This is a transcript of the talk SANDRA JOBSON prepared to deliver to the D.H. Lawrence and New Worlds Conference in Taos. Unfortunately, due to illness she was: unable to attend, so ROBERT DARROCH delivered her talk in her absence. The Editor of the UK D.H. Lawrence Journal asked for a copy of her paper and has now accepted it for publication in the Journal.



As a young reporter on a Sydney newspaper, I used to do the shipping round. This entailed going out on to the Harbour in a launch to meet ocean liners before they docked.

We would hove to at the stern of the boat and climb up a precarious rope ladder to the deck where the captain would greet us and take us down to the first class saloon where we would interview movie stars and authors at their breakfast tables. I recalled those shipboard visits when I was reading the Perth Daily News about the arrival of D.H. Lawrence at Fremantle, Western Australia, on the Orsova on May 4, 1922.

A stringer for the News had gone out to the Orsova (as 1 myself had done years later) as it arrived at the mouth of the Swan River and had interviewed the famous Theosophist, Annie Besant, and also the English writer, D.H. Lawrence. The stringer's name was Mrs Zabel. She was also the owner of the Booklovers' Library in Hay Street, Perth, which Lawrence was to frequent dur- ing his two-week stay in Western Australia. Afterreading Mrs Zabel's item about Lawrences l decided to retrace Lawrence's time in Western Australia as if 1 were a reporter again. I would go to all the places he went to and track down the descend- ants of people he met. It was to prove an exciting and worthwhile exercise because 1 made a number of new discoveries about Lawrence, one of which is the identity of the woman he based at least the out-ward characteristics of Victoria Callcott in Kangaroo .

(Overhead map of the world was displayed) First of a11, let us look at these maps and see where Lawrence travelled.

(Overhead ofAustralia and the United States) As you can see, Australia is a continent roughly the same size as the US.

But there the similarities end. For, unlike North America which has a fertile interior, with a very large population, Australia is largely a flat, dry, uninhabited desert and its population today of around 18 million is still tiny compared with the US. In 1922, when Lawrence arrived in Western Australia from Ceylon, the capital city of Western Australia, Perth, was little more than a large country town. The total population of Australia in 1 922 was only just over five-and-a-half million. The population of Western Australia was 341 462 and the population of Perth was a mere 161,770.

Nevertheless, Western Australia and tiny Perth, founded by a close-knit group of free settler pioneer amilies in 1827, prided themselves as being a cut above other Australian States which had started out as penal colonies.

Pioneer families such as Burt, Leake. Hare,Waldeck and Durack dominated Perth society. as they do to this day. Lawrence was to meet a number of members of these leading families during his time in Western Australia.

It was a very English society - many of the families sent their children back to England to be educated, and would have called England "home''. They looked down their noses at the East Coast of Australia. As Mollie Skinner, cc-author with Lawrence of The Boy in the Bush, said: "As a people of a free settlement founded for the most part by members of the British landed gentry and respectable farmers, they had no great desire to associate with a mixed bag of jumped up "other aiders.''

I shall concentrate on this close-knit and inter-related circle rather than repeat what is already well-known and well-documented about Lawrence's dealings with William Seibenhaar. Katherine Susannah Pritchard and a number of other Perth literary luminaries.

Let us start at Fremantle at the mouth of the Swan River where Lawrence and Frieda were about to disembark from the Orsova. Fremantle. the port for Perth, is situated at the mouth of the Swan River, so named after the black swans the first settlers discovered there. Lawrence, standing on the deck of the Orsova, would have seen a busy little port town with 19th century warehouses, banks and business houses.

The Perth Daily News stringer, Mrs Zabel, being a bookshop owner, was au fait with Lawrence's work and had probably been tipped off that he was on board the Orsova by her friend, Mrs Jenkins.

Mrs Zabel duly recounted in the Daily News that Lawrence had thoughts of settling down on the south coast of Western Australia in the apple-growing countryside.

Waiting on the wharf for Lawrence and Frieda to disembark was Mrs Jenkins. Her real names were Annie Louisa but she was known to close friends and family as "Pussy''.

In his volume in the Cambridge edition biography of Lawrence, The Dying Game 1922-1930, David Ellis calls her "Anna'' (as does a reference to her in the Collected Letters). However, she was actually called Annie not Anna - as her birth certificate indicates, and her family confirmed this when 1 interviewed them.

Ellis also refers to her as being "wealthy''. This, 1 discovered, was not quite the case. She came from a wealthy family, but, as we shall see, she herself was not well-off, which is why she had travelled second-class on the Osterley from Naples to Colombo when she had met Lawrence and Frieda, who had been seated at her table.

