During the frst 22 years or so of my life at least the major factor shaping my early life in my coming-of-age quest was one of personal struggle, the major theme of my memoirs. There were, however, four related factors, the sub-themes of the memoirs:

• • social class and government-provided school education;

• • the efect of adolescent sexual abuse on an individual's life chances;

• • the lifelong disadvantages and benefts of correspondence/distance education; and

• • untangling the insidious long tentacles of racism.

I spent several years considering how I should present these in written format to an audience of paraprofessionals, student teachers, postgraduate students and practising teachers participating in professional development courses – and maybe just community-based and interested folk. Slowly, the idea of writing my memoirs formed. Somehow, over the decades working frst as a teacher and school principal and later as an academic, the idea had formed in the back of my mind that a memoir was not so much about the memoirist per se, but rather larger issues, issues shared by many folk. And quite pleasingly, my research for this exegesis confrmed this.

Perhaps, it is a necessary condition for any octogenarian to refect on how he/she came to be what he/she is in a personal and professional sense, where he/she came from at their birth – the vagaries of life's chances – what some have called ‘the examined life’. I reckon, now, that for me at least these determining factors come down to the weight and nature of one's childhood and adolescent social/cultural/economic conditions during the frst 22 or so years of one life.