PREFACE

 

Lawrence, photographed by Dennis Forrester in July 1922 in the front garden of "Wyewurk" (Lawrence is probably translating Giovanni Verga)

 

WHEN I STARTED what became a project that lasted almost four decades, it did occur to me at the outset to think what sort of book it might eventually make.

In August 1974 my wife Sandra wrote to Dr David Farmer, then the assistant director of the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) in Austin, Texas (where we had undertaken the initial research for Sandra's biography of Lady Ottoline Morrell).

"The book on Ottoline is now virtually completed," she told him. "I have two new projects in mind. The first is a short-term idea which my husband and I will collaborate on. We would like to do a fairly small book or monograph on D.H. Lawrence in Australia: his stay there, its influences on him, and the work he did there…we plan to finish [it] within 12 months".

Well, it has turned out to be a monograph, of sorts. But it took longer than 12 months to complete.

When in 1976 the research started in earnest, I discussed the form the eventual book might take with a leading Sydney barrister, Edward St John QC, (whom I was helping with some problems he was having with some Sydney right-wing extremists called, wonderfully, The Sinless Perfectionists).

Ted suggested I might emulate AJA Symons, whose biography The Quest for Corvo is regarded as a masterpiece of biographical writing. He had a point. The quest for the truth about Lawrence and Kangaroo is almost as interesting - certainly a saga in itself - as the truth itself.

Its content is a distillation of, and elaboration on, a research diary that I have kept from 1976 to the present day, and which records what happened during the search for the truth about Kangaroo, from day-to-day, week-to-week, decade-to-decade. (That diary - entitled "Kangaroo's Secret Army Research notes" - can be accessed on our DH Lawrence Society of Australia website, http://www.dhlawrencesocietyaustralia.com.au )

I believe the traditional form of the book, in the Gutenberg sense, is dying. Bookshops are ailing, libraries are on the verge of becoming obsolete - book mausoleums - and so the written word, if it is to go forward, must find new forms and formats more suited to the digital age.

Thus I have tried with this "monograph" to explore the possibilities that the future is demanding of us writers. It is my hope that its unorthodox form, and format, will make it easier and more pleasant to read, in these information-saturated days.

Robert Darroch

Bondi, 2013

 

NB - As this monograph/book is written for both an academic and a non-academic audience, I have decided not to burden the text with footnotes or endnotes (for, given the amount of research it involved, citations would clutter it up no end). If anyone, from either world, has a query about a particular source I have relied on, I am happy to provide it. I can be contacted via our website, http://www.dhlawrencesocietyaustralia.com.au

 

Illustrations by courtesy of Paul Delprat, Garry Shead, and the estates of Sir Sidney Nolan, Brett Whiteley, Howard Ashton, Grace Cossington-Smith, George Molnar, and the family of Dennis Forrester. The cover illustration, "Kangaroo", is a depiction by Sidney Nolan of the Australian author Patrick White, and is one of his 1982 Kangaroo series - see below.

Click HERE to view the online version of this e-book.

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