I suppose I lost hope this way. On 16 February 2003 I march through the centre of Adelaide against the war in Iraq. I’m 18, just a few months across the legally recognised threshold of adulthood, and about to start my first year of university. I’m much too young to have experienced the anti–Vietnam War protests that had galvanised so many of a previous generation. This, even by the admission of those who had lived through that time, is bigger; much bigger.

However, measured by the fate of our chief demand—that the government of the day led by prime minister John Howard not take the nation to war—the protest fails. At the time we guessed at the needless death and destruction that would result from a war. Now we know: a country in ruins; a notional enemy; international terrorism, inflamed rather than lanced. And 100,000 Iraqi civilians dead, as many people as had joined me on that warm, overcast day in 2003, thronging the kilometre-long stretch of King William Street from Tarntanyangga to Parliament House.