Instead, she vanished. In the end, my father decided to return to Britain for a break. As an attempt to shake off his misery, he booked himself a three-month trip during which he’d stay with his mother and sister.

As luck would have it, one of my father’s friends was moving to Canberra and it was arranged that this old mate would look after me. The only catch was that he wouldn’t arrive for a while. So here was the deal: I would live on my own for three weeks and would then be joined by a temporary parent. We’d ‘batch it’, as was the expression for two chaps sharing a house. Looking back, this seems a peculiar decision: why didn’t my father just delay his trip until his friend was ready to move in? Still, I don’t remember being troubled by it. I didn’t write a diary at the time, despite my familiarity with the work of Mr Pepys, but if I had, I imagine it would have been filled with observations about potential girlfriends and the pretentious books I was pretending to read, rather than the departure of either my mother or father.

My friends, of course, were keen to make the most of a house without parents, especially one with a freezer full of food and a pool. I’d like to claim it also had a well-stocked bar, but as the child of any alcoholic knows, though many bottles come to visit, few hang around. I have a half-memory of one of my friends trying to get the sticky dregs out of one of my father’s bottles of Blue Curaçao before realising he’d been bested by a professional. And so my friends would visit every night and we’d sit drinking tea, talking bullshit philosophy, awaiting the arrival of my fill-in father.

Occasionally, I admit, I became a little maudlin and would whine to my friends, hoping to drum up some sympathy: ‘It’s so unfair, my mother’s run away and now my father’s gone.’

Years later one of them remembered the scene with unnecessary accuracy: ‘Yes, yes, Richard never really left home. Home left him.’

A few weeks on, my father’s friend arrived. His name was Steve Stephens. All those years before, he’d helped my father set up the newspaper in New Guinea and they’d stayed in touch. Separate to the drama in our household, Steve had seen the financial success of my father’s business and decided that he, too, would buy a newsagency in Canberra. That $200 suit had a lot to answer for.

By the time Steve knocked on the door, the fridge was empty and the pool had turned green. He fixed both problems with immediate good cheer. I realised, almost instantly, that I’d been sent a gift.

Steve Stephens was a craggy-faced Australian bloke. His hobbies were shooting and fishing. He always had a cigarette poked into his mouth and a talent for the Australian vernacular. He also wrote poetry, loved his wife and was fiercely loyal to my father. He was very masculine in a traditional way, as well as being reflective and generous. This sort of expansive masculinity turned out to be just what I needed.

By the time Steve arrived, events had conspired to make me a little confused about what it meant to be an Australian man. My father, for all his good points, didn’t really embody what you could call masculine virtues. Selfless, forthright, practical, strong: none of these words really sprang to mind. And Mr Phillipps didn’t measure up, either: he was pompous and vain, even aside from the way he’d made off with my mother. Outside these two men, there was the more general perception of the Australian man as some sort of unfeeling Ocker – a definition which involved attitudes to sport I didn’t share, attitudes to women I didn’t understand, and attitudes to alcohol which, well, I’ve been working on ever since.

My confusion wasn’t particularly helped by my passion for Canberra Youth Theatre, in which I was now spending all my free time. There were some admirable young men there, but they shared a view of masculinity as extreme as that of the Ockers. The Youth Theatre group-think went something like this: that maleness is associated with violence, insensitivity and the oppression of women, and that the best thing is to hide any masculine attributes under a fluffy layer of hippydom. We would do plays about rape in war, and other light entertainment topics.