Bill is now retired but Shirl – despite being sixty-three – still works part-time at the BP on Bondi Road.

‘Wouldn’t give up work if they paid me,’ she told me, with her lipstick-coated durry between her lips. ‘First thing that happens when you stop work is you drop dead.’

‘Didn’t happen to me,’ said Bill.

The Carsons live directly opposite Delaney House, on the high side of the street, and they have a deck on the front that looks down into the Delaneys’ front yard.

‘You’re not the first to figure out that I would have had the best view of that raid,’ Bill Carson said, when I explained that the purpose of my visit was to try to piece together how the raid unfolded.

‘The Channel Nine guys, when they arrived, were right onto it. They’d got a tip-off, they told me, that a raid was going to happen, and they’d scoped out the street and decided that the best place to watch matters unfold was from my deck.’

He led me through his house, past 1950s furniture that your modern Bondi hipster would pay a fortune for, and past at least eleven overflowing ashtrays, studded with Shirl’s stained butts.

‘I put this deck on myself twenty years ago. Didn’t get a permit, so don’t tell the council,’ Bill said, swinging the flywire door open. ‘Shirl wasn’t keen on the idea. She was always, who’s going to want to sit out there with the stink from the sea? But now she’s out here all the time.’

The deck that Bill Carson built is about two metres wide, made of timber and concrete, with a steel balustrade and, I hope he doesn’t mind me saying, not exactly stable. It clings to the side of his house with bolts, and the front end sags a little toward the ground. It’s perhaps not big enough for a table, but there were two worn cane chairs with seat cushions with a faded palm-tree pattern. There’s also an old white birdcage with Shirl’s budgerigar in it. She calls him Tony Abbott.

‘You can see the ocean over there, and whales from May to September, if you get the binoculars out,’ Shirl said, but what I wanted to see was directly below me: the front garden of Delaney House.

‘So, there she is,’ Bill Carson said, seeing me looking down. ‘You get a good view of the place, don’t you?’

He’d taken a seat in one of the cane chairs, and had his slippered feet up on the balustrade. ‘So, pull up a pew.’

It was clear to me that the raid on Delaney House was a bit of a thrill for people like Bill, a retiree who says himself that he mostly fills his days ‘walking back and forward to the post office or running a lawn mower across the nature strip’.

‘I’d actually been out in the car that morning, getting petrol and a bag of ice, and when I came back I couldn’t get into my own street,’ he said. ‘The cops had blocked both ends off with those chunky orange barricades you see at the City2Surf. I pulled up beside one of them – the one at the Bondi Road end of the street – and said, “What’s going on? I live down there.” But they were busy getting lids off their coffee cups, and not in a mood to discuss things with me. I said, “At least tell me it’s not my house you’re interested in,” and they said, “This has got nothing to do with you, mate, unless you live at Delaney House.”’