A MAJOR RESEARCH breakthrough came in February 1979, just as I was about to return to London, which had been our home since 1971.

In the novel Lawrence says that his alter-ego Somers initially stayed in a house next to Jack Callcott's home in Sydney.

If I could track down where Scott had lived in May-August 1922, and link that to the text of Kangaroo, I believed I would have the vital evidence putting them both in the same place at the same time, and thus show that their paths had indeed crossed.

The Mitchell and NSW State Libraries in Sydney had extensive records of where people lived in Sydney in the 1920s...directories, telephone books, electoral rolls, and so on. Over the past three years or so, I had ransacked them trying to track down where Scott had lived in 1922.

But although I could place him in 1921, and again in 1925, he was absent from any record in 1922.

My big breakthrough came when I was tidying up some loose-ends before my plane left for the UK in early 1979.

I had identified where a Sydney address that Lawrence mentions in Kangaroo - "51 Murdoch Street"- was in 1922 (according to the text, it was next door to the fictional Callcott's address).

In 1922, this "real" address - 51 Murdoch Street - was the "Canberra Flats", a rooming-house in the harbourside suburb of Cremorne.

One source (the Sands directory of Sydney street addresses) showed that, in the early 1920s, it had been occupied by various people, but whose names meant nothing to me. Scott was certainly not among them.

Yet I suspected that the address was in some way significant, for not only is such an address adjacent to the fictional house where Callcott lives in Sydney, but Lawrence's description of its environs could only have come from direct observation...and where did he get such an precise address anyway?

So one of my final research tasks, before I departed for London, was to go back to the relevant electoral roll and look up the names of those "Canberra Flats" occupants again, to see if there was some clue in them that I had overlooked in my initial check.

But when the attendant brought out the requested roll, it was not the same one I had perused so closely before. What I had not realised was that, in those days, there were two sets of Sydney electoral rolls - the Federal rolls and the State rolls.

Moreover, the State roll that I had now been given, and which I had not seen before, had been compiled in March 1922, because of a pending State election (in which the NSW Labor Government was defeated). And in it I finally found Jack Scott's 1922 address - 112 Wycombe Road, Neutral Bay (a neighbouring suburb to Cremorne - and only a block away, a mere few hundred yards, from 51 Murdoch Street).