Munt had been some sort of itinerant hippy, I think. He said he’d never had a job before he started teaching at the school. Never quite doctrinaire enough for the Inner Council, he was still enough of an astral tripper to be given 30 kids and a real lot of benefit of the doubt.

He drove classic cars, about one or two a year, replacing them as crashed. A Type 3 Volkswagen, a Troop Carrier, a red Holden ute with a custom tray cover. I remember a couple of us kids getting a ride home in the tray while that one lasted, rattling around like beans in a tin as he slapped through the suburbs, laying it flat out round corners and swapping lanes like we were taking evasive action.

I made up a sign on one of those trips, a piece of paper with HELP written on it in texta. Pressed it onto the back window, thrashing through traffic. Just a prank at the time. With hindsight it was perfectly rational. If dash cameras had been a thing back then I’m a hundred percent sure he’d have been arrested.

It was his air of mischief that made us admire him rather than recognise him as volatile and wildly incompetent. He had a cheeky smile and a wheezing Muttley laugh, made inappropriate jokes in a conspiratorial tone and approached rules as suggestions.

After 6 years with him as class teacher a child could come out with burn scars, an acquired brain injury and a suicidally lax attitude to personal safety, but would be unlikely to be a keen reader. Or able to read, in some cases.

On the plus side, they’d know a fair bit about beekeeping and be able to make a really, really good cup of tea.

A lot of people hypothesised that Munt had a drinking problem. He didn’t, though. His addiction was indeed causing him to gain weight, crash cars and give children concussions by throwing big wooden chalkboard erasers at them, but it wasn’t alcohol.

It was tea.

I asked him once. I just fronted up and, being my usual restrained and tactful self, said “Do you have a drinking problem? You keep crashing cars.”

He said no, it was down to drinking too much tea. He couldn’t sleep, which explained the matching luggage under his eyes.

He liked tea with honey, which was why he kept bees. In a two hour class he’d need three cups. A student would be sent to make them, which is how being the best at making tea could leave you illiterate enough to have to ask a nurse what the sign saying BURNS UNIT meant.

One thing I will say for the Arcadia Free School is that at least once a year, each class would be herded into a rusty Toyota Coaster and taken on a trip nobody would later believe. We all did wild things, like climbing Mount Warning in pitch darkness to see dawn from the peak – first light on the continent, which was thick, grey and obscured by rainforest – but Munt took the cake.

Munt took 30 primary school children up “Ayers Rock”, and was proud of it. “A bucket list thing”, he said. The children, now in their late 40s, are loathe to admit having done it.

The Aṉangu – always upset by anyone making the easily lethal climb up Uluru without genuine cultural business – would be appalled. Parents were notified afterwards.

Munt was the wild uncle, the wayward older brother, the inspiration to try stuff that was obviously a bad idea. To my lasting mortification I idolised him. He had records by Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson and Ry Cooder. He played a National resonator guitar that sounded like a gramophone and looked like a hub cap. He was a vegetarian, and so was his cat.

That last one bothered even me.

I visited his house once. It was basically a verandah with an attached bedroom and pit-toilet ensuite, in dense bushland above a steep drop on the Hornsby side of Galston Gorge. If you leaned out far enough you could see a number of his cars rusting in the trees off the hairpin bends.

His cat, when called, did indeed come and eat steamed pumpkin from a bowl while the sun set over a forest eerily devoid of birdsong.

I saw him one last time in the late 90s, when he had for some reason dropped in on my mums. He was thin by then and smaller than I remembered. He said he was selling avocados by the road for a living. He reminisced with me about my high school bully, the one whose tyres I’d let down after he’d tried to run me over for laughs. They were best friends these days, he said, because nobody else would lend him a car.

*Names are changed regularly to enhance readability