DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 1

Out of Voice Reach

The first room I remember was not a room at all, although I would never have described it that way as a child. It was a grazing property seven miles from the nearest settlement, with paddocks running away further than a young mind could properly measure, and the nearest farm far enough away that a good yell would have achieved very little apart from alarming a magpie. We were out of voice reach in the most literal sense, not as a poetic image but as a practical arrangement of distance, wire, dust and silence. If something went wrong, you did not call over the fence and wait for a neighbour to wander across with a spanner, a bandage or a bit of common sense. You either dealt with it, waited for someone who could deal with it, or learned fairly quickly that the world did not become safer just because you had become frightened.

That sounds dramatic now, because age gives us the bad habit of turning ordinary beginnings into symbols. It was not dramatic then, at least not to me. It was simply where we lived, and children do not begin by comparing their circumstances to other children’s circumstances unless adults, schoolyards or absence teach them to. The place was not isolated in my mind because it was home, and home has a way of making even the strangest arrangements appear to be the only possible ones. The distance to town, the distance to neighbours, the distance between trouble and help, all of that was just part of the air. It sat around us like heat, dust, wire, sky and the smell of dry grass, asking no one’s permission and offering no apology.

I did not know then that a mind can be shaped by geography, or that silence can become a tutor as stern as any schoolmaster. I did not know that distance can teach a child to listen for what is missing as much as for what is there. I only knew there were gates that had to be shut properly, dams you did not muck around near, snakes that deserved more respect than any adult ever managed to teach by lecture, and machinery that seemed to have been designed by people who had never met a small child but were quite prepared to remove one from the census. The farm did not need to explain danger, because it left danger lying around in plain sight. It was usually rusted, sharp, hot, boggy, slithering or attached to something with a motor, which covered most of the major educational categories.

There is a kind of childhood that comes with noise, neighbours, cousins over the fence, shops nearby, other children wandering in and out, and the constant interruption of human life. Mine was not that sort, although I would not have had enough experience to call it unusual. Mine had space in it, and space is not always the peaceful thing people imagine when they are looking at it from a motel balcony with a drink in their hand and no jobs waiting. Space can be generous, certainly, but it can also be a bit of a mongrel. It gives the mind too much room to move, and when there are not enough voices coming in from the outside, the voice inside starts doing extra shifts.

I am not suggesting I sat there as a small boy contemplating the architecture of consciousness while leaning on a fence post. I was a child, not a visiting philosopher in short pants, and there is a difference even if children sometimes ask questions philosophers have been dining out on for centuries. I played, wandered, watched, got dirty, got disciplined, and learned the ordinary farmchild arts of being in the wrong place just often enough to become useful rather than decorative. There was a lot to take in, and I took it in constantly because the property kept offering up information whether I had asked for it or not. I watched the weather change, watched adults read the sky with the seriousness city people later reserved for bank statements, and watched animals know things before people admitted them. I watched my parents make decisions without committee papers, mission statements or a consultant from Sydney explaining that rain would be beneficial if approached strategically.

The farm was full of information if you knew how to look at it, and even before I could have put such a thought into words, I understood that looking mattered. A gate left open meant consequences, and consequences on a farm were rarely theoretical. A dam low on water meant more than a dry summer; it meant worry moving quietly through the adults, even when they did not turn the worry into a family announcement. A snake near the house did not lead to a group discussion about biodiversity. It led to a particular kind of alertness, the instant shift from ordinary life to practical response, where voices changed, bodies moved differently and the day narrowed around the problem in front of us.

That may have been one of the first lessons I absorbed without anyone teaching it directly. The world was not made up of opinions floating harmlessly in the air, waiting for everyone to feel comfortable with them. It was made up of signs, patterns and consequences, and if you missed the sign, you still got the consequence. The grass did not care whether you understood drought, the dam did not care whether you had been warned, and a brown snake did not wait politely while you developed emotional readiness. Life on that sort of property had very little interest in whether you were comfortable with the lesson. It simply provided the lesson, usually without a worksheet, and left you to decide whether you were going to be foolish enough to need it repeated.

