Firstly, it was where Lawrence said it was (no need of a place-transposition to Collaroy). It fitted the setting of the fictional "St Columb" perfectly. Its lagoon (Narrabeen Lagoon) was a more "genuine" lagoon than the one at Collaroy, which was merely a lagoon-looking rock-pool that had given its name to "The Basin".

However, the strongest point going for the Narrabeen "end-house" was that Robert Whitelaw obtained a captioned photograph (see below) of Charles Rosenthal and his wife having tea in the front garden of "Billabong".

To being able to place Jack Scott at "Hinemoa" was all well and good. To being able to place Charles Rosenthal - the "Kangaroo" of the title of the novel - in the garden of a house at the end of Ocean Road, Narrabeen, was quite another.

There is now little doubt that the afternoon tea-party was held in the Shultz end-house in Ocean Road, North Narrabeen, as Lawrence said it was.

Yet those framed photographs of "the first Trewhella" - identified by Peter Oatley as being in the living-room of "Hinemoa" - together with the "settles around the window" still worried me.

Nevertheless, "Billabong" seemed to all-but tie up this particular loose-end.

* * *

Or did it?

So worried was I about that framed medal-and-ribbon and letter praising the first Trewhella (referred to by both Lawrence in Kangaroo and Scott's stepson Peter Oatley when I spoke to him in 1979) that I tried to find if there was any way the two ill-matched pieces of the Sunday-afternoon tea-party jigsaw - the "Narrabeen" scenario and the "Collaroy" one - could be fitted together.

On the one hand, I now have no doubt at all that the crucial tea-party took place at "Billabong", the Schultz house at the end of Ocean Road, North Narrabeen, as described by Lawrence.

Yet, when you examine his text more closely, there is something slightly out of place, a small and apparently insignificant anomaly.

The text says that, at the conclusion of the tea-party, Callcott offered Somers and Harriett a "lift" back to town in his car (as mentioned above).

And something like this must have happened, for Lawrence and Frieda are unlikely to have gone back to the tram terminus at Narrabeen and caught the tram back to Manly, and thence by ferry to Circular Quay. No - they were driven back, as the text says.

As they are about to depart in the car from Narrabeen, Jack Callcott (according to the text) says:

"If you like to crowd in we can take you in the car. We can squeeze in Mr. Somers in front, and there'll be plenty of room for the others at the back, if Gladys sits on her Dad's knee."

The anomaly here is in the words "if Gladys sits on her Dad's knee", for that implies - as "Gladys" is almost certainly Enid Hum - that the Hum family were also in that "fictional" vehicle.