I approached the end of seventeen years teaching at Newtown High School of the Performing Arts with a mixture of emotions. I was excited about leaving Sydney for a new adventure in Melbourne. I knew I’d been at Newtown for long enough. Seventeen years in the one place is long enough for anybody. I even knew how I was going to leave – by taking a group of kids to perform in China and by doing a production of Blackrock.

I’d had a peripatetic teaching career, interrupted by fifteen years as an actor and interspersed with various acting and writing jobs. There were things I loved about teaching and things that I hated. There were things about how schools function that drove me around the bend. I created a niche for myself but it was hard work and I spent a lot of time shaking my head.

So, how can I now synthesise all these conflicting thoughts?

I’m a writer. I have mainly written plays but even those have been about things I care about. Maybe one of their common failings is that they are about things. I’ve been accused of writing 'message plays'. I didn’t ever take this as criticism.

My first play, Us or Them, was a vaguely autobiographical piece about my early years as a teacher. It was surprisingly successful. I didn’t take myself seriously as a playwright as I was too busy trying to take myself seriously as an actor. I wrote more plays as I waited for acting jobs and the 'big break' that sort of came but passed me by when I wasn’t looking.

So I couldn’t write Us or Them 2. I couldn’t write another play about teaching. Nor could I leave the profession without saying something, without expressing all those pent-up emotions and letting loose all those festering thoughts.

It occurred to me that I might write a book. Don’t ask me why this occurred to me. I’d never written a book. I’d only had time to whack out a few half-formed plays. Still, the thought grew and grew and became a minor obsession. I had no idea what I’d write about and it was really only a fantasy anyway.

The trouble with me is that I like the idea of realising fantasies – not the ones we usually associate with 'fantasies’ but the ones to do with dreams, like performing at the Opera House or playing cricket for Australia. So the idea of a book about teaching started taking hold of my imagination.

Then fate stepped in. We took the kids to Cockatoo Island for an excursion around the old convict gaols – a very Sydney thing to do. We ran into some friends and on the way home on the ferry I struck up a conversation with one of them who happened to be a publisher with NewSouth. We’d talked before about a kids' play I wrote that I was trying to flog, and she was very helpful at the time – the play has since been published and is doing very well.

Some people, including my partner, would baulk at pitching an idea to a friend you’d bumped into on a ferry on a sunny Sunday afternoon but not me. I’ve never been one for protocol. No one ever explained it to me. Or maybe it was a reaction to the absurd upbringing I'd had. Whatever it was, I told Phillipa that I had an idea for a book. Before I could finish the sentence, she cut me off and told me she’d been meaning to get in touch with me. She wanted to talk to me about writing a book about teaching.

I nearly fell into the harbour.

We arranged to meet and the rest, as they say, is history. Or Playground Duty.