Next day I drove up Wycombe Road. Number 112 turned out to be a substantial building, dating from the 1920s, which had been converted into a convalescent home.

I sought out the manager and explained that I was trying to identify a place locally that was connected to a work of fiction. He showed me over the building.

I knew I was getting warm when I saw from an upstairs window the Macquarie Lighthouse, for in the novel Somers says a lighthouse could be seen from "51 Murdoch Street".

Yet what I was really looking for was the distinctive feature of the property described in Kangaroo - a "tub-top" lookout which Somers mounts to see the view down the Harbour.

Alas, there was no such structure there when I visited 112.

Lawrence also mentions a tree with bare limbs and spiky flowers - a coral tree - in the backyard of the fictional house. I asked the manager if he could recall such a tree.

"No," he said, "but perhaps Norm might." He gestured to an elderly man who was pottering nearby.

He was Norm Dunn, and for more than 50 years he had lived in the house over the back fence of 112.

Yes, he did recall such a tree. He used to lop it for the two ladies who had owned the premises when it was a rooming-house.

Did he also recall, I asked, some sort of lookout?

Yes, he did. There used to be a fern-house in the backyard with a ladder going up to a roof-top lookout, built so you could see the Harbour over the roof of the house next door.

Lawrence in Kangaroo writes:

Then he went into the garden, even climbed the tub-like summer house, to have a last look at the world. There was a big slip of very bright moon risen, and the harbour was faintly distinct.