Kangaroo: Text Classics

Introduction by Nicolas Rothwell

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.