AustLit

'When D.H. Lawrence arrived in Australia in 1922, he defined himself, as Judith Ruderman remindsus, as 'a man without a country'; he had, by this time in his life, taken many bold steps to become a man no longer 'firmly moored in his class, nation, or gender' (Ruderman 2003, 50). Lawrence frequently used gendered terms to describe the tantalizing appeal of crossing the border between the old world and the new, proclaiming, in Fantasia of the Unconscious, for example: 'You've got to know you're a man, and being a man means you must go on alone, ahead of the woman, to break a way through the old world into the new' (2004a, 218). Kangaroo presents Lawrence's first sustained attempt to respond to this call. He begins by describing Richard Lovatt Somer's realization that the old world was 'done for' and his imperative desire to go to 'the newest country, to young Australia' (1994, 13), a desire impelled by many of the same impulses that induced the Lawrences to make a similar journey. Nonetheless, from nearly the first page of this oddly uneven novel, Lawrence draws attention to Somers's English ideas about maleness, friendship, sexual desire, Marriage, power, class politics, and violence, as he describes his protagonist's increasingly more disorienting confrontations with Australian men who embody alternative ideas about male identity.' (p. 138)