running straight as to go nowhere, with little bungalow homes ... Then quite near the inland, rose a great black wall of mountain or cliff ...". A park and a monument (dedicated 21 November 1998) commemorate D H Lawrence's time at Thirroul, located on the same street as the house he stayed in. The book D.H. Lawrence at Thirroul by lifelong Thirroul resident Joseph Davis was published by Collins (Sydney) in 1989 and questioned many of the assumptions made by Robert Darroch in his 1981 work entitled "D.H. Lawrence in Australia" published by Macmillan (Melbourne). The Cambridge edition of Kangaroo (edited by Bruce Steele) tended to accept the views of Davis rather than those of Darroch. Davis has gone on to write numerous articles and a number of books about art and the environment in Thirroul and the local area, including "Greetings from Thirroul" (1994), "Greetings from Wollongong" (1995), "The Illawarra Society of Artists" (2001), "Lake Illawarra: an ongoing history" (2005), "John Brown of Brownsville" (2011), "Gooseberry & Hooka" (2012),"One Hundred Seasons" (2014), "Wobbly Wollongong" (2016), "The Real Alexander Harris" (2018), "Rachel Henning and Deighton Taylor in Illawarra 1853-1896" (2019) and "D.H. Lawrence at Thirroul: one hundred years on" (2022).. Michael Bialoguski, later to become a prominent player in the Petrov Affair (1954) and later still an orchestral conductor in the UK and Europe, had a medical practice in Thirroul in the late 1940s. The artist Brett Whiteley died from a heroin overdose in the Beachside Motel in Thirroul on 15 June 1992, aged 53. The artist Paul Ryan is a long-term resident of Thirroul, as is the artist Frank Nowlan. The Thirroul Village Committee (TVC) was formed in 1983 because, in the words of Don Gray, "the town was looking rather tatty" and something needed to be done. Don was the founding Chairperson and Lynne Jones, the founding Secretary. In 1983 the population of less than 5,000 qualified Thirroul as a village. In 1993 the TVC won the Basil Ryan gold award at the Rise & Shine Awards presentation for improved streetscapes. The Thirroul Seaside and Arts Festival, which is a successful community event, was the idea of Don Gray. The first festival was run in 1993. Lynne Jones organised the Festival for many years, building to the point where it was handed over to the Lions Club. Another community event was "the Growing Green Kids Festival' – a