterley's Lover.

In his autobiography Out in the Open, Dutton claimed to be the only person who had read the collected works of DH Lawrence while flying an aircraft. (As a very young pilot in WWII, flying a Wackett Trainer, Dutton discovered that a book could be balanced on the cowl above the instruments, and propped again the windscreen.)

For John Douglas Pringle, a Scot who came to Australia in the 1950s and later became editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Kangaroo was a "masterpiece".

In his much-acclaimed 1958 book, Australian Accent, Pringle devotes his second chapter to Kangaroo. Pringle was certain about Lawrence's importance to Australian life and literature.

Pringle praised Lawrence's "faultless" observations in Kangaroo of the landscape and the bush: what Lawrence called "the spirit of place". Pringle also believed that Lawrence had got to the heart of the Australian character, diagnosing a "vast emptiness or indifference in the core of each man".

One of the few Australian artists to actually gain access to "Wyewurk" was Paul Delprat, who was also inspired by Lawrence and Kangaroo.

He went down to Thirroul and "Wyewurk" several times, the first in 1976 (when he created a series of 20 pen-and-wash illustrations for one of Robert Darroch's articles about Lawrence and Kangaroo published in The Australian colour magazine).

On a later visit Paul stationed himself in Craig Street, opposite Number 3, "Wyewurk", and was completing a sketch he had done of the street-side of the famous bungalow, in preparation for a painting (see below):

 

Paul Delprat's painting of "Wyewurk", from the "street-side" of Craig Street
in Thirroul (at least delegates to the 2011 DH Lawrence conference in Sydney
saw the back-fence of Lawrence's "cottage by the sea")

Paul explains: "An occupant from the house noticed me painting and took time to examine my work. I told him that I was an artist from Sydney, and that I was interested in DHL. He offered to let me view the interior of the house and the garden. I was invited to walk through to the front of the bungalow, down the steps, and across the lawn facing the sea, to the cliff edge. It was just as Lawrence had described it."

Delprat's 1976 series (see previous pages) had depicted a number of scenes from Kangaroo, showing the Lawrence/Somers figure bathing in the sea, walking in the bush, watching a football match, and writing at the jarrah table which Paul saw with his own eyes - as had Whiteley and Shead two decades earlier - the day he was invited into "Wyewurk" (see his 1976 painting above).

"Having read much of his work, I believe I am able to say that I am 'Lawrentian' in the sense that I have been affected, as have so many others, by his poetic vision, and by Kangaroo."

What other literary text could have inspired so many significant Australian works-of-art, or had such an influence on Australian culture?