Showing posts from category: Biographical
Ibn Battūta, Moroccan Explorer of Dar al-Islam and Beyond: The World’s Most Prodigious Wayfarer of Pre-modern Times
Everyone’s heard the story of Marco Polo, his epic journey from Venice via the Silk Road to Cathay (China) and the court of Kublai Khan, and further explorations in Southeast Asia as the Great Khan’s foreign emissary, but much less well known outside the Maghreb and the Middle East are the more impressive peregrinations—in terms of immenseness of scope and distance—of the medieval Moroccan Islamic traveller Ibn Battūta.
Marco Polo’s ‘Travels’Battūta was born in Tangier, Morocco, into a Berber family of legal scholars about 50 years after Marco Polo’s birth. In 1325 the youthful Battūta set off alone initially with the purpose of undertaking the hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca, but circumstance and curiosity took the Moroccan scholar on a seemingly never-ending series of extended side trips. Over the next 29 years Battūta’s travels took him on a wide arc to the East, visiting virtually all of the Islamic lands including far-off Sumatra (in modern Indonesia). Battūta’s sense of adventure and desire to learn about distant lands led him to extend his journey far beyond Dar al-Islam (the lands of Islam) to visit Dar al-Kufr (the non-Muslim world). As an Islamic scholar Battūta’s travel to ‘infidel’ lands was legitimised by the Islamic principle of Talab al-‘ilm (“search for knowledge”) (Berman, Nina. “Questions of Context: Ibn Battuta and E. W. Bovill on Africa.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 34, no. 2, Indiana University Press, 2003, pp. 199–205, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4618304).
Battūta’s travels (Image: ORIAS – University of California, Berkeley)
Battūta’s world Ibn Battūta’s adventure-packed travels—sometimes on foot, sometimes by sea, often for safety in the company of camel caravans—took him to the lands occupied today by 40 modern countries. Divided into two journeys, the first encompassed North Africa, Central Asia and Russia, the Middle East and Anatolia, India and South Asia, the Maldives, East Africa (down as far as modern Tanzania), Southeast Asia and China. A later, shorter journey took him into the Mali Empire and West Africa (crossing the Sahara to Niger, Timbuktu, etc) and later to Moorish-inhabited Spain.
The top three travellers in Pre-modern history – measured by distance
• Ibn Battūta (Islamic scholar and explorer) approx. 117,000 kilometres • Zheng He (Chinese admiral and explorer) approx. 50,000 kilometres • Marco Polo (Venetian merchant and explorer) approx. 24,000 kilometres
(‘Ibn Battuta’, Wikipedia entry; John Parker World Book Encyclopedia, 2004)
Image: www.history.com
Unreliable memoirs Although Battūta clocked up a phenomenal amount of mileage for a traveller in the Medieval age, many modern scholars believe that Battūta did not visit all of the destinations listed on his Rihla✡ itinerary, the narrative of his journeys. Amikam Elad for instance contends that Battūta plagerised large parts of the travel narrative including the description of Battūta’s travels in Palestine from another Muslim traveller Muhammad al-‘Abduri (Elad, Amikam. “The Description of the Travels of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa in Palestine: Is It Original?” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, no. 2, [Cambridge University Press, Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland], 1987, pp. 256–72, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25212152). Doubts also exist about his visits to the city of Sana’a in Yemen, Bolghar via the Volga River and Khorasan et al. Some academics contend that in China Baṭṭūṭa only ever got as far as Quanzhou and Canton. Another false claim was that he witnessed the funeral of the Mongol Great Khan (the reality was no emperor died during Battūta‘s sojourn in China). The Moroccan storyteller borrowed liberally from hearsay evidence in the accounts of earlier Muslim explorers, and from his illustrious Venetian predecessor – the Rihla reveals many similarities in themes and commentataries to Marco Polo’s Travels.
