Joseph Davis (2) (1956–)

D.H. Lawrence at Thirroul is both a piece of local and international history - the story of the brief period the famous writer spend in a working holiday on the south coast of New South Wales, 50 miles south of Sydney, at a place called Thirroul. As a local I loved this book because it talked about my back yard and it helped me to better understand Lawrence's semi-fictional novel Kangaroo, written in a house which sits above a little cliff south of Thirroul beach and which remains much as it was in the 1920s when Lawrence was there. Of course Lawrence is much bigger than Thirroul, and this book is probably just a footnote in the collections of real Lawrence fans, but his visit means a lot to the Australian literary fraternity and also to the local people. Davis is a English teach at a local high school. He is very much a local, and this comes through in the book in a delightful way. It gives the book life - the life of the place, and a sense of what it was like eighty or so years ago. As I said, it is also a great entry into understanding Kangaroo and the whole context to his Australian visit.… (meer)