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But Nolan's kangaroo was no ordinary Australian marsupial. He was no "Skippy".

Nolan portrayed this kangaroo in a slightly reptilian aspect - a sort of small dinosaur, with "paws" caked up to its armpits in what appears to be dried blood.


Nolan's "Kangaroo" - note what seems to be caked blood
on the creature's paws and forearms


This reptilian creature is wearing what looks like an Air Force officer's hat, its human shield-like face twisted awkwardly towards the viewer.

Given the circumstances of the composition of this final "Kangaroo series" painting, it is difficult to avoid its identification with Patrick White...

...who has now become, in Nolan's eyes, the fascist leader out of Lawrence's Australian novel.

[RD adds: in fact, the identification may be more pertinent than even Nolan realised, for Patrick White's family, the Whites of Belltrees - as Andrew Moore's research has revealed - were active in the 1930-32 Old Guard, and 10 years earlier had been almost certainly involved with the country section of Rosenthal's King and Empire Alliance, and thus Jack Scott's secret army, "the garage".]

 

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The luminaries in Australia's cultural pantheon who have been influence by Lawrence and Kangaroo cannot be fully plumbed here. Indeed, I cannot make up a definitive list.

However, Tom Bass - Australia's greatest sculptor - must be mentioned.

Bass, who died in 2010, called Lawrence "my inspiration, my mentor, my guide".

It was Lawrence's poetry that first attracted him. "Lawrence spoke to me directly. I can't think of any other man who has been on my life's journey with me as intimately and constantly as Lawrence," he said in an interview published in Rananim in 2004.

In 1974, one of Lawrence's poems "The Story of the Man Who Has Come Through" inspired Bass to cast a Lawrentian bronze, which he named "Introspection".

"I was especially affected by that poem," he said. "It was particularly important to me at a time when it seemed that almost every aspect of my life and my values were crumbling. I felt that my whole sense of myself and my career had been invalidated. I felt like a medieval man stranded in the middle of the 20th century.

"Then, when I read Lawrence's lines that there is "the fine, fine wind that finds its way through the chaos of the world" and that he would be "like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted driven by invisible blows, the rock will split, and we shall come at the wonder" I felt he was speaking to me as a sculptor."