Dr Luke Johnson with a copy of the poetry book at DH Lawrence Reserve in Thirroul – just a stone’s throw from Wyewurk, the house where Lawrence stayed in 1922. The coastline in the background features heavily in Shead’s series. Photo: Supplied.
A novel, a series of paintings, and now a book of poetry — DH Lawrence’s brief but impactful 1922 visit to the Illawarra continues to inspire new creative works a century later.
Wollongong poet Dr Luke Johnson has penned Kangaroo Unbound, a poetry collection inspired by Australian artist Garry Shead’s famed ‘DH Lawrence painting series’ from the 1990s, that were themselves inspired by Lawrence’s 1923 novel Kangaroo set in 1920s Illawarra.
Johnson, a University of Wollongong senior lecturer in creative writing, will now bring Lawrence and Shead’s work back to the fore by launching Kangaroo Unbound on 12 April at Wollongong Art Gallery.
The project began in 2017 when Johnson participated in a UOW group project, where he and others were asked to choose a painting from a collection at the Wollongong Art Gallery and write a poem for an exhibition.
“I picked a painting of Garry’s called Death of Kangaroo and it just blossomed from there,” Johnson said.
“He wasn’t really on my radar until that point, but I quickly started tracking down more paintings from the so-called DH Lawrence series and then set myself the task of trying to write a poem for every painting I could get my hands on, which total around 50 paintings.”
Johnson said before it was a book, the poems were published in journals and formed part of an art exhibition with Shead’s paintings and Lawrence’s artefacts that continue to tour, with it residing in Jervis Bay this month.
He said the book title spoke to that notion of unbinding the legacy and of ideas that get forgotten for periods of time.
“I’m not originally from the Illawarra … so for me, even to have discovered as an adult that DH Lawrence had visited this place in 1922, it’s just this bizarre episode of serendipity,” he said.
“Under the surface, we’ve got this literary history that’s just waiting to be tapped into and hopefully the poems bring that to the fore.”
He said the Illawarra was uncannily recognisable in that original novel penned from Lawrence’s short stay in Thirroul, which he and Shead then carried through their own work.
“If you go back and read that, the Illawarra is very identifiable,” he said.
“As part of the exhibition, I’ve got hold of an original copy of the novel that belonged to the barber who cut Lawrence’s hair while he was in the Illawarra.
“He’s gone through and made a note of geographical mistakes. So the misidentification of certain trees, things like that.
“But beyond those few little errors, when you’re reading it you can very much feel the spirit of the Illawarra as it still exists today.”
He said the same was true of Shead’s paintings, which cemented the Archibald and Dobell prize winner’s status as a major Australian artist.
“There’s something so recognisable about this patch of land with the escarpment coming down to meet the sea as it does, which feels quite unique,” he said.
“For a number of the poems, I went out on location and tried to find the spot where the painting was made and tried to capture what was happening there in the present moment and fuse that with some of those earlier descriptions.
“So I hope there’s a nice throughline that runs from the novel to the paintings through to the poems.”
So how do you write poetry that’s based on art that’s based on literature, and differentiate between what you’re being inspired by?
“There’s a hell of a lot of personal biography that seeped into the collection,” he said.
“When you set yourself the task of writing a poem for every image in a series of paintings, you don’t realise how easy it is for that to become boring really quickly.
“So I found myself employing every trick I had to keep things interesting.”
He said that could be anything from formal experimentation, playing around with different forms of poetry, through to finding different points of inspiration in the paintings.
“So sometimes they’re quite descriptive and didactic, and other times there might be something as little as a word in the title that gives rise to the poem,” he said.
Johnson said one of the great benefits of a project like this was that it allowed time and space to create.
“It’s a really great excuse just to engage with the works on a level that’s much deeper than you would be inclined to do if you were just wandering through a gallery,” he said.
Johnson went a step further and was able to meet Shead at UOW and his Bundeena studio, after requiring copyright permission early on to publish one of the poems and relevant paintings in a literary journal.
Despite Johnson’s fear Shead might not like his poem after reading it, instead he enjoyed it and asked to see more.
“Then in 2022 on the 100-year anniversary of Lawrence’s visit, Garry donated a collection of etchings to the Wollongong University art collection,” he said.
“When he donated those, he suggested we do some kind of collaborative project or exhibition, and that was where the Kangaroo Unbound exhibition came from.”
Kangaroo Unbound book launch will be held on 12 April from 2 to 3 pm at Wollongong Art Gallery and will feature Johnson in conversation with Australian writer Luke Carmen.
