Pepys famously detailed the Great Fire of London as well as the bubonic plague of 1666. For a thirteen-year-old, his diary was a revelation. He wrote so vividly, the personal and the political in perpetual collision. Building on my enthusiasm, Mr Phillipps suggested I write my own diary. I loved the idea, scribbling my thoughts day by day into a small exercise book. On subsequent Saturday mornings Mr Phillipps and I would critique and analyse what I had written. Had I made the same decisions as Pepys? Was my writing as powerful as his?

It was only later, a lot later, that I realised the whole thing had been a ruse. Actually, quite a cruel one.

Meanwhile, in a piece of perfect timing for my parents, the Whitlam government was elected. The public service grew in size and Canberra boomed. The newsagency was raking in money. My father could have bought $200 suits every day. We moved from the rented house with the separate wing and bought a smaller but very chi-chi house on the same street as The Lodge, the official residence of the prime minister. The house had been owned by the man who ran Canberra’s Lobby restaurant, a favourite haunt of politicians and journalists. It looked like a decorator had been hired to fit out both business and home. The interior design hovered in some weird 1970s combination of hippy retreat and upmarket brothel. Several of the doors featured sheets of heavy, patterned glass, covered in ruby-coloured swirls. The wallpaper was burnished to look like metal and there was white shag-pile carpet throughout. Later, when things turned nasty and bloodstains became an occasional problem, this turned out to be a poor choice of floor covering.

Despite their disregard for each other, my parents’ lives were working out in a material sense. They purchased a small rural property outside Canberra, my mother happily naming the cows and playing the gentlewoman farmer on Saturday afternoons. She was both an animal lover and a cleanliness obsessive and so took to wearing white cotton gloves whenever she went near the animals. In fact, she started wearing the gloves whenever she left the house. My father began dressing like a country auctioneer, in tweed jackets and a knitted tie. He saw himself as Lord Ted – a Lancashire man who’d done well and could jovially splash around his money. The extra-wide hallway in our new house was optimistically renamed the ‘Gallery’ and kitted out with outback oil paintings by people like Pro Hart and Hugh Sawrey. My father insisted on buying me a made-to-measure suit for my fourteenth birthday, even though my body was changing by the month. And he began purchasing sports cars so expensive they never worked.

The main activity I shared with my father was helping him count the family cash: he’d bring home bags of coins each day from the newsagency and we’d sit together at the kitchen table, rolling them into batches so they could be presented to the bank. Despite my somewhat difficult childhood, this book is not Angela’s Ashes and here’s why: it’s hard to win sympathy from a reader once you’ve included the phrase ‘every night my hands were black from counting the family money’.

When not counting coins, I spent a lot of time away from the house – either with my friends or walking on my own in a dreamy adolescent way, hands stuffed into the pockets of my overcoat, imagining myself a tortured intellectual. While walking, I would talk to myself. I enjoyed the chance, I suppose, to converse with someone whose intellectual ability I found so impressive. I was regularly stopped and questioned by the police. It was hardly surprising: I would be walking past the embassy of some troubled country in a padded greatcoat, mumbling inanities.