Kangaroo (novel)

Kangaroo is an account of a visit to New South Wales by an English writer named Richard Lovat Somers and his German wife Harriet in the early 1920s.

Ultimately, after being initially somewhat drawn to the right-wing Digger movement led by Benjamin Cooley (aka 'Kangaroo') neither it nor the "great general emotion" of Kangaroo himself appeal to Somers.

To turn to the old dark gods, who had waited so long in the outer dark.”[2] The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature describes Kangaroo as a ‘strongly auto-biographical’ novel: "reflecting the almost daily flow of Lawrence’s thoughts and impressions while in Australia.

Richard Somers, the restless hero, is a barely disguised picture of Lawrence, as Harriet, his wife, is of Frieda, and many of the domestic incidents are drawn directly from their Australian experience.

Historian, Barbara Kearns, in a centenary review of the novel, contests Darroch’s argument and points out that Lawrence arrived in Sydney with all the material needed to create his ‘thought adventure’.

Novelist Margaret Barbalet, in her fiction Steel Beach, (Penguin, 1988) imagined what the known-to-have-been-excised pages from the Kangaroo manuscript could have contained, and evoked an extra-marital Lawrentian affair in Thirroul, complete with illegitimate son.