Section 3

"CLAWS IN THE ARSE"

By Sandra Jobson Darroch

 

 

 

The "Wyewurk" diptych - left Garry Shead, right Brett Whiteley

LAWRENCE'S VISIT to Australia in 1922, and the major novel he wrote here, Kangaroo, have inspired a number of leading Australian artists and creative minds.

The novel has acted as a catalyst for their talents, producing major works. Kangaroo provides a common thread that winds through their work, and links them.

Australia's leading composer, Peter Sculthorpe, sensed an affinity with Lawrence in their mutual pantheism and love of landscape.

He first wrote a song cycle, "Sun", based on three of Lawrence's poems, and later developed this into a major work, "Irkanda IV".

The lines in Lawrence's poem

A sun will rise in me. I shall slowly resurrect, Already the whiteness of false dawn is on my inner ocean.

deeply affected Sculthorpe.

"It was in this section that I finally managed to recompose my setting of the DH Lawrence poem 'Sun in Me'. The melisma of the solo violin is a reflection of the poem. Thus, in the final bars, there is a high white C. Lawrence in his poem relates sun and atom to God and atom. The high white C, which must be the whitest note of all, represents the word 'God'."

 

Lawrence continued to inspire Sculthorpe, and in 1963 he composed a work in five movements, "The Fifth Continent". The third movement was revised in 1976 to become a smaller work, "Small Town", based on Thirroul, which he felt epitomised all old Australian country towns.

The statue of the returned Digger, which used to stand outside the School of Arts at Thirroul, and which Lawrence mentions in Kangaroo, led Sculthorpe to introduce an oboe solo, mingled with the bugle sound of the "Last Post", giving a chilling, nostalgic undercurrent to the lyrical piece.

Artist Garry Shead, too, responded to the military undercurrents in Kangaroo in his celebrated Kangaroo series of paintings and etchings.

Shead also uses the image of the Diggers' memorial, while always looming in his pictures of Lawrence and Frieda at "Wyewurk" is the mysterious, sometimes menacing, sometimes slightly comical, figure of the kangaroo.

In 2011 Sculthorpe and Shead collaborated on a DVD production using the Kangaroo series and the music of "Small Town".

Shead also collaborated with another great Australian artist who was strongly attached to, perhaps haunted by, Lawrence and Thirroul - the late Brett Whiteley.

In 1975 the two painters decided to go down to Thirroul and paint a diptych.