One of Game's strengths is his deep familiarity with the entire Lawrence corpus, which allows him to highlight references to Australia in such early works as the short story 'The Vicar's Garden' (1907), where a young man dies in the parched Australian country, or his first novel, The White Peacock (1911), where a gamekeeper is said to have vanished in the Australian bush. Game also points out how Australia emerges as a theme in Lawrence's 1912 play The Daughter-in-Law, where two brothers consider emigration to resolve their personal and economic problems.

Taking this analysis one stage further, Game suggests that Lawrence's interest in searching for the 'Rananim' of an ideal spiritual community led him to a 'pronounced "tilt" towards Australia' in the years after World War I. He even argues for an 'Australian period' in Lawrence's oeuvre, extending from the publication of The Lost Girl in 1920 through Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), The Boy in the Bush (1924), and concluding with St. Mawr (1925). Game understands St. Mawr as a novella 'not set in Australia' but 'nevertheless in important respects about Australia', and this exemplifies his strategic approach of indirection, finding allusions to Australia in the less obvious places. The Boy in the Bush was written in collaboration with Australian novelist Mollie Skinner, and Kangaroo is automatically associated with Australia because the book is set here; but all of the other narratives in this putative 'Australian period' are not usually linked to this country. Game thus seeks to expand Australia's impact on Lawrence far beyond the four months he actually spent here in 1922, and he suggests instead that the country exerted a consistent influence on both Lawrence's earlier and his later work. This is a thought-provoking thesis, and one that is likely to be influential upon future Lawrence scholarship. Game's range of textual reference is considerably larger than that in Robert Darroch's D.H. Lawrence in Australia (1981), which attempted more narrowly to associate Lawrence's fictional figure of Benjamin Cooley in Kangaroo with political reactionaries in the New South Wales King and Empire Alliance, and through the ambitious scope of his research Game considers how Lawrence's Australian connections extend into the wider radius of his work as a whole.

D.H. Lawrence, Laura Forrester, Frieda Lawrence, Mrs Marchbanks and Mr Marchbanks at 'Wyewurk,' 3 Craig Street, Thirroul, New South Wales, 1922 (photograph by Mr A.D. Forrester).

While the pronounced strength of this critical work lies in its extensive knowledge of the archival and biographical contexts of Lawrence's writing, it is not quite so sure-footed on the dynamics of modernism more generally. Though Game treads carefully among current critical theories in this field, citing plentifully the work of influential modernist scholars such as Anne Fernihough and David Trotter, some of this material is presented in a manner that becomes a touch repetitive. Game does not give the sense of being entirely comfortable in assimilating recent directions in modernist theory into his archival orbit, and indeed the book's subtitle, 'Anxiety at the E­­­­dge of Empire', is almost a misnomer, since there is very little here on the kind of questions about imperial agendas raised in recent times by post-colonial studies. Indeed, observations on the representation of empire are largely confined to comments on Australia as 'profoundly "other"', attributed to Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), a book first published nearly forty years ago.

More perhaps might have been done on how Lawrence's attitude towards the Southern Hemisphere was shaped in part by his friendship with Katherine Mansfield, whom he first met in 1913, as mentioned here in passing by Game. Mansfield's complicated relationship to colonial questions has, for instance, been excellently charted by Saikat Majumdar in his recent book Prose of the World: Modernism and the banality of empire. By contrast, Game's default tendency is to read Lawrence's fiction in the first instance as 'highly autobiographical', as he says explicitly of Sons and Lovers, and this means he is not always so attuned to the more abstract, experimental aspects of Lawrence's art.

Postcard from D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence to Katherine Mansfield, sent from Wellington, 15 August 1922 (courtesy of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand).

There is, however, a useful section on the implicit identification of Lawrence's hero R.L. Somers in Kangaroo with Robert Louis Stevenson, an affiliation that suggests ways in which Lawrence's novel engages intertextually with a tradition of British travel writing going back to the final decades of the nineteenth century. Admittedly, there are a few loose ends here: for example, Game says 'it is possible that Lawrence read Stevenson's The Wrecker (1892)', a novel set partially in Sydney, without offering any conclusive evidence for this suggestion. In general, though, Game situates Lawrence convincingly in relation to an earlier tradition of British Victorian writers, including Samuel Butler and Thomas Hardy, who had projected transpacific space as an antidote to the repressive customs of English society.

Occasionally, Game's archival reconstructions also appear somewhat speculative, as when he suggests that the writing of Kangaroo in Thirroul might have been 'stimulated' by 'two Australian postage stamp designs' of kangaroos 'that circulated during the time of his visit to Australia'. Overall, though, the careful textual scholarship, along with the wealth of textual and historical detail accumulated here, ensures that Game covers the empirical contours of his subject as thoroughly as it is possible to conceive of anyone doing.

Postcard from D.H. Lawrence to Robert Mountsier, sent from Thirroul, 3 June 1922 (courtesy of The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana).

D.H. Lawrence's Australia is a critical work whose attention to detail will surely be of great benefit to subsequent Lawrentians, as we see, for example, in Game's observations on how both the novel Kangaroo and Lawrence's poem of the same name were heavily revised in the United States, a process attested to by the fact that extant drafts were composed on American typing paper. This is a work of solid, traditional scholarship with a few critical frills around the edges, but it should prove an invaluable resource for those interested in how travel writing became an integral part of Lawrence's artistic journey, or indeed for those concerned with the cultural history of modernism in Australia.