Boris Johnson was an Englishman down under at Timbertop

Boris Johnson worked at Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop campus as a teaching assistant in 1983.

Jeremy Madin was head of Timbertop when Boris Johnson worked there in 1983. Picture: Geelong Grammar

Boris Johnson was eccentric, ebullient and a little accident-prone when he arrived at Geelong Grammar’s Timbertop campus as a teaching assistant in 1983.

One staff member from the time remembers Britain’s new Prime Minister driving a tractor with a frontend loader attached through the back of a garage while doing odd jobs around the bush boarding school near Mansfield in the foothills of the Victorian Alps.

“I couldn’t find the brake,” the recent Eton graduate apparently replied when asked “what on earth” had happened.

In his gap year between finishing school and reading classics at Oxford, Mr Johnson helped to teach English, Latin and physical education at the Year 9 campus, as well as helping with the outdoor education program and tasks such as rubbish collection and wood chopping.

About 200 students, staff and their families live at the seven-day-a-week co-educational school that aims to teach self-sufficiency by requiring the 14 to 15-year-olds to chop wood and light a boiler for hot showers, do their own cleaning, help in the campus kitchen and participate in a running program where every student and teacher is expected to run a 28km marathon at the end of the year.

Clive Moffat, who was deputy head of campus during Mr Johnson’s tenure, said he “hadn’t been brought up to do manual labour”, but was “exceedingly bright” and embraced the school program with enthusiasm.

“I found him a wonderful person,” Mr Moffat said. “I think ­people underestimate Boris to the nth degree. He was very eccentric, and I think the eccentricity is part of his nature. It’s not put on.”

Mr Moffat’s wife, Julie Johnston, was a matron in the school sanatorium at the time, and recalls Mr Johnson leaving the British winter to find himself in the middle of the Australian bush in January. “He was so white when he got here, almost translucent,” Ms Johnston said, recalling a swimming trip to nearby Fry’s Flat on the Howqua River.

“We had this poor, pale lad who’d arrived from England and he looked so funny alongside all these bronzed Aussie kids. His blond hair is still the same.”

Then head of Timbertop ­Jeremy Madin remembers Mr Johnson, who was then known by his first name, Alexander, as a hard worker and unmatched Latin scholar.

“I don’t think he’d skied in ­England or Europe, but we introduced him to it and he was terrific fun and a great learner, in the same indomitable, persistent style with which he attacked all of the jobs we gave him,” Mr Madin said.

Japanese businessman Toshikazu Ota remembers living in the room next door.

“We were the only two from the northern hemisphere and I think we both sometimes felt like outsiders because all the others were from Geelong Grammar or Geelong College,” the then Japanese language assistant saidfrom Osaka.

“Alex had a unique, British sense of humour. The kids really liked him. He had an intense ­energy and concentration that was a bit different from the other ­assistants.

“Any ball game, don’t go near him. He was very dangerous. He was like a bulldozer.”