A warm-hearted, lively red-haired widow in her mid-forties, Pussy Jenkins was a member of one of the most illustrious Perth pioneer families, the Burts, who in turn were closely related to the Leakes. Sir Archibald Paull Burt, Pussy's grandfather, was the first Chief Justice of Western Australia and Lieutenant-Governor. His seventh son, Septimus, Pussy's father, was the first Attorney General after the establishment of responsible government in Western Australia. (To this day, the Burts are a legal family.)

She regularly travelled by boat to London, partly to visit her son who had gone to school at an English public school, Repton, and had established himself later in London as a lawyer. She also visited her close friend the Australian composer, Percy Grainger. And she was something of a "cricket groupie'' and liked travelling with the Australian cricket team when it set off to play in the Old Country.

Pussy and Lawrence and Frieda had become well acquainted during the trip from Naples to Ceylon. It was Pussy who had suggested Lawrence might like to journey on from Ceylon to Australia, and she had given him her family mansion Strawberry Hill in Perth as an address for his numerous correspondents.

Lawrence's mail, which she no doubt brought with her down to the wharf, very probably included a letter from someone inviting him to come over to Sydney on the east coast for Lawrence never again mentioned any thought of settling in the apple-growing country south of Perth. Indeed, he had completely changed his mind about his travel plans and was planning to sail to Sydney within a fortnight.

Pussy Jenkins led the Lawrences to the Burt family's chauffeur-driven car and they set off for Perth where she had booked them in to the Savoy Hotel in Hay Street. I had always wondered why Pussy Jenkins had not invited the Lawrences to stay at Strawberry Hill.

But when I tracked down and interviewed Pussy's great niece, Mary Brazier (nee Burt, who, by the way. llives in Leake Avenue in a Perth suburb), she explained why Pussy happened to be travelling second class and why she couldn't put up Lawrence and Frieda at Strawberry Hill.

The problem was that by 1922 Pussy was somewhat down on her luck. In her youth she had been a promising pianist, and the family, tired of hearing her incessant practising, built her a little bungalow in the grounds of Strawberry Hill where she could play to her heart's content. The family had nicknamed the bungalow the "Dugout''.

Because nice girls from upper-class families didn't become professional musicians, Pussy was destined to marry someone fairly prominent. which she did in Perth's Anglican cathedral in 1895. Her husband was Arthur George Jenkins, son of Sir George Henry Jenkins, clerk of the Victorian parliament. Arthur George Jenkins. at the time of his marriage to Pussy, was a lawyer practising in the goldfields town of Coolgardie, where he was soon to become the Mayor. After her marriage, Pussy went to live in Coolgardie and became part of Coolgardie society. It is likely that, being musical she joined the Coolgardie German vocal society, the Leidertafel, where she would have met a young basso, Charles Rosenthal, who was to became a prominent general in the Australian Army in World War 1 and later led a secret army style organization very similar to the secret army portrayed by Lawrence in Kangaroo. After their stint in Coolgardie, Pussy and her husband and young family returned to live in Perth. But. as Pussy's great-nephew, and brother of Mazy Brazier, Sir Francis Burt (recently Chief Justice and Lieutenant-Governor), wrote in a letter to me, Mr Jenkins mysteriously disappeared from the scene some years before his death in 1917.

Nobody can recall what actually happened. but Pussy found herself in financial straits. She was forced to sell their house at Cottesloe (close to where William Seibenhaar lived) and her mother offered to let her live in the "Dugout'', her modest little bungalow in the grounds of the big house. This was far too small a place to invite Lawrence and Frieda to stay. As for the chauffeur-driven car, Pussy had no doubt persuaded her mother to allow her the use of it for the day that Lawrence and Frieda arrived. Pussy used it to take Lawrence and Frieda to the Savoy Hotel in Hay Street, where she had booked a room for them. Lawrence quickly realized that this hotel was far beyond his budget, so the next day Pussy again borrowed the Burt car and took the Lawrences out to Darlington, a hill resort about 15 mites east of Perth, where another of her relatives, Mollie Skinner (whose great-grandfather was George Leake's elder brother, Luke), ran a guesthouse-cum-convalescent home called "Leithdale'', patronized by her friends and relatives who recovered there from scar-
let fever and other ailments, and enjoyed their school holidays in the relatively cool mountain air. On their way to Darlington in the Burt car, Pussy Jenkins asked the chauffeur to stop and pick up a friend of hers, Eva May Gawler, another member of a pioneering Perth family, the Waldecks. Like Pussy, Eva May, now widowed, had fallen on hard times and had started a millinery business.

