CITIES ARE SOCIALLY stratified. The nobs live where the views are best. The workers live in the valleys and the flat wastelands. It is possible to live in a certain part of an Australian city and never meet an Aborigine, a Jew, an immigrant from the Indian subcontinent, a doctor (apart from when visiting a surgery), a garbage collector (until he fails to take your garbage away) or a billionaire.

This doesn’t happen in country towns. While it is true that adults, applying nothing more complex than the “birds of a feather” principle, will tend to gravitate towards each other out of social, economic and intellectual self-interest, country schools are great homes of egalitarianism – until, at least, the end of primary school, when some parents send their children off to city private schools.