When the Lawrences set out for the United States, they went the long way round, sailing first to what was at that time Ceylon, and then to Australia. Their stay in Ceylon was not a success but they remained in Australia for three months, long enough for Lawrence to write a novel there. Kangaroo, as this novel is appropriately called, is like Aaron's Rod in being another of what he liked to call thought adventures, that is to say it makes use of a fictional form to work out ideas which were troubling him. Yet as far as love and sex are concerned, it represents variations on what are very much the same themes. The story is told through a travelling English writer called Richard Lovatt Somers (the initials RLS recall another writer who explored the southern hemisphere and was tubercular), and his German wife Harriett. Together they form a couple more instantly recognisable as the Lawrences than any other in his fiction.

The relation of these two characters receives a good deal of attention throughout the novel but the chapter which is focussed exclusively on them is entitled ‘Harriett and Lovatt at Sea in Marriage’. What it suggests is that their marriage is at a crossroads with Harriett still insisting that their hymeneal bark should fly the flag of ‘perfect love’ even when, according to Lovatt, perfect love is a fiasco ‘ninety-nine times out of a hundred’. In his view, their real choice is between a drift into companionship and her acceptance of him as her lord and master, and his preference for this second option is indicated when he says that, after all, ‘you can't have two masters of one ship: neither can you have a ship without a master’. He wants to replace the tattered ensign of perfect love with one which represents a phoenix, and imagines himself as this mythical bird rising from the nest which is his wife. ‘A forward-seeking male’, he would like her to ‘believe in his adventure and deliver herself over to it’ so that they can sail together into ‘unchartered seas’.