It was a nice suit but it hadn’t exactly been tailored to fit me properly. Thanks to her, I walked into class with confidence

• Read more in the Kindness of strangers series

I started law school in 1976. Gough Whitlam had abolished university fees, which meant a lot of older women who previously wouldn’t have been able to afford to study were arriving at uni for the first time.

I was 17 and nursing an otherness of my own. One day in class, our lecturer asked everyone who had attended a private high school to raise their hand. The sea of arms that shot up revealed that, in a class of 30 people, I was the only one who’d come from a state school. The lecturer didn’t do this cruelly – he was making a point about lawyers being privileged people, and how that affects the legal system. But I nonetheless felt very confronted by the different world my peers came from.