David Game: D. H. Lawrence’s Australia. Anxiety at the Edge of Empire. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015.

D. H. Lawrence lived in Australia between 4 May and 11 August 1922, staying briefly in Darlington, a suburb of Perth, before travelling on to Sydney and settling in Thirroul, a coastal town approximately seventy kilometres south of the city. During his time at Thirroul he wrote an Australian novel, Kangaroo (1923), and he later collaborated with his host in Darlington (a nurse named Mollie Skinner) to write a second, entitled The Boy in the Bush (1924). The two previous book-length studies of his stay in Australia – Robert Darroch’s D. H. Lawrence in Australia (South Melbourne, 1981) and Joseph Davis’ D. H. Lawrence at Thirroul (Sydney, 1989) – mainly focused on biographical matters. Darroch, in particular, used Lawrence’s fictional writing primarily in order to speculate on what he did there and whom he saw. David Game takes a different approach. Drawing on the ‘Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works’, he explores what Australia meant to Lawrence from his youth to his final days, beginning with a reference to a character who ‘got lost in the bushes’ and ‘died of thirst’ in a short story of 1907 entitled ‘The Vicar’s Garden’ and ending with nostalgic letters about the flowering mimosa Lawrence saw in the south of France in the last weeks of his life, which reminded him of Australia.