Kangaroo: Text Classics

A landmark D. H. Lawrence novel, considered to be among the best writing about Australia.

After the Great War, Richard Lovat Somers, a writer, and Harriet, his wife, leave disillusioned Europe for Australia. Almost immediately, Somers comes into the orbit of the charismatic ‘Kangaroo’, who leads a shadowy political movement in Sydney. With its astonishing descriptions of the bush ‘biding its time with a terrible ageless watchfulness’, and its free-form narrative, Kangaroo captivates and provokes. First published in 1923, D. H. Lawrence’s semi-autobiographical novel is among the most significant works in Australian literature.

In Nicolas Rothwell’s new introduction to Kangaroo, he writes: ‘Everyone who seeks to find words that match the Australian landscape is…an inheritor of Lawrence. He made the bush a serious subject for literary endeavour.’

D. H. Lawrence, born in England in 1885, is one of the key figures in literary modernism. Among his most notable novels are Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). Kangaroo (1923) was published the year after Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, spent three months in Australia. Lawrence died in France in 1930.

Nicolas Rothwell is the award-winning author of Quicksilver, Belomor, Heaven & Earth, Wings of the Kite-Hawk, Another Country, The Red Highway and Journeys to the Interior. He was a senior writer for the Australian.

‘The settings in Kangaroo have small trouble in being the most acutely observed and evocative writing about Australia that there has so far been.’ Clive James

‘Still the most exquisite account of place in our literature.’ Geordie Williamson

‘[A] wonderful sense of immediacy…It may indeed be the first truly modern novel written in Australia…Acute and still pertinent observations about our society.’ Susan Lever