Overseas, Kangaroo was widely reviewed, mostly favourably. Reviews appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, the Nation and Athenaeum, the New York Times Book Review, the London Mercury, and The Dial. The TLS review was particularly perceptive, the anonymous reviewer concluding: "Here, despite its flaws, is a fine book...experimental, masterful, challenging the rules and his readers, yet compelling us to recognise that the form of the novel has been used with strength, diversity and beauty."

Later comments were less favourable. In 1948 Ian Mair in The Age [Melbourne] complained that "DH Lawrence met none of us, yet he found us hollow and shallow." In 1956 a UK critic, Peter Green, said that Kangaroo was hardly a novel at all, but "whole deserts of stultifying political discussion" in the course of which "Lawrence fails to get inside his Australian characters and understand their motives."

In 1950 Katharine Susannah Prichard, whom Lawrence had tried to help with some literary advice, wrote about the "flat disappointment" of Kangaroo. "How fatuous and absurd are yards of Somers' drivel about Australia," she said. "He failed as a writer of the first magnitude."

Perhaps the harshest criticism came in 1974 from one of Australia's leading literary figures, Professor AD Hope. In an article published in The Australian Experience [ANU Press, ed. WS Ramson] entitled "DH Lawrence's Kangaroo - How it Looks to an Australian", Hope - a practising poet as well as a professor of literature - described Kangaroo as "ignorant", "suspect", "shoddy", "slapdash", "carelessly written", "sloppy", and "a travesty". He called its secret-army plot "factitious" with "no real touches of local colour".

When an enhanced interest in Lawrence and his writing developed in England and America after WW2 - particularly after Aldington's biography, and the new Phoenix editions of his works began to appear - his reputation in Australia, and that of Kangaroo, also rose.

As controversies about censorship, with their focus on Lady Chatterley's Lover, raged in the 1950s and 60s, his became almost a household name throughout Australia.

Such growing interest was fanned by the Leavisite controversies that blew through Australian academic halls in the 1960s, leading to a famous split in the English Department at Sydney University between the Leavisites and the non-Leavisites.

Leavis's championing of writers of what he called "The Great Tradition" - which included, in particular, Lawrence - was promoted in Australia by academics in Sydney and Melbourne associated with Professor Sam Goldberg. (Goldberg famously set an honours student an essay task analysing Women in Love in the light of Marlowe's Dr Faustus.)

Such championing, however, did little to advance the particular cause of Kangaroo in Australia, except as part of the overall Lawrence canon. As Sandra explains below, the influence of Kangaroo in Australia was seen more in the world of art - and music - than in the literary firmament.

However, one other aspect of Lawrence's legacy should be mentioned here. And that is the importance of Kangaroo to Australian history.

As Andrew Moore, Humphrey McQueen and a growing number of local historians now know, there was a gap in Australian history studies prior to, say, 1968, when Don Rawson first drew attention to the hitherto unrecognised anti-democratic - fascist - activities of organisations like the King and Empire Alliance.

Kangaroo, now that we know what it is about, affords us a unique insight into the organisation and structure of ultra-right, secret-army activities in Australia in the years after WW1 - one that otherwise we would not have, and which would have probably remained a secret, perhaps forever.