Eva May Gawler might have been down on her luck, but she didn't lack confidence and was soon quizzing Lawrence on his need to be continually travelling from one place to another. Why couldn't he simply stay in one room and write? she demanded. Lawrence was uncharacteristically non-plussed by her question. At "Leithdale", a large. single-storeyed Victorian house with a wide verandah with iron-lace railings, Mollie Skinner decided to seat the Lawrences at the same table as a honeymoon couple, Eustace Cohen. an architect, and his bride, Maudie (who also happened to be convalescing from a broken leg caused by falling down a lift shaft a few days before her wçdding). Lawrence obviously quizzed Maudie, for 1 discovered that it is her family history that he used for the character of Victoria Callcott in Kangaroo.

P r e v i o u s l y, scholars had been deflected from the truth by the mention in Kangaroo that Victoria's family came from a farm "down the south coast'' . This was thought to refer to the south coast of New South Wales - on the east coast of Australia - not the south coast of Western Australia. Thus many possible but incorrect, candidates for the basis of the character Victoria had been suggested.

My Perth contact, Mary Brazier, not only had her Burt ancestry but she had married a Brazier, and because of this I was able to make contact with Maudie Cohen's (nee Brazier) relatives. Thus I was able to track down Maudie's youngest sister Gwen Fitzharding and Eustace and Maudie Cohen's son, Gresley, who each gave me some very useful information.

They told me Maudie had "warm brown eyes'', and that her father, Major Noel Brazier, had been a surveyor in Victoria before moving to Western Australia where he established a dairy farm on the coast south of Perth. He had taken the "cream of the South West's young men'' to the First World War and had been shot in the eye at Galipoli.

Maudie's mother, Edith Maude nee Hardwick. was from Somerset in England and had produced nine children, of whom Maudie was the eldest.

If these details are starting to rling bells, let me quote from Kangaroo:
Richard Somers asks Victoria Callcott:
"Was your home in Sydney?''

She replies:

"No. on the South Coast - dairy farming. No, my father was a surveyor, so was his father before him...then he gave it up and started this farm down south.''

And further down the page, Victoria speaks about her mother: "she came from Somerset. Yes she died about five years ago. Then I was mother of the family. Yes, I am the eldest except Alfred.''

Lawrence's sojourn at "Leithdale" produced other far-reaching results. He wandered down the road one evening and found himself amongst tall, eeriewhite gum trees. This experience terrified him and is described in Kangaroo. Indeed, much of the descriptions of the bush in Kangaroo are not of the east coast bush, which is more scrubby than that of Western Australia.

His friendship with Mollie Skinner, as we all know, produced The Boy in the Bush. But later Lawrence worked on another of Mollie's manuscripts featuring a bush nurse and her experiences in a min- ing town in Western Australia, which Lawrence re- named Eve in the Land of Nod, and to which he made extensive alterations and changes, many of which Mollie refused to accept.

One example is that he changed the case from the first person to the third, naming the protagonist "Evelynne'' instead of Mollie's "l''.

She then crossed out his corrections, and, to this day, the manuscript languishes in the Battye Library in Perth, waiting to be published (although a member of the D.H. Lawrence Society of Australia, Stephen O'Connor, is currently beginning work on editing it).

Although, in my opinion, it is not a very good piece of literature, Eve in the Land of Nod is nonethelcss worth resuscitating if merely to see bow Lawrence shaped and edited it, although parts of it where she describes the down-and-out patients in the little bush hospital, and the comings and goings of the local Aborigines, are quite vividly-written, and worth publishing.

And finally, the Rosenthal connection. When Charles Rosenthal ended his stay in the gold mining town of Coolgardie years before he rose to become a general in the First World War, he decided to ride a bicycle across that huge, flat, desert that stretches over 3.000 kilometers between Perth and Melbourne. Moreover. it was one of those old-fashioned bicycles that didn't even have tyres. If Pussy Jenkins had met such a determined young man during her time in Coolgardie, and if she had kept in touch with him subsequently, she would have known that in l 922 he published a journal called the King and Empire.

Just as she gave Lawrence an introductory letter to a journalist on the weekly Sydney-based Bulletin, in the hope that Lawrence might find some income from writing for it, might she not have also given Lawrence a letter of introduction to Charles Rosenthal?

Acknowledgements:

1 would like to thank Mary Brazier, her brother, Sir Francis Burt; Ann Archer, Battye Library, the Cohen family, the former owners of Leithdale; the people of Darlington; Mollie Skinner's niece. Dot Muir, and Elsie Gare of Fremantle.

-Sandra Jobson