IF you didn’t know it was there, you would drive right past it. In a quiet back street in the Illawarra beachside village of Thirroul … No. 3 Craig Street. For two or so months in 1922, this inconspicuous bungalow with the jokey, alt-spelt name ‘Wyewurk’❂ was home to one of the 20th century’s greatest English-language writers, DH Lawrence. That Bert Lawrence resided briefly in a far-flung part of the world like Thirroul NSW was not exceptional in itself. In the course of his “stop-go” global peregrinations Lawrence lived in over 300 addresses across the world! What gives it import and binds the great writer to this country was that he used this sojourn in the Illawarra to write all but the final chapter of his 421-page novel about Australia, Kangaroo.
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After the 1914-18 War DH Lawrence (DHL), opted for a life of voluntary exile, eventually journeying to Australia with his German wife Frieda, the latest destination in a globe-trotting quest by the writer for a peculiar degree of spiritual fulfilment. They stayed two weeks in Perth⊞, before sailing on to Sydney. Lawrence’s initial plan was to live in Sydney for an extended time, however a day trip up to Narrabeen Lakes apparently convinced him that Sydney was decidedly not to his taste. The people with their displays of unbridled, rampant democracy, he found jarring to his sensibilities. He discovered little to enthuse about in the town…in the novel he describes pre-Harbour Bridge Sydney as “loused over with small promiscuous bungalows around which lay an aura of rusty tinned cans” (its fortunate that DHL didn’t pursue a career as a real estate agent on Sydney’s foreshore suburbs). He also rather extremely went so far as to wish that something akin to a tsunami would engulf the city. The Lawrences escaped from Sydney finding refuge in a small, coal-mining settlement 70km south. That Lawrence found a haven from the suburbia of Sydney in a (then) coalmine-littered Thirroul is a choice irony, given his hatred of coalmining, the vocation of his father back in Lawrence’s native Nottinghamshire.
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Descriptions abound in Kangaroo of the bungalow in which they lived, and of Thirroul more widely. Lawrence evocatively depicts the beach directly below ‘Wyewurk’—which he gives the name “Coo-ee” in the novel—as “the pale sea of green glass that fell in such cold foam. Ice-fiery, fish-burning … full of brilliantly clear water and delicately-coloured shells … strangely sea-scooped sharp sea-bitter rock floor, all wet and sea-savage”. In the thinly-autobiographical novel Lawrence calls Thirroul ‘Mullumbimby’ – presumably he came upon the name ‘Mullumbimby’ on a state map as it’s the name of an actual town in the “hippie hinterland” of north coast NSW. The bungalow Wyewurk/Coo-ee is delineated thus: “The house inside was dark, with its deep verandahs like dark eyelids half closed … overlooking the huge rhythmic Pacific.”
The hastily written and skimpily revised novel Kangaroo itself is not valued highly in the overall oeuvre of DHL by critics or academe, eg, “Kangaroo is little more than an egregious failure” [Macdonald Daly, 1997 Penguin edition of Kangaroo; “a generic gallimaufry with a primarily pastoral focus”, Joseph Lenehan Davis, ‘Place, pastoral and the politics of the personal: a semi genre-based exploration of D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo‘, PhD dissertation, University of Wollongong, 1992]. What the novel has attracted recent commentary for revolves around the thesis advanced by Robert Darroch and others – its depiction of a secret right-wing army in Australia which was allegedly planning a coup d’état. Lawrence in Kangaroo seems to have anticipated the advent in the late twenties and early thirties of semi-fascist groups in Australia such the Old Guard and the New Guard.
David Herbert and Frieda outside ‘Wyewurk’, 1922 ⍙
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In the isolated village of Thirroul—between the sea and the escarpment—DHL found an anonymity and ‘stillness’ that he had craved but had hitherto eluded him. The freedom, artistically, he found in Thirroul, enabled him to write over 3,000 words a day of his ‘great’ modern Australian novel [John Worthen, DH Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider] . Frieda and Bert left Thirroul and Australia in August 1922 for the US via Wellington, NZ. Settling near Taos in New Mexico, Lawrence completed the final chapter of Kangaroo and hastily edited the book. The serene native pueblos and western ranches of Taos were the next staging post in Lawrence’s lifelong “savage pilgrimage“, his descriptor of the relentless search for a more fulfilling lifestyle than that delivered by industrialised Western civilisation. Lawrence believed that “every continent has its own great spirit of place”. In the course of DHL’s terrestrial wanderings, both Taos and to a much lesser extent Thirroul embodied in their different ways aspects of the powerful life-spirit he was seeking.
⍙ ‘Lawrence wrestling with the Kangaroo on the veranda of Wyewurk’ by Garry Shead
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In the years after the Lawrences departed Australia Thirroul slowly extricated itself from its coalmining preoccupation. Largely, it has remained a sleepy holiday coastal town while building a thriving arts community for local artists and musicians. Wyewurk, bereft of the DHL aura, slumbered back into a cloak of invisibility. It continued to be owned by the Southwell family whilst a succession of renters occupied it. In the 1970s people (some local, some from further afield) started to take a renewed interest in the literary significance of the writer’s 1922 residence. Unfortunately for the growing public interest but hardly surprisingly, the occupants of Wyewurk at the time (a dentist and his wife) repeatedly denied visitors access to the house and grounds.