I learned to observe because observation was useful, and usefulness was one of the first currencies I understood. I learned to remember because remembering avoided trouble, and trouble usually created work for someone who already had enough of it. I learned to manage myself because there was not always someone close enough to manage me, and even when there was, a child could sense when the adult world had no appetite for extra complications. None of this felt noble at the time. It was not the formation of character in some grand old bush memoir sense, with a boy standing against the horizon while a crow called from a dead tree. It was more ordinary than that, and probably more formative because of it.

Usefulness was noticed, although noticed is not the same as celebrated, and it is certainly not the same as understood. If you shut the gate, kept out of the way at the right time, handed over the tool that was needed, watched where you put your feet, or learned not to ask fourteen questions when everyone was already hot and cranky, you became part of the machinery of the place. That was not cruel, or at least I do not remember it as cruelty. It was practical, and practicality has always had a clean reputation in country life because it gets the job done and does not require anyone to make a speech about feelings. Inner life, on the other hand, did not have the same obvious purpose. A child’s questions, fears, theories, private worries and odd little conclusions were not always as useful as a closed gate.

I suspect that was where one of my earliest misunderstandings began, although I could only name it much later. I thought being useful might eventually lead to being known. If I could understand what was going on, if I could anticipate what was needed, if I could make myself less trouble and more help, then perhaps the inside of me would become visible as well. That is a dangerous bargain for a child to make, especially when no one has actually offered it and no adult has knowingly signed the other side of the contract. Adults are often grateful for a useful child, but gratitude is not the same as seeing the child. It can look similar from a distance, and children are very good at mistaking glimpses for shelter.

There were no great speeches about it, which was probably fortunate because speeches on a farm usually meant somebody had done something wrong. Nobody sat me down and said, “Jeff, your role in this family ecosystem is to watch, process, adapt and become quietly functional while your emotional development catches up somewhere behind the machinery shed.” That would have been a bit much, even for our place, and I suspect it would have been poorly received by everyone except possibly the dog. The lesson came the way most lasting lessons come, indirectly and repeatedly. If I noticed something, I could sometimes prevent a problem. If I asked too much, I could become the problem. If I was quiet and useful, the day moved more smoothly, but if I let too much of my mind out at once, it interrupted the adults and risked being dismissed before I had even finished the sentence.

This was before school gave me marks for remembering things and before anyone tried to turn ability into a number. It was before anyone tested or labelled anything, and well before I had any idea that minds ran at different speeds. I did not yet know that some people needed three steps explained while others had already gone to step nine, become annoyed at step four, and were now privately redesigning the entire system. I did not think of myself as intelligent, and I did not think of myself as different. I thought I was hungry for input, though I would never have used those words then. Years later, the closest image I could find was No. 5 in Short Circuit (1986 – Tri Star Pictures), demanding more input from the world as if information itself was oxygen. That was me, only with fewer wires and a much poorer ability to avoid being sent outside.

The problem with being hungry for input in a place like that is that the menu can be limited. There were adults, animals, weather, work, radio, books when they were available, and the endless detail of the property itself. So I fed on all of it, because a mind does not stop asking merely because the world has run out of convenient answers. I listened to adult conversations from the edge, which was where children were often expected to live in those days. Seen but not heard was not just an adage; it was almost a household operating system, handed down without anyone needing to write it on the wall. You could be in the room, but not quite of the room, and you could absorb the adult world without always being invited to ask what it meant.

That suited part of me and starved another part, which is one of those contradictions childhood often carries without knowing it is carrying anything at all. It gave me access to information while denying me a proper place in the conversation. I picked up fragments without always understanding them, then carried them away and turned them over until they fitted somewhere, or at least until I had made them fit well enough to quieten the question for a while. I watched tone more than words, because tone often told the truth before words put their boots on. I learned which silences meant tiredness, which meant worry, and which meant a subject had just walked into a barbed-wire fence. