The author (left) snapped in front of "Wyewurk" in 1988 in the company of Barry Conyngham, then Professor of Creative Arts at Wollongong University, and later Vice-Chancellor of Southern Cross University(and now, at time of writing, Dean of the Victorian College of the Arts)

BEFORE WE WENT to Perth we had, the previous year, formed the DH Lawrence Society of Australia. This had come out of a campaign to save "Wyewurk", the bungalow in Thirroul in which Lawrence stayed and where he wrote Kangaroo.

Thanks to a quirk in local tenancy laws, Lawrence's "cottage by the sea" had remained, occupied by a single "protected" tenant since the early 1940s, preserved in almost the same state that Lawrence had left it in August 1922.

We know this because one of the people Nehls commissioned to look into Lawrence's time in Australia - the Sydney journalist Fred Esch - had, in 1955-56, interviewed its owner, Mrs Southwell, and had gone down to Thirroul and taken photos of its interior and exterior.

After my first Lawrence article was published, I met and interviewed Esch in Sydney in mid-1976. He urged me to try and get "Wyewurk" preserved.

The following year Sandra and I made representations to the NSW Minister of Planning, Paul Landa (with whom I had gone to school), to have "Wyewurk" either acquired or otherwise preserved in the condition Lawrence had portrayed it in Kangaroo.

Alas, he did nothing. (So much for Sydney High's old-boy network.) In 1981, after the "sitting tenant" moved out, and following the death of Mrs Southwell, the house came on the market.

Had we known this - we were in England at the time - we would have moved hell and high water to have it purchased and preserved. We would have happily bought it ourselves if necessary.

However, a local estate agent learned of its vacant state and immediately made an offer to the Southwell family, which was accepted. (He conducted, we were told by the Southwell family, a "dutch auction", at which he was the only bidder - though I am, of course, not implying he didn't pay a fair price for the cottage.)

Nevertheless, "Wyewurk" thus fell into property-owning, rather than literary or heritage, hands.

When, on our permanent return from London in 1987, we learned of its new ownership, we successfully convinced the current Planning Minister, Bob Carr (with whom I had worked on The Bulletin - that old-boy network still worked), to put a preservation-order on the precious building, which he managed to arrange.