ON A WARM Monday morning in late February 1988, I tentatively entered a sandstone lecture theatre and climbed the wide stairs to one of the near-to-the-back rows. I was accompanied by two of my closest friends from high school, and we should have been well practised, having arrived to classrooms together literally thousands of times. Yet this was different. The teaching space was so much bigger, able to seat hundreds of pupils, and we were the little kids again, ‘freshers’ in our very first class at the oldest and largest university in our state, impressive to our young provincial eyes. That Beethoven’s Ninth was playing over the loudspeaker added decidedly to the weight of the moment and my ambient sense of impostorism. The lecturer waiting behind the lectern was a middle-aged man with unruly dark hair and glasses. As the class began and the teacher introduced himself I wrote his name – Professor Richard Bosworth – in blue pen on a piece of paper that I still have in storage somewhere.

The unit was Late Modern European History 102 – an easy choice for my friends and me, as we’d all liked and done well at history in our leaving year. We soon found out, though, that this was no simple narrative account of events of the kind to which we were accustomed, but a different country altogether. The course was a steep introduction to ‘history’ as fundamentally unstable: a multivalenced, complicatedly ironic and endlessly nuanced dialogue between past and present. The feeling was unsettling; a departure from comforting certainties of neatly ordered understanding into a far more complex milieu of infinitely greater strangeness and richness, with still evolving tendrils that reached disconcertingly into the now.