“Lessons from Untaught Books

One of the strongest memories of my state-school education in Ballarat in the 1960s and 1970s is that it consisted to a large extent of unexpected and unexplained events. At my little five-teacher primary school most teachers stayed only a year or two before leaving for—well, I don’t know where, or why, as not one of their departures was ever announced, let alone explained.

Many of my fellow students were even more transient, some staying only weeks, or even days. Seldom did anyone let us know they were going, or where or why they had gone; they just seemed to disappear, and usually we realised they had gone only after an absence too long to be explained by illness.

It was, I suppose, a useful preparation for dealing with the unexplained in life generally, and for living with uncertainty. It could almost have been a deliberate ploy with this purpose in mind. Take the schools movie. A movie would be shown at a special schools session at the local cinema, and if we were in the…