Grace Cossington-Smith's painting of the coal pier at Thirroul, a few hundred yards from "Wyewurk" (Sandon Point is in the background.) This, in a stylised depiction, is what Lawrence would have seen looking south from his front garden.

 

KANGAROO was not the only work of fiction in which Lawrence portrayed Scott and Rosenthal.

They also make an appearance in two of his later works.

That is not unexpected, nor without precedent. (Indeed, it would be surprising if he did not make some future use of his Australian experiences, given his transposition proclivities.)

Lawrence was notorious - as Neville had pointed out - for "recycling" people he knew, or had known, in his fiction. Neville himself was portrayed on no less than four separate occasions.

So it was likely that Lawrence's experiences in Australia - people he met, names he remembered, character traits he observed - would be called up for duty in future fiction.

For example, he used the names of his two Malwa shipmates, the English migrants Bill Marchbanks and Denis Forrester, in later works.

In St Mawr there is a character called Forrester, and in Lawrence's short story The Last Laugh there is a character called Marchbanks. (However, one is duty-bound to point out that at children's games in Eastwood, Lawrence and his friends also conjured up a character called "Marchbanks".)

Neville also remarked, perceptively, that Lawrence not only borrowed names from real life, but often their characteristics and other personal details as well. He excused, as mentioned above, Lawrence of blatant plagiarism by saying that the fictional traits of a real-life "model" were often the opposite of what they were in real life.

That, however, was not the case when Lawrence came to portray Jack Scott as Jack Strangeways in the second version of what became Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Here, taking advantage of this subsequent opportunity, Lawrence visited condign revenge on the man Lawrence called Callcott who had threatened Somers with dire consequences in the "Jack Slaps Back" chapter in Kangaroo.

The second Lady Chatterley, which Lawrence called John Thomas and Lady Jane, was not intended for publication, and in fact was not published in Lawrence's lifetime. When his final version of the "Chatterley" saga - renamed Lady Chatterley's Lover - was published in 1928, Lawrence drastically revised what he had said about Jack Strangeways in the earlier JTLJ version (which itself was first published in 1971 [Heinemann, London]).