Some twenty years ago, I was a young science lecturer struggling with my first job at an institution of higher learning in Adelaide—famous of course as our “City of Churches”—a now embarrassing epithet reflecting Adelaide’s one-time status as a key centre of Nonconformist Protestantism. Just returned from scientific training in the USA, I was feeling the anxiety that afflicts new academics finding themselves alone in lecture halls filled with critical, hard-to-impress late-teens: how the dickens do I hold their attention for the next forty-five minutes? Returning to my department after a lecture one day, I mentioned my frustrations to a…