One of Garry Shead's Kangaroo series

 

BY THE EARLY 1990s we had a number of leads, not all of them in Sydney, that needed following up.

I had become particularly interested in Lawrence's time in Ceylon. It was there that he made the decision to go on to his ultimate destination - Taos in New Mexico - via Australia, rather than "doubling back" to Europe and travelling west to America.

Kangaroo was the consequence of that decision.

I was also interested in what happened when Lawrence stopped off in Perth, on his way through to Sydney.

It was well known, from Nehls and other sources, including Lawrence's letters, that in Western Australia he met a nurse, Mollie Skinner, who ran a boarding-house-cum-convalescent-home in the hills outside Perth.

Lawrence and Frieda had stayed there for about a week before catching the boat eastwards to Sydney.

Miss Skinner had ambitions to be a writer. She had already written an account of her time as a nurse during the war. She showed it to Lawrence, along with another, partly-finished work of fiction, which he urged her to complete. He offered to help her.

(At this point in his writing career, Lawrence - frustrated by his inability to write a new novel - was exploring the possibility of collaborating with other people in a novel-writing project...of taking someone else's text and using his writing skills to turn it into something worthwhile.)

Later they collaborated on Lawrence's "other" Australian novel, The Boy in the Bush, which Lawrence extensively re-wrote, and which was published a few years later [Secker/Seltzer, London & New York 1924] under both their names.

Another Australian Lawrence scholar, Dr Paul Eggert, edited this work for the CUP edition [CUP, Cambridge 1990], and in doing so made a number of useful discoveries about Lawrence's time in Western Australia.

I was grateful, for example, for his insight that the incident in Kangaroo, when "Jack Callcott" coughs up a bullet, had in fact derived from Perth, and the husband of the local socialist writer, Katharine Susannah Prichard.

As it turned out, that was not the only input in Lawrence's Australian novel Kangaroo that derived from Western Australia.