The second song, 'Green mooned the white lady,' is a ballad in four rhyming strophes, much distorted in the music, in which we are given a hint of the later significance of the colours green and white to Stow: Green mooned the white lady of silvered Sydney town -O, stately as a candle-end, all in her winding-gown; apple-pale and like a spider's egg her dainty muslin face and her moonstones new polished with a moon-clout of lace. Stow worked on the new novel in 1983, finishing it despite the distractions of an excellent spring: 'the sun is pouring in the window of my top room, and birds are chirruping away. . . it's distracting me rather from my book-it suits me best to work while the nights are long and cold and dark, and I had hoped to have it finished, or nearly, by now (Letter to mother, 28 April 1983). There are links with Stow's former home towns of Fremantle and Geraldton; the Western Australian and Essex towns saw huge cargo vessels in a working port, and Harwich's lighthouse out at sea was an English version of Fremantle's lighthouse. Stow had an excellent ear for languages, and had begun his researches into the Suffolk dialect by working in the local pub some ten years earlier (Letter to mother, 20 Aug 1973). ...Harry speaks in a distinctive local dialect, the particular words that Stow creates meticulously preserved across the novel, for example: whass what's hooman human redooce reduce goo go knoo know hoom home stoodent student The Suburbs of Hell was shortlisted for East Anglian book of the year in 1984, the prizegiving event aptly held in a literary Suffolk venue, the Angel hotel in Bury St Edmunds, where Dickens's Mr Pickwick stayed.