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Grand tours: Lawrence's novel view of Down Under

26 January 2002 -Eighty years ago, DH Lawrence arrived in Sydney, where Australia Day is celebrated today. The alien land was first to annoy him, then inspire him and, finally, to help him come to terms with his life. Deirdre Coleman finds out what fired his imagination

"This is the most democratic place I have ever been in. And the more I see of democracy, the more I dislike it."

David Herbert Lawrence was not having a good day in Australia when he wrote to his sister-in-law from Sydney in 1922. You might be grumpy, too, if you had left a tropical island for a wintry British dominion. New South Wales was merely a staging-post in an unwieldy journey eastwards from Italy to America for the writer and his wife Frieda, and a disagreeable stopover at that: the pluralism of the place "just brings everything down to the mere vulgar level of wages and prices", he complained. Furthermore, Australia was full of healthy but hollow people who were always "vaguely and meaninglessly on the go". And the backpacker hadn't even been invented.

Like many new arrivals since, DH Lawrence was anticipating a kind of Utopia, where he might realise what he called some "new spiritual life-form". Instead, he found himself in a new world that, paradoxically, appeared more ancient, torpid and senile than Europe. Lawrence, mind you, was here mainly because he was worried about his health. He had suffered from the enervating effects of the humidity and heat of Ceylon, where they had gone to visit friends, and had been unable to write. They stayed only six weeks on the island now known as Sri Lanka, then took up a chance invitation to visit Australia.

"You never knew anything so nothing, Nichts, Nullus, niente, as the life here," he grizzled, vowing that he would write only letters during his stay.

Fortunately, it wasn't long before the country itself, and especially the bush, captured his imagination. He soon stopped sending dismal mail and started writing. Brilliantly.

Lawrence embarked on a massive novel entitled Kangaroo. A grandiose and untidy work, it was written at lightning speed in a rented bungalow called "Wyewurk", perched on the very edge of the Pacific ocean in the picturesque coastal town of Thirroul, about 40 miles south of Sydney.

The Lawrences loved their cheap and comfortable retreat, with the garden of their bungalow stretching down to the sea, and the "dark tor", the dramatic Illawarra escarpment, looming behind. Eighty years after they first arrived, their former home is still standing.

The New South Wales coast immediately south of Sydney is all too often missed by visitors keen to get south to Victoria's Great Ocean Road, or head north to the lotus-eaters' haven of Byron Bay and onwards to the Great Barrier Reef. But as soon as you evade the cloying suburbs of Australia's largest city, the terrain becomes alien to British eyes – the shore a ragged fringe between the world's biggest ocean and the still, silent, phantom-like and ghostly bush that was to enthral Lawrence.

These days, the wilderness has retreated some distance inland. The traveller is more likely to be entranced by the coastline, with the Illawarra escarpment dipping into the Pacific. In spite of the intrusion of a commuter rail line from Sydney, and the democratic notion that everyone should be entitled to a slice of ocean shore on which to build a home, you can still see the sea through the gaps between the timber and brick bungalows. These comprise the staple housing near a shore that looks as wild as the settlements are tame.

You don't find too many homes like that in Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire. Although this part of New South Wales bears little resemblance to Britain, there were resonances of his upbringing: coal from the Illawarra was shipped from Thirroul, where Lawrence saw the poor scrounging for bits of coal in the sand beneath the jetty. Luckily, though, mining had not disfigured the landscape of the Illawarra. In his novel, he noted with pleasure the little collieries where "the men just walked into the face of a hill".

Kangaroo is a thinly disguised autobiography – the record of an Englishman, Richard Lovell Somers, who finds himself in a world turned upside down, where Orion stands on his head "as if pitching head foremost into the sea", while Sirius courses "high above his heels". The experience of being inverted inspired some unrivalled descriptions of Australia's beautiful but weird flora and fauna, while the space of Lawrence's fiction gave him the chance to dramatise, temper and even refute some of his more superficial first impressions of Australia. Indeed, he mocks his hero's torments, telling us that Somers "wearied himself to death struggling with the problem of himself, and calling it Australia".

Australia seemed a country still to be born, as evidenced in the unreality of its built environment. Even the vast town of Sydney is merely "sprinkled on the surface of a darkness into which it never penetrated", the cliffs surrounding the city "as silent and as Aboriginal as if white men had never come".

Lawrence was deeply conscious of the limitations of the colonial eye, with so many of Australia's hidden beauties lurking "just beyond the range of our white vision". He was also quick to tap into the racial consciousness of Australia, unwittingly revealed as a deep reservoir of white denial, fear and guilt over a land deemed by the white settlers terra nullius, land belonging to no one. For instance, at the very moment in the novel when the bush is dismissed as mere nothingness, it rises up in anger, gripping our hero with terror as he moves among tree-trunks resembling "naked pale aborigines", the "roused spirit of the bush" watching and waiting just behind his back.

Even Lawrence's Thirroul bungalow, with its dark interior and its "deep verandahs like dark eyelids half-closed", assumes an Aboriginal aspect, its carefree name of "Wyewurk" replaced in the novel with the evocative "Coo-ee", the bush call used by Aboriginals to establish contact with each other.

A lifetime after Lawrence left, the significance of this location became evident to white Australians. In 1998, just south along the beach from "Wyewurk", where the writer took his daily walk, big seas unearthed from the sand dunes the 6,000-year-old bones of an Aboriginal elder. Subsequent archaeological digs have confirmed that the coastal wetlands here are rich in native artefacts. Alongside the burial site, near a beautiful lagoon, the flag of an Aboriginal tent-embassy flies, set up by the Kuradji people to mark the site of their ancient camping and burial site, and to protest against a planned development to build 400 houses on this ancient and sacred place.

Today, visitors are not encouraged to call at the bungalow – Lawrence was too much the tourist to have become part of the literary heritage of New South Wales, let alone Australia, and no plaque boasts of the notable resident. But there is nothing to stop you wandering down to the beach, and wondering about the writer's state of mind as you watch the waves crash in.

Readers of Kangaroo have long puzzled over Lawrence's depiction of a shadowy, clandestine army of right-wing paramilitaries in Sydney, biding their time before seizing power from their socialist enemies. The leaders of this secret army attempt to recruit Somers as their theorist and spokesman, and it is in these intensely homo-erotic encounters that we see Lawrence giving rein to some of his most enduring obsessions. These include his longing for a strong and charismatic leader, and his desire to be initiated into some secret blood brotherhood that would admit him to an exclusive male activity, "beyond woman".

Lawrence's imagination found fertile ground in the land of overt physicality and mateship, a country innocent of the "horrible human mistake of Europe", and he masterfully overturned his initial supposition that "one could never make a novel out of these people, they haven't got any insides to them".

Deirdre Coleman teaches at the University of Sydney, New South Wales

This article appeared in The Independent

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