Marco Polo, adapting to Tartar dressPolo/Battūta overlap Both Marco Polo and Ibn Battūta were in a sense oral historians, neither travellers penned a single word of the books they are famous for, instead dictating their travel stories to a scribe. Battūta’s tendency to rely on hearsay to describe some places he didn’t visit (eg, the Great Wall of China) mirrored the larger-than-life Venetian storyteller’s inclinations – Polo described the small island of Ceylon thus, “for its actual size, is better circumstanced than any island in the world”, despite never having set foot on Ceylonese soil (Marco’s contemporaries were well aware that “il Milione” was given to exaggeration).
Battūta/Juzayy’s ‘Rihla’
Battūta’s ghostwriter As Ibn Battūta never kept a journal during his nearly three decades of travel, the Marinid sultan of Fez commanded him to collaborate with court poet Ibn Juzayy who wrote the manuscript of what became A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling☯ based on Baṭṭūṭa‘s recollections. The title was later shortened for convenience to the Rihla☮. The travel book has transparent shortcomings, the format is undercut by extreme chronological inconsistencies. The travelogue relies on Battūta’s memory—Morgan points out that the memory of a traveller understandably may lapse especially if the travels stretch over such a large passage of time (Morgan, D. O. “Ibn Baṭṭūṭa and the Mongols.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 11, no. 1, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 1–11, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25188080).
Wives, concubines and divorce A curious side feature of Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s global footprint is the disclosure in the travelogue of various personal relationships he entered in to. Baṭṭūṭa on arriving at a new town regularly married women and took countless concubines, leaving the (divorced) wives and some of his issue as well behind when he moved on. For an observant Muslim Baṭṭūṭa includes a surprising level of sexual detail pertaining to the local women he encounters on his journeys (Singer, Rachel, ‘Love, Sex, and Marriage in Ibn Battuta’s Travels” (2019). MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference. 1. http://commons.lib.jmu.edu/madrush/2029/love/1).
Though the Rihla was in essence intended as the devotional work of a pious Islamic scholar, its real value lies in its secular insights into the world of the Middle Ages…providing descriptions of diverse and far-flung countries’ geography, personalities, politics, cultural practices, sexual mores and the natural world (‘The Longest Hajj: The Journeys of Ibn Battuta’, Douglas Bullis, Aramco World, July-August 2000, www.archive.aramco.com).
(Photo: History Extra)In the 1350s after Ibn Battūta had finally had his fill of wanderlust and hung up his sandals for good, he settled into an altogether sedentary vocation, appointed as a Qadi (Islamic judge) in his hometown of Tangier.
Endnote: Polo and Battūta didn’t invent fabrication and embellishment in travel writing. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (5th century BCE)—considered both the “father of history” and the world’s ur-travel writer from—was prone to mixing in ”legends and fanciful accounts” to his Histories (Euben, Roxanne L. “LIARS, TRAVELERS, THEORISTS: HERODOTUS AND IBN BATTUTA.” Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge, Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. 46–89, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7t5dw.7).
———————————————————————————————————————— ✡ literally the ‘Travels’
☯ the travelogue’s proper title
☮ the word Rihla strictly speaking refers to a genre of Arab literature rather than the name of the travel book (Bullis)
The ‘Wicklow Chief’ and the Irish Rebellion of 1798 Remembered in a Sydney Coastal Cemetery
The first time I wandered through Waverley Cemetery in the chic, beachside eastern suburbs of Sydney I was somewhat bemused to find in the midst of the congested maze of gravesites of famous Australians—poets, politicians and judges, sports men and women, aviation pioneers among others—a large, impressive marble, bronze and mosaic memorial to the martyrs of the 1798 Irish Rebellion.
Honouring the sacrifices of 1798 The connexion only became clear to me later when I did some research on the ‘mystery’. The nexus linking the heroic but lost cause of nascent Éireannach 18th century insurrection against the indignities of English rule to a Sydney cemetery turned out to be one Michael Dwyer, whose remains along with those of his wife are buried within the grand monument. The memorial was constructed for the 100-year anniversary (1898) of the uprising, the plot and monument paid for by the local Irish community in New South Wales.
