Of all the great names in English literature who have visited our shores, the one that left the biggest footprint was D.H. Lawrence. In 1922, in a bungalow in Thirroul, he wrote his eighth major novel, Kangaroo, which John Douglas Pringle called “the most profound book ever written about our country” (alongside only Hancock’s Australia). Lawrence co-authored another novel set in Australia (The Boy in the Bush, with West Australian nurse Millie Skinner), wrote a poem (“Kangaroo”), and dispatched fifty-three letters in which he told his various correspondents what he thought of a country whose “spirit of place” he initially…