They married and his new wife moved into the house. I liked her a lot. Almost from the start, the marriage didn’t work. My father was still besotted with my mother and, given half a chance, would weep and rage, screaming about ‘that bastard Phillipps’, the word ‘bastard’ always appended to the ‘Phillipps’ as if it would be a grammatical error to have one without the other. As for me, I was having adventures and misadventures, and both were probably the product of negotiating an adolescence unencumbered by parenting. Some of the experiences were great and some quite awful. I don’t need to recount them all, but to summarise: when a young person is unprotected and needy, paedophiles from miles around seem to instantly know, like they are on some sort of text alert. I remember at age sixteen, having been invited to stay at some older man’s flat in Sydney, opening a cupboard door to see a swill of child pornography on the floor and thinking: ‘How did I get myself into this? And how do I get myself out of it?’

On another occasion, a man convinced me and one of my school friends that he was a filmmaker. He had a script. It was set in Weimar Germany and was about the adventures of two young sailor boys. Yes, really: Weimar sailor boys. If there’s one thing I can’t stand about small-town paedophiles it’s their lack of originality. I was keen to be a film star, but then my friend showed his father the script. My mate’s dad, in a scene of some fury, descended on the project and chased the old creep away, saving me in the process. I suppose, all these years on, I should thank that father. In fact, we can all take pleasure in the non-existence of a film showing me rouged, mascara-ed and dressed as a sailor.

I finished school and found a job in Queensland. After my years of devotion to Canberra Youth Theatre, I passed an audition to become part of a theatre-in-education troupe touring schools in the outback. We’d often drive a hundred kilometres between schools each day, across vast plains of scrub, staying each night in a different country pub. Some audiences were made up of indigenous kids; more commonly they were the children of white cattle-farmers. On one occasion we met a Greek bloke who proudly told us, ‘I’m the only bloody ethnic in 800 bloody miles.’ Hardly anyone in our audiences had ever seen a play. This was highly useful, as they lacked a point of comparison by which to assess my truly awful acting.

I had long thought of myself as independent, needing neither parents nor anybody else. Here, on the broad plains of outback Queensland, I could test that resilience. We were a crew of three performers – me and Peter, both straight from school, and a slightly older guy with the unlikely name of Rock. We tolerated each other fairly well, despite some tension between Peter and Rock – mostly over Peter’s enthusiasm for the complete product range of the Brut cosmetics company. Peter had Brut aftershave, Brut antiperspirant, Brut shampoo and Brut soap. If Brut had produced a toothpaste or a range of condoms he’d have been an early adopter. Every morning we’d jump into the enclosed space of the car, ready for the long trip, with Rock and I gagging against the Brut which oozed from Peter’s every pore. In Bundaberg, where we shared a house on the coast for a few days, Rock finally snapped, gathering armfuls of Brut products from the bathroom and running out the front door, Peter in hot pursuit, and me following behind, worried they might physically attack each other. Along the beach they went, then up onto the grassy headland, Rock laughing maniacally, Peter yelling for him to give back the Brut, out towards the point, the sky huge, the mighty Pacific stretching to infinity – and then the moment: Rock’s arms flung wide, an evil cackle . .