Lawrence in Thirroul

It had been awhile since we went to Thirroul so this weekend my brother and I drove down to the seaside town on the South Coast. We first went there because of a chance reading of DH Lawrence's uneven novel, Kangaroo. Lawrence wrote the book when he spent a few months with his wife Freida in Australia in 1922. It has a lot of moaning and groaning about Sydney ("Great swarming, teeming Sydney flowing out into these myriads of bungalows, like shallow waters spreading, undyked. And what then? Nothing. No inner life, no high command, no interest in anything, finally"), the emptiness of Australia and its people and a shadowy fascist organisation with which the narrator (always a Lawrence stand-in) gets involved. Nevertheless, it is Lawrence and therefore interesting. In particular, its description of the land and surrounds sounds fresh even today. Here for example, is his description of his journey to Thirroul, which he fictionalised as Mullumbimby in the novel:

"The land grew steeper—dark, straight hills like cliffs, masked in sombre trees. And then the first plume of colliery smoke among the trees on the hill–face. But they were little collieries, for the most part, where the men just walked into the face of the hill down a tunnel, and they hardly disfigured the land at all. Then the train came out on the sea—lovely bays with sand and grass and trees, sloping up towards the sudden hills that were like a wall. There were bungalows dotted in most of the bays. Then suddenly more collieries, and quite a large settlement of bungalows. From the train they looked down on many many pale–grey zinc roofs, sprinkled about like a great camp, close together, yet none touching, and getting thinner towards the sea."

The collieries must have had some resonance with Lawrence, given his novels. Remarkably, the cottage where Lawrence lived (called Wyewurk) still exists though it is in private hands. Given the brief visit, there is nothing by way of a museum, indeed most Australians are unaware that the writer passed through the country. Consequently, a modest plaque at the end of Craig St. is the only marker.

Lawrence's visit inspired a set of Garry Shead's paintings (below). The novel itself was made into a film, though not one that is well-known.

This weekend, the weather was as Australians are wont to say, glorious. Some fish and chips and a dip in the ocean later we took a few pictures of Craig St. where Lawrence lived. Our quasi-literary pilgrimage was followed by a visit to the Indian temple at Helensburgh. It takes awhile before a temple is integrated with its landscape, in Helensburgh like a Lawrentian novel, the old in a new setting simply lacks an "inner life". The Gods look quite lost in the bush setting.

Pics on top: Plaque at DHL Reserve; the sea from the reserve; DHL bungalow(looking very much like Army bungalows in India). An older image of the house with DHL posing here.