The town, a mining and logging centre that also services some farms and orchards in the area, sits in the hills to the north of the Illawarra escarpment. In fine weather it might look picturesque from certain angles although it’s basically just a well-treed suburb, but as I drove in it seemed to be huddled down under a thin mist as if getting ready to be rained on.

I located Hillcrest Street and drove slowly along it looking for the right number. The street could have crested a hill once, but the spread of houses, a couple of blocks of units, the bitumen, cement kerbing and guttering and lines of lampposts along the major streets had obliterated the original, topography. A few residents had left decent sized gum trees and wattles on their blocks, but most had embraced the shrub, Clinton Scott’s house was a standard post-World War II fibro box with an iron roof, skimpy front porch and small windows. The slight lurch to the left of the whole structure suggested decayed stumps; the broken-down fence and overgrown garden shrieked cheap rent. I parked and walked through a gate wide enough to admit a car. It was held open by a brick. Tyre tracks showed where a car or cars had been parked but there weren’t any in evidence. The front yard was scruffy, although efforts had been made. At a guess, the grass had been cut roughly with a hand mower fairly recently and some of the more aggressive weeds and thistles had been pulled up and put in a heap.

The mist was thickening towards rain as I walked up the gravel path to the front of the house. I knocked, got no response and tried the door. It opened and I went in, making as much noise as I could. There was a threadbare carpet runner down the passage on top of linoleum. It was a lino kind of house. A bedroom off each side of the passage; a kitchen-cum-sitting room after that with a bathroom and toilet off to one side.