D.H. Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire

The first full-length account of D.H. Lawrence’s rich engagement with a country he found both fascinating and frustrating, D.H. Lawrence’s Australia focuses on the philosophical, anthropological and literary influences that informed the utopian and regenerative visions that characterise so much of Lawrence’s work. David Game gives particular attention to the four novels and one novella published between 1920 and 1925, what Game calls Lawrence’s ‘Australian period,’ shedding new light on Lawrence’s attitudes towards Australia in general and, more specifically, towards Australian Aborigines, women and colonialism. He revisits key aspects of Lawrence’s development as a novelist and thinker, including the influence of Darwin and Lawrence’s rejection of eugenics, Christianity, psychoanalysis and science. While Game concentrates on the Australian novels such as Kangaroo and The Boy in the Bush, he also uncovers the Australian elements in a range of other works, including Lawrence’s last novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lawrence lived in Australia for just three months, but as Game shows, it played a significant role in his quest for a way of life that would enable regeneration of the individual in the face of what Lawrence saw as the moral collapse of modern industrial civilisation after the outbreak of World War I.