AustLit

Craig Munro (79-80) records that Stephensen wrote The Bushwhackers probably between February and May 1929 while personally and intellectually engaged with D. H. Lawrence and his novel Kangaroo. Lawrence wrote to him: 'I am puzzled that you should feel you have to conquer or contradict something of me inside yourself. Kangaroo was only just what I felt. You may indeed know something much deeper and more vital about Australia and the Australian future. I should be the first to admit it.' Lawrence felt Stephensen lacked perseverance as a writer, critiquing The Bushwhackers as follows: 'it's too sketchy. You won't be patient enough and go deep enough into your own scene. You always stay at the level of the sketch, because of the hurry. If you went deeper you'd get a real book out of it. But you haven't the submission.'

By contrast Miles Franklin as 'Brent of Bin Bin' wrote to Stephensen: 'Bushwhackers...made a milestone day for me, one of those days when I threw up my hat because of finding a new accretion to the real Australian Literature; that which savours our unique, our inebriating, laughing, haunting, wistful, brooding, ancient, ageless, unplumbed, silent land...it is Australian writing, and that has special, I may say sacred..significance to me.' (Munro: 80).

(Craig Munro Wild Man of Letters: the Story of P.R. Stephensen (1935)).