In 1922, the English poet and novelist, D. H. Lawrence, spent four months in Australia, drawing on the experience to write one novel and collaborate on another.
Lawrence arrived in Perth during May 1922. While staying at a guesthouse for convalescents, he met Mollie Skinner, a nurse who was also a writer. Discussions about writing led to Skinner's delivery of a manuscript entitled "The House of Ellis". Lawrence worked on the manuscript in late 1923 and early 1924 to produce The Boy in the Bush, an account of English immigrants to Western Australia in the 1880s. A long-held belief that Lawrence did little to the manuscript was corrected in the 1980s when scholarship demonstrated that Lawrence made extensive revisions to tone and character, producing a distinctive Lawrentian narrative.
Lawrence travelled to Sydney at the end of May 1922 and then stayed at the mining town of Thirroul. Here he wrote his famous Australian novel, Kangaroo, in six weeks. Based on his own experience, and extensive reading of Australian material such as the Bulletin, Kangaroo tells the story of an English poet, Richard Lovat Somers, and his wife, who come to know a group of returned soldiers. These soldiers are members of a right-wing political movement that is determined to eventually seize power. Somers befriends the leader of this group, "Kangaroo", but avoids direct participation. Nevertheless, before travelling on to the United States of America, he witnesses the group descend into extreme violence when disrupting a labour meeting in Sydney .
Lawrence's Australian novels have attracted several full-length studies in recent years and have been criticially edited for The Cambridge Works of D. H. Lawrence. Kangaroo was adapted to film in 1985.
