He would address each student as ‘old boy’ and endlessly read aloud from his collection of ancient Penguin paperbacks. In retrospect, I can see he was pretty delighted by his own sonorous voice and upper-class accent. Mr Phillipps certainly gave his voice, and his credentials, a real workout. Rather like my mother, he was a ‘lavatory’ man. And a ‘sofa’ man. And a ‘spectacles’ man. He had wiry dark hair and a clipped DH Lawrence-style beard, like it was copied from the photo of Lawrence on the back of the Penguin paperbacks he was reading. Summer and winter, he would wear an ancient blue jacket onto which was stitched the crest of the Oxford college he had attended decades before, teamed with fawn trousers and an Oxford tie. He would mention, quite often, that he had been personally taught by JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. Occasionally, on a sports day, the jacket would be exchanged for a white cable-knit jumper, also bearing an Oxford logo – one which, he said, indicated he had a ‘blue’. In the Australian schoolyard of the ’70s a ‘blue’ still meant an argument, normally involving fists, but we did our best to look impressed.

He was precise in all things. He’d move slowly, deliberately, whatever the task, as if he was enjoying his own body and the elegant way it moved. I remember watching him, one day after school, approach his car. First he placed his briefcase on the bonnet. Then he opened the latch of the briefcase. Each of these was a separate movement, with a conscious and deliberate beat in between. Next he fished down into the briefcase – separate movement – located the keys and pulled them out – separate movement – set them on the bonnet – separate movement – relocked the bag – separate movement – and finally reached for the door. It’s not that it took him ages to drive off, just that every stage was somehow self-regarding.

For all that, he was passionate about his subject. An example: when I was thirteen, he became concerned about my progress with Shakespeare. In the middle of Year 8, he suggested he could give me extra lessons. He offered to meet me each Saturday morning in a small office close to our classroom. I agreed. For all my difficulty understanding Shakespeare, I loved reading and I loved writing. And so our arrangement began: I would cycle from home on Saturday mornings, arrive at school at nine, and be treated to a couple of hours of free, private tuition. Canberra, in midwinter, was cold. Cycling meant a scarf wrapped around my head, a slit for my eyes, like I was wearing a hairy burka. My hands would sting as they gripped the handlebars, my eyes streaming with the cold. I was a martyr to literature. Yet I felt lucky to have been offered this doorway into a sophisticated, literary world.

Mr Phillipps was a patient teacher, encouraging me to recall and explain Shakespeare’s plots. After a few weeks, we naturally moved on to a study of Samuel Pepys, the great English diarist of the seventeenth century.