The Young Desire It

In the late afternoon of a day in February, that hottest of Australian summer months, when a brutal sun stood bronze above the river flats which you may see from the dormitory windows of Chatterton, Charles came to the school with his mother, walking from the railway station to the gates by a private path across a burnt, untidy field, overhung with Cape lilacs that still drooped, dusty and melancholy...In the lower part of his belly fear kicked and pulsed like a child in the womb, ready to be born.

Fifteen-year-old Charles Fox is sent away to boarding school, innocent, alone and afraid. There one of his masters develops an intense attachment to him. But when Charles meets Margaret, a girl staying at a nearby farm for the holidays, he is besotted, and a passionate, unforgettable romance begins.

Published in London in 1937 to wide acclaim, The Young Desire It is a stunning debut novel about coming of age: an intimate and lyrical account of first love, and a rich evocation of rural Western Australia. It won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, and is now back in print for the first time in years with a new introduction by David Malouf.

Read John Purcell's Review

There is nothing so seductive and yet elusive as the memories of our first experiences in love. We can recall the actions - shared glances, a sweet paralysis, then the first touch, perhaps a chaste kiss - but this is not what we desire. We want to feel again the fear, the pleasure, the tremors and the foreign breath. But it is this that eludes us.

Unless we stumble across an artist who can recreate these feelings for us.

Recently Text Publishing sent me a copy of The Young Desire It by Kenneth Mackenzie. Published to acclaim in 1937 and virtually lost to us since Mackenzie's early death in 1955, The Young Desire It is another great find and perfect fit for the Text Classics collection.

This is very much the work of a young novelist. Recounting a home schooled adolescent's experiences after he is sent to boarding school, there is very little story beyond this transformational transition from boy to man. Mackenzie was just seventeen when he started writing the novel and twenty-five when it was published. He was as close to the subject as any artist can hope to be and within these pages Mackenzie has captured for all time the sensation of first love. For which we must all be thankful though some may find the poetical prose hard going.

About the Author

Kenneth Mackenzie was born in 1913 in South Perth. His parents divorced in 1919, and he grew up with his mother and maternal grandfather on a property at Pinjarra, south of Perth. He was a sensitive child who developed an intense love of nature.

At age thirteen Mackenzie was sent to board at Guildford Grammar School in Perth. His experiences there informed his first novel, The Young Desire It, published under the name Seaforth Mackenzie by Jonathan Cape in 1937. The author was just twenty-three.

The novel drew praise from The Times, Spectator and Sydney Morning Herald; the Liverpool Daily Post called it ‘amazingly brilliant’. It was awarded the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

By this time Mackenzie had studied law, worked as a journalist and moved to Sydney. There he met the leading lights of the literary scene—among them Kenneth Slessor and Norman Lindsay—and married. He and his wife had a daughter and a son.

Mackenzie’s subsequent novels were Chosen People (1938), Dead Men Rising (1951), based partly on his experience of the Cowra prisoner breakout, and The Refuge (1954). He also produced two volumes of poetry.

Kenneth Mackenzie’s last years were spent mainly alone, in declining health and battling alcoholism, at Kurrajong in New South Wales. On 19 January 1955 he drowned in mysterious circumstances while swimming in Tallong Creek, near Goulburn.