AustLit

'1922 saw the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. But in the same year, far from the famous Anglo-Euro-American sites of literary modernism in its annus mirabilis, the emblematically countermodern modernist D. H. Lawrence was in Australia. It was, he thought, ‘the most democratic place [he had] ever seen’—and ‘the more [he saw] of democracy the more [he] dislik[ed] it’. This extreme political reaction resulted in a novel: spending most of his six weeks in Australia in the seaside town of Thirroul, just north of Wollongong, Lawrence wrote a long book called Kangaroo and published it early the following year. It is a strange, somewhat autofictional, almost plotless work, and for a long time was only taken seriously for its mesmeric descriptions of Australian nature, with justly anthologised paragraphs about yellow wattle (‘as if angels had flown right down out of the softest gold regions of heaven to settle here’) or shark fins (‘like small, hard sails of hell boats’). But on the occasion of its centenary the novel ought to be read as well at the level of ideas. The book, in fact, sums up to being one of the most compelling and prognostic critiques ever made of democracy in Australia, and for that reason alone it should not be allowed to drop out of the memory of those of us uneasy with the defaulty democratic status quo.' (Introduction)