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This situation got worse from the perspective of the DH Lawrence “fan base” after a local real estate agent bought Wyewurk from the Southwells in 1984. The new owner categorically refused any access to the property at all. Lawrence scholars (who would later coalesce into the “Friends of Wyewurk” and also form the nucleus of the DH Lawrence Society of Australia) grouped together to lobby politicians resulting in an interim conservation order being placed on Wyewurk. Despite this the owner submitted plans with Wollongong Council to add a two-story extension to the bungalow (which if implemented would effectively “cape cod” it).
Thus began a protracted period of litigation, the outcome of which saw the Heritage Council of NSW reject the owners’ ‘Pavilion’ plan. The Wyewurk group rallied support for the preservation of Lawrence’s house in its original form from public figures like Patrick White, Manning Clark and Judith Wright, from various national and international DHL scholars, and the local community. Later, support was also forthcoming for its retention on architectural grounds after the architects’ council declared Wyewurk to be the oldest surviving example of the Californian bungalow style in NSW (possibly in Australia) [S Jobson, ‘How we battled to save Wyewurk’, Rananim, Nov 1995, 3(3)]
The Wyewurk saga dragged on for several years more with the community divided on the issue. With all the publicity about Lawrence’s house, the Sydney Morning Herald weighed in with a predictable LCD tag, referring to Wyewurk as “Lady Chatterley’s beach house” [SMH, 29 July 2003]. Submissions to the Commission of Inquiry followed including proposals to turn Wyewurk into a centre for arts activities, but none of this bore fruit. At one point the owner himself is believed to have approached Wollongong Council with a view to the Council purchasing the house. The Council, adopting a breathtakingly tunnel-visioned approach, rebuffed the proposal outright…it’s woeful lack of acuity signifying a real missed tourism opportunity! Despite the building’s literary and cultural significance, the Commissioner ultimately ruled that the owner be permitted to erect a one-story addition to Wyewurk. To everyone’s surprise, in the end the owner decided not to proceed with the approved changes to the bungalow![Jobson, ibid.]
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Wyewurk today is still there in Craig Street, pretty much as it was (the exterior at least) in Bert Lawrence’s time, though more strongly fortified now – given its challenges a minor miracle of survival! The preservationists won, but since sightseers and Lawrence devotees are barred from viewing its lawns, verandahs and the jarrah wood table on which Kangaroo was crafted, it remains something of a Pyrrhic victory. Since the mid Eighties the estate agent/owner has done all he could to block the public’s view of the bungalow through fences, the planting of trees and dense shrubs, a garage and a marauding dog on the property ready to bark at inquisitive and unwelcome visitors. There are no plaques in front of the cottage proclaiming its connection to the great English novelist and poet. The only indication signalling that “Lawrence was here” is 35 metres away in a tiny reserve overlooking Lawrence’s “green glass” Pacific. In late 1998 the Council named the reserve in honour of DHL and installed a commemorative plaque.
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Footnote: the current inaccessibility of the bungalow to DH Lawrence enthusiasts and the ordinarily curious over the last few decades was not ever thus! After the Lawrences’ departure for America, the owners at the time, grasping the significance of their recent famous tenants, kept the house as a sort of shrine for the 20th century literary icon. They maintained the furniture that Frieda and Bert used during their stay, including the table on which Kangaroo was penned! They even kept a visitors’ book for the many literary “pilgrims” who undertook the trek to Craig Street [‘Wyewurk’, (built circa 1911) NSW Office of Environment & Heritage, www.environment.nsw.gov.au].
⍙ Wyewurk with cute, friendly “dangerous dog” sign
Postscript: Lawrence’s visit and the publication of Kangaroo have exerted a profound influence on a number of Australian artists and other creative practitioners in the arts field. These include composer Peter Sculthorpe, Nobel laureate Patrick White, artists Sidney Nolan, Brett Whiteley and Garry Shead. Sydney artists Whiteley and Shead set up their easels in the backyard of the adjoining cottage to Wyewurk (with the similarly quaint name of ‘Wyewurrie’) in about 1973 and painted several Lawrence-themed pieces❈ including a diptych of the bungalow where Lawrence penned Kangaroo [Sandra Jobson Darroch, ‘Claws in the Arse’, www.dhlawrencesocietyaustralia.com.au].
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❂ the ‘Wyewurk’ theme is extended to the house the Lawrences/Somers fleetingly stay at in Murdoch St Cremorne – which in the novel DHL called ‘Torestin’ (“to rest in”)
⊞ DHL penned a short story here while being simultaneously inspired and frightened by the WA bush
❈ the Shead paintings of DHL’s sojourn are memorably jocular ones, especially riotous is the one (see reproduction above) which depicts Lawrence frantically trying to ward off a frenzied attack from a large red non-metaphorical kangaroo on the back verandah of ‘Wyewurk’, while an unperturbed Frieda serenely admires the view