Down through the years, a number of critics and political commentators, here and overseas, have described Lawrence's Australian novel as "a fascist novel" - most notoriously by the feminist Kate Millett in her 1970 book, Sexual Politics [New York, Doubleday].

(Lawrence has not, hitherto, been a pin-up boy in feminist and "progressive" circles.)

However, this glib categorisation is, I believe, more the product of ideological prejudice than disinterested analysis or informed literary criticism (though one has to concede that Lawrence's portrayal of Benjamin Cooley as a Fuhrer-like leader inevitably lent some credence to imputations of fascism in the novel).

Yet Kangaroo, while patently autobiographical, was nevertheless ostensibly fiction, what Lawrence described, first as "a romance", then as "a thought-adventure".

Surely the most he could be accused of politically, or philosophically, in Kangaroo is that he initially portrayed Cooley in a benevolent or even flattering light, and was thus, supposedly, giving his (admittedly not inconsiderable) imprimatur to Cooley's and Callcott's fascist beliefs and activities.

However, that was prior to chapter 11, ""Willie" Struthers and Kangaroo", and chapter 16, "Jack Slaps Back".

In other words, that was before Australia's "silvery freedom" suddenly turned, and Lawrence - to his obvious consternation and horror - found himself confronted with the real nature of the society and milieu into which he had so ingenuously blundered, and of which he had been so glibly approving...

...a revelation that immediately inspired the novel's justly-famous "The Nightmare" chapter, one of literature's foremost anti-militaristic tracts.

Yes, Kangaroo is a "fascist novel" - but not in the sense that so many of its detractors have in the past accused it of being.

Whatever approval of what could be called "fascism" that Lawrence might have evinced in the first 10 chapters of the novel was, in the end, repudiated by him.

Kangaroo is ultimately an exposure and rejection of fascism. It is a novel that reveals the downside, and dangers, of niave authoritarianism.

It is, if you like, Lawrence's great anti-fascist novel.

For many years Kangaroo was, and to a large extent still is, categorised as one of "Lawrence's leadership novels" - ie, the middle one, sandwiched between Aaron's Rod and The Plumed Serpent…"the writer as activist".

I have no wish to rub salt into anyone's wounds. However, I need now to put to rest the hitherto "received" interpretation of Kangaroo - of what it is "about"…

…as (for example) expressed by Dr Bruce Steele in the current, and now generally-circulating, CUP edition of Kangaroo. I quote again from its Introduction:

 

Somers's involvement with the leaders of the Diggers and Socialists had its roots in Lawrence's intellectual and imaginative grappling with the claims of the right and the left in politics and the problem of the writer as activist - a problem that had preoccupied him at least since 1915.

 

No, that is incorrect. That is not what Kangaroo is about.

Kangaroo is about Lawrence, on his boat to Sydney, deciding to get round some writing problems he had been having by experimenting with a new diary-technique; then, on arrival, encountering a proto-fascist organisation, and deciding to base his narrative on it; discovering half-way through the writing that what he had initially thought was a benign entity was in fact fundamentally evil; being repulsed by it; and then bequeathing to us one of the great images in modern literature…

…of the scaly back of a reptile, and its horrible, blood-caked, fascist paws.

(See Section 3, "Claws in the Arse" below, for Sidney Nolan's depiction of the fascism in Kangaroo - and thus the provenance of our cover illustration.)

One now hopes that Kangaroo will be recognised - particularly in Australia - for what it unquestionably is...

...one of the most profound books - as John Pringle described it in 1958 - ever written about our country, and a major work in the Lawrence canon, and in world literature too.