Dwyer in the ‘Pantheon’ of Irish independence heroes Native Wicklow man ‘Captain’ Dwyer fought in the ‘98 Rebellion, later leading an effective guerrilla campaign against the British army in the Wicklow Mountains. Dwyer held out till 1803, earning himself the sobriquet “the Wicklow Chief” before his eventual capture and transportion to the NSW colony (not America as he had been promised). In any event Dwyer got off pretty lightly compared to many of the rebels – given his freedom and a land grant of 100 acres on Cabramatta Creek. Dwyer’s life in Australia was a roller coaster of a ride and colourful to put it mildly…twice imprisoned and tried for plotting an Irish insurrection against the British authorities in NSW, a highly dubious charge that that he was acquitted of (though he still had to do time in Norfolk Island and Van Diemens Land penal colonies). When the NSW Corps overthrew Governor Bligh in the Rum Rebellion, Dwyer was reinstated as a free man, fortune favoured him again a couple of years later when he was made chief constable of police at Liverpool, NSW, and then it deserted him once more when Dwyer ended up in debtors’ prison (Ruan O’Donnell, ‘Dwyer, Michael (1772–1825)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/ biography/dwyer-michael-12896/text23301, published first in hardcopy 2005, accessed online 9 September 2021; O’Sullivan, Michael, 1798 Memorial, Waverley Cemetery, Dictionary of Sydney, 2012, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/1798_memorial_waverley_cemetery, viewed 10 Sep 2021).
First steps on a long road to liberty The inspiration for a surge in Irish nationalism and a sovereign republic free of English domination came from the French and to a lesser extent American revolutions. Ireland had a parliament of its own in Dublin but democratic participation was strictly limited by religious and property entitlements, squeezing out Catholics and Presbyterians and leaving the “Protestant Ascendency” in control of the country. The Society of United Irishmen (SUI), a secular organisation not restricted to Catholics¹,was formed to push for real autonomy for the Irish. Some reforms were forthcoming such as the franchise for non-Protestants but this was not near enough for the more radical elements of SUI.
Wolfe ToneThe SUI leader (Theobald) Wolfe Tone forged links with French republicans aimed at overthrowing English rule, leading to a 1796 invasion of Ireland by a nearly 14,000-strong French army. Unfortunately nature intervened and the invasion fleet ran into storms off the Irish west coast, loss of vessels and lives forced the abandonment of the invasion. The response of the government in Ireland—symbolically known as Dublin Castle—was to crack down heavily on the SUI radicals. The SUI was driven underground in a wave of repression culminating in the imprisonment of many of the organisation’s leaders. Though the Irish republicanism of SUI was a popular sentiment in the country, it didn’t have universal support even on the Catholic side, the Catholic Church strongly opposed what it saw as the ‘atheistic’ United Irishmen (‘The 1798 Rebellion – A Brief Overview’, John Dorney, The Irish Story, 28-Oct-2017, www.theirishstory.com).
An uncoordinated insurrection The Irish rising in 1798 was ill-timed and badly organised – most of the SUI leadership was still incarcerated. The insurgents’ planning was strategically inept, the rebellion was intended to be nationwide, but was largely confined to isolated pockets – Wexford, Leinster, Mayo, Antrim and Down. Dublin which should have been central to the revolt played virtually no part in it (Dorney). Historian Thomas Bartlett disputes the commonly held view of the rebellion being a localised affair…he argues that far from being confined to the east coast, the uprising produced “tremors throughout the country” with disturbance occurring in a very large number of counties (Bartlett, Thomas. “Why the History of the 1798 Rebellion Has Yet to Be Written.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an Dá Chultúr15 (2000): 181-90. Accessed September 8, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30071449). The rebels had some brief, early successes (especially the Battle of Oulart), but superior English troops and weaponry overwhelmed the poorly equiped Irish force inside a month. A subsequent incursion from a small French expeditionary force offered a momentary flicker of hope for the rebel cause but this was quickly snuffed out as the English-led forces took complete charge of the country. Retribution against the rebel leaders was swift and uncompromisingly brutal, most were summarily executed (or in Wolfe Tone’s case took his own life while awaiting execution). Atrocities were committed on both sides. A large number of the insurgents (like Michael Dwyer later on) were transported to the penal colony in New Holland. The failed ‘98 rising left a mixed legacy, intensifying the level of sectarian bitterness in Ireland but also inspiring countless Irish republicans and revolutionaries to continue the struggle for a free Ireland (‘The 1798 Irish Rebellion’, Thomas Bartlett, BBC, 17-Feb-2011, www.bbc.co.uk).
1800 Act of Union
In the wake of the crushing of the rebellion by the Marquis Cornwallis², fundamental political changes were enacted. The Irish Parliament was dissolved and direct British rule imposed by virtue of the 1800 Act of Union with Ireland, a situation that would stay in force until the Irish Free State came into being in 1922.
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¹ in fact many of the leaders like Wolfe Tone, Harvey and Keogh were Protestant ² the same (Lord) Cornwallis in the forefront of the ignominy associated with the 1781 English surrender at Yorktown which ended the land conflict in the American War of Independence
Lawrence’s New Mexico “Shangri-La”
In his semi-autobiographical, Australian novel Kangaroo, DH Lawrence’s protagonist Richard Somers remarks that he’ll “probably repent bitterly going to America”. This echoes Lawrence’s own equivocation about America. In correspondence, Lawrence thought America “the land of his future” but this was tempered by a pessimism that the United States would be ‘barbaric’ and he would hate it⌖ (Letters IV:141, 151, ‘Manuscripts and Special Collections’, D. H. Lawrence Research – The University of Nottingham, www.nottingham.ac.uk).
The call of Pueblo lifestyle In the end what clinched it for Lawrence was an invite from New York art patron Mabel Dodge Sterne to visit Taos, New Mexico. The promise of Taos captured DHL’s imagination…remote (7,000 feet-high, 23 miles from the nearest railway), 600 free Indians unspoilt by western capitalism and modernity, “sun-worshippers and rain makers” (D. H. Lawrence and the American Indians’, Jeffery Meyers, Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol 56, Issue 2, Spring 2017, www.quod.lib.umich.edu).
DHL was enchanted with the idea of the primitive lifestyle of native Americans, their spiritual faith and traditional connexion with the earth.
Taos Pueblo (Source: http://ahistoryofthepresentananthology.blogspot.com/)Lawrence envisaged that this could be the utopian community, the free and open, instinctive society, ‘Rananim’, that he had been trekking around the world trying to find. Mabel also lured Bert to Taos with the prospect of dazzlingly spectacular scenery.
Mabel Dodge (Luhan) & her Amerindian husband (Photo: Santa Fe New Mexican)
In search of healthy air DHL had another motive for choosing New Mexico, being potentially beneficial to his precarious health. His tubercular condition was not diminishing at allq. The climate in Taos—high and dry with famously good and clean air— was one that might bring about a cure for his infected lungs (‘Looking for Lawrence’, Henry Shukman, New Mexico Magazine, (nd), www.newmexico.org).
Desert Rananim? As his letters show, Lawrence was in love with the desert landscape of New Mexico to an intoxicating degree – overwhelmed by the strangeness and beauty of the place, even a bit awestruck and fearful. When the writer visited the wilderness of Western Australia earlier, he experienced similar vibes from the bush environment (‘Looking for Lawrence’).
DHL waxed lyrical on the experience later, ” I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me forever …. the moment I saw the brilliant, proud morning shine high up over the deserts of Santa Fe, something stood still in my soul, and I started to attend”: he wrote how the person who lives there “above the great proud world of desert will know, almost unbearably how beautiful it is, how clear and unquestioned is the might of the day” (‘Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers is D. H. Lawrence’, (2017)).
At Taos Lawrence found himself the unwilling object of a love triangle with host Mabel vying with wife Frieda for his attention, which stiffled his creativity somewhat. He did however manage to finish the final chapter of Kangaroo during his initial sojourn in Taos.
The Lawrence Ranch
Ranch life in the high country
Lawrence returned to England in 1923 keen on recruiting members of the British artistic fraternity for his New Mexico ‘Rananim’. He returned the next year but with only the one recruit, artist Dorothy Brett☼, whose presence added a further tension to the feminine rivalries at Taos. This led to Mabel giving the Lawrences their own ranch way up in the mountains (8,600 feet above sea-level) and about 20 miles from Taos—the only property the couple would ever own—the Kiowa Ranch (now the D.H. Lawrence Ranch)✪. When not beavering away on new manuscript projects, Bert kept busy at the ranch chopping wood and constructing log cabins, as well as taking hikes in the mountains.
(Photo: www.taos.org)Ambivalence towards Amerindian culture Once Bert got to see Amerindian religious ritual and customs up close, much of his pre-visit enthusiasm dissipated (“not impressive as a spectacle”, he noted). He still admired the “Red Indian” but felt the native American culture had been debased by American ‘progress’ and modernity, reduced in Taos to that of a tourism attraction (essay ‘New Mexico’, (1928); ‘D.H. Lawrence and the American Indiana’s, Jeffery Meyers, Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol 56 Issue 2, Spring 2017, www.quod.lib.umich.edu).
‘St Mawr’ set partly in New Mexico mountains juxtaposes the vitality of nature with modern degenerate civilisation
Lorenzo’s literary output in the Southwest
DH Lawrence visited Taos, NM, three times during the period 1922-25 but only for a total of 11 months altogether. ‘Lorenzo’, as his patron and admirer Mabel Dodge fondly called him, never fulfilled the fervent hopes of Mabel by writing the great novel of the Southwest or even of New Mexico…but he did manage to produce a solid body of work while residing in NM including the novellas St Mawr and The Woman Who Rode Away, the travel book Mornings in Mexico, as well as writing part of the novel The Plumed Serpent at the ranch (after research conducted in Mexico).
Lawrence’s TB condition worsened in Europe and the novelist died in 1930 in the south of France, still proclaiming to friends a heartfelt desire to return to his beloved Taos. Frieda, who returned to live in Taos, afterwards had her late husband’s remains exhumed and shipped back to be interred on Taos soil.
Kandy, 1925 (Photo:www.lankapura.com)End-note: Lawrence in the tropics Lawrence’s global search for an alternative to modern, industrialised ‘civilisation’ landed him in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) on route to America. Lawrence’s anticipation of a good time in Ceylon was dealt a harsh blow by reality. The Lawrences stayed on the edge of the forest in Kandy, their attempts to sleep plagued by unbearable heat—”the terrific sun … like a bell-jar of heat, like a prison over you”, and the local fauna —“horrid noises of the birds and creatures … hammer and clang and rattle and cackle and explode all the livelong day” (Letters IV: 214, 227 Notts U). The one bright spot was the Raj Pera-Hera festival which DHL enjoyed, inspiring him to write a poem, ‘Elephant’, the sole literary fruit of his five weeks in Ceylon.
Huxley & Lawrence in Taos
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⌖ San Francisco, the Lawrences’ entry point to the US, Bert, pernickety as ever, found less than prepossessing – “noisy and expensive”
☼although writer Aldous Huxley did visit Lawrence in NM
✪ in return the Lawrences gave Dodge the MS for Sons and Lovers, which proved to be far more valuable than the ranch
DH Lawrence in Australasia, 1922: That Novel and Perceptions of People and Place
Next year marks the centenary of the visit of acclaimed writer DH Lawrence to the Antipodes … the author of Sons and Lovers and Women in Love spent some 99 days on the southern continent travelling from its west to its east coast and writing the bulk of his great Australia novel, Kangaroo. The 1922 visit by the English novelist and poet has attracted new interest both within Australian literary circles and the general public over the past couple of decades. The tortuous saga of the vicissitudes of Lawrence and his wife Frieda’s house in Thirroul, NSW, after the Lawrences departed Australia, has been canvassed elsewhere on this blog site – “Lawrence of Thirroul: Creating Kangaroo at ‘Wyewurk’”, November 10, 2014.
Lawrence”s Weltanschauung (World view and moral vision) Lawrence’s unquenchable wanderlust emerged from a disavowal of the dehumanising and degenerating effects of modernity and industrialisation. To his moral eye, people’s natural feelings including sexuality had been “dulled by the mechanical routine of ‘civilisation'”, making their responses coldly cerebral, not warmly instinctive and spontaneous. Lawrence’s answer to the dilemma was for society to embrace the anima (vital energy or spirit force) to be found in primitive cultures (eg, among the ancient Etruscans)…only by doing this would modern civilisation achieve the necessary revitalisation (‘D.H. Lawrence World Literature Analysis’, upd.05-May-2015, www.enotes.com). Later after the Australasian leg, DHL believed he had discovered in Taos, New Mexico, the utopian place he had been searching for (“a new part of the soul woke up suddenly and the old world gave way to a new”)⌖.
⏏ ‘Women in Love’, set against the modern industrial Britain so loathed by Lawrence
Travels with DHL DH Lawrence’s arrival in Australia was a stage in the writer’s global quest to find a new world in tune with his sensibilities. Dissatisfaction with his homeland had prompted voluntary exile from the industrialised rat race of Britain and launched Lawrence on a country to country “savage pilgrimage” across the world.
Coming to the southern continent, DHL’s hope was that Australia, free from the old society’s ills, would deliver the ‘nirvana’ he was seeking (a utopian construct he called ‘Rananim’) (D.H.Lawrence’s Australian Experiment’, Susan Lever, Inside Story, 21-Oct-2015, www.insidestory.org.au).
Deep dissolution down under As the text of Kangaroo reveals, these hopes were swiftly extinguished during the sojourn in Australia. Taking an instant dislike to urban Sydney Lawrence swiftly escaped to the south coast town of Thirroul. Though the beauty and awe of the Australian bush and landscape (its “spirit of place”) left a deep impression on him, Lawrence found disfavour in what he took to be the Australian character. What galled Lawrence was the “profound Australian indifference” … “hollow, modern people, living in a society so democratic that it denied all superiority and depth of intellect and feeling”… “exemplifying the degenerative nature of industrial society” that DHL abhorred (David Game, DH Lawrence’s Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire, 2015).
DH Lawrence, technophobe Australians’ material modern-ness irked Lawrence, their slavish craving to be up-to-date with the most modern conveniences, be it electric lights, tramways or whatever (‘The beard of the prophet’, Tom Fitzgerald, Inside Story, 30-Oct-2018, www.insidestory.org.au). Australians, Lawrence/Somers opined, were too materialistic, too outward-looking, to the exclusion of their inner lives…”like so many mechanical animals” (“‘Harmless Eden”: Revisiting D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo“, Julian Hanna, 3:am Magazine, 28-Oct-2014, www.3ammagazine.com).
In Kangaroo, Richard Lovat Somers’ dalliance with the alt-right paramilitary Diggers movement serves as a warning of the coming peril of fascism. But Somers is equally distrustful of democracy in modern, industrial society⧆ and is also alienated from socialist sentiments he encounters – embodied in the character Willie Struthers※. Typically contrarian (and at times contradictory) in his views, DHL was notorious for being what one journalist called “something of a world champion in hypercritical, hard-to-please invective (Fitzgerald)֎.
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)Lawrence in New Zealand, hit and run The Lawrences left Sydney in August 1922 , sailing “four days to New Zealand over a cold, dark and inhospitable sea”. A minor run-in with an immigration official upon arrival in Wellington prompted in Bert an instant negative reaction to New Zealand. Spending just one day in “cold and stormy Wellington” and seeing very little of the place♤, the couple left abruptly for San Francisco via Rarotonga and Tahiti (also not to DHL’s taste, Papeete: “dead, dull, modern”). Lawrence’s parting shot at NZ/Aeotoroa (based on a single day’s stay in the capital city) was that he had no desire “to stay in a cold, snobbish middle-class colony of pretentious nobodies” (‘Katherine Mansfield: DH Lawrence’s “Lost Girl”. A Literary Discovery’, Sandra Jobson Darroch, Rananim, 2009, www.dhlawrencesocietyaustralia.com.au).
♠ ♠ ♠
A note on place names in ‘Kangaroo’ Lawrence freely identifies the various places the Somers come across on their travels—Manly, St Columb (Collaroy), Narrabeen, the Quay, North Sydney, Murdoch Street (Cremorne), Mosman Bay, Como, Bulli, etc—but he alters the names of where the couple live…Thirroul becomes ‘Mullumbimby’ and their beach-cliff bungalow on the Illawarra coast, Wyewurk , is renamed ‘Coo-ee‘ in the novel.
The Lawrences’ mini-Odyssey in Sydney through the lens of ‘Kangaroo’ In DHL’s Roman à clef Australian novel, Richard and Harriet Somers re-trace Bert and Frieda’s perambulations from the city to the Northern Beaches on their first full day in Sydney, before the escape to Thirroul .
Royal Botanic Garden
”A bunch of workmen were lying on the grass beside Macquarie Street … they had that air of owning the city that belongs to a good Australian”❧
Circular Quay ferry across the harbour
“The harbour … was an extraordinary place … like a lake among the land, so pale blue and heavenly, with its hidden and half-hidden lobes intruding among the low, dark brown cliffs”
⏏ The CorsoThe Corso, Manly “You land on the wharf and walk up the street , like a bit of Margate with seaside shops and restaurants … at the end … is the wide Pacific rolling in on the yellow sand”
⏏ Lagoon at Narrabeen (Source: DH Lawrence Society Aust.)Narrabeen Lagoon, beach ”They seemed to run to leg … three boys, one a lad of fifteen or so, came out of the warm lagoon in their bathing suits, to roll in the sand and play … extraordinary like real young animals, mindless as opossums”
Footnote: what ultimately comes through in the pages of Kangaroo is an ambivalence about Australia. In the final chapter added when living in New Mexico, Lawrence talks about loving Australia but at the same time needing to rail against it. There’s a constant struggle in Somers’ mind, a tension between his love of the place (the bush)⌧ which is “in his marrow”, and the suffocating apathy of the people surrounding him.
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⌖ Taos’ native pueblos, the “earth-centred culture”, Lawrence’s new ‘elemental’ civilisation, the wellspring of regenerative potential for contemporary civilisation (‘Looking for Lawrence’, Henry Shukman, New Mexico Magazine, (nd), www. newmexico.org)
※ possibly modelled on Australian communist agitator and unionist Jock Garden (Robert Darroch, Rananim, Dec 1999)
⧆ “a self-convinced opponent of the levelling-off effects of democracy“ (John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider 2005)
֎ DHL’s hyper-critical reflex was seemingly boundless – California on first impression was summarily dismissed as “a queer place…turning its back on the world (looking) into the Pacific void …absolutely selfish, very empty” (DH Lawrence, 1923 letter)
♤ the experience was mutual, Lawrence’s fleeting stopover in the “Land of the Long White Cloud” went unnoticed by the New Zealand press or public
❧ the overt egalitarian ‘mateship’ of workers in Australia was a trait that certainly got stuck in Lawrence’s craw
⌧ love, that is, mingled with a sense of dread of the bush both in Western Australia and the “bush-covered dark tor” of the Illawarra escarpment
The Aberscot Diaries MMXIII, A Fragment from Anno 2013
Adrift in an ocean of non-sentient beings
I finally received Carol’s death certificate from the unfeeling bots at the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages, Glancing through it I noticed that under the sections “Mother’s Name” and “Mother’s Maiden Family Name”, the entries were “Unknown” and “WALKER”. This triggered something in my mind that I hadn’t realised before. Whenever Carol had raised the hate-inducing subject of her mother, she had never mentioned her by first name or by any name for that matter. For Carol, the resentment of her maternal treatment was as fresh and vivid as it was when she was five…the mother-abuser of Carol’s childhood, the denier of their mother-daughter bond, was a non-person, merely and perpetually an accursed thing, not to be dignified with human attribution.
The entry for “Father’s Name” conveyed even less information. Entered on the page were the cold and clinical words that had haunted Carol all her life — (first) “Unknown” and (surname) “UNKNOWN”. Her father’s identity was an enigma—the missing nexus that perhaps would have made her feel more whole—which Carol had always puzzled over unendingly and unknowingly. Now, here it was, official confirmation from Births, Deaths and Marriages so it would seem, that the cloak of anonymity enveloping her natural father would accompany her to the grave. Given that Carol in her life caused such a ripple with so many people who entered within her orbit, touched so many with her selfless kindness devoid of the semblance of a quid pro quo, I wondered to myself, was Carol the known daughter of two unknown (and unknowable) persons? So it does seem.
James Oatley, Keeper of the Town Clock and Pioneering Georges River Landowner
Oatley is a prime piece of residential real estate in the southern suburbs of Sydney. The suburb faces on to the Georges River (Tucoerah River in the local indigenous language). Large leafy blocks of land and water views abound in this “north shore” status locality of the south. One of the star attractions in the western fringe of Oatley is the 45-hectare Oatley Park, a dense concentration of natural bushland with Edwardian era baths and sandstone ‘castle’ built during the Great Depression and now encircled by lofty smooth-barked Angophoras Costatas.
If you cross the railway line to the east side of Oatley you can see a tower dedication to the early Sydney settler the suburb is named after – James Oatley. Oatley was yet another transported felon made good in New South Wales’ formative years. The Oatley tower in the high street contains a clock face which alerts us to J Oatley Esq’s association with timepieces. Oatley from Staffordshire in the West Midlands got napped for stealing two featherbeds and linen to the value of £16, sentenced to death for his crime but transported instead to Australia in 1814. Oatley put his watch and clock making skills to good use, winning a conditional pardon and a Georges River land grant from Governor Macquarie in 1821. On his Georges River land—stretching from Gungal Bay in the west to Boundary and Hurstville Roads—where he established a farm on his property called “Needwood Forest” after the woodland in his native Warwickshire. Oatley’s Needwood Forest grant included the area of today’s eponymous suburb.
Appointed colonial clockmaker, Oatley plied his trade from a shop in George Street opposite the Sydney Town Hall, with a bit of a flair for constructing grandfather clocks. His best known work was the clock in the turret at the Hyde Park Prisoners’ Barracks built by fellow emancipist Francis Greenway (Oatley’s clock has featured on the Australian $10 note).
Oatley’s work also won favour with later governors who granted him 515 acres in the Hurstville area between 1831 and 1835. The clockmaker died on his residential property ‘Snugburough’ in 1839. The precise location of Snugburough in Sydney is not certain…some sources give it as Canterbury, others Beverley Hills or Pubchbowl. After Snugburough was sold by Oatley’s family, future owners had to accede to a curious condition of sale – they were required to retain Oatley’s sepulchre and his body on the property. Clockmaking stayed in the family after Oatley’s demise, his third son took over the George Street shop.
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Books and sites consulted:
Frances Pollon, The Book of Australian Suburbs (1988)
Brian and Barbara Kennedy, Sydney and Suburbs: A History and Description (1982)
Oatley, James (1770–1839)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/oatley-james-2514/text3399, published first in hardcopy 1967, accessed online 30 March 2021
Australian Royality, www.australianroyalty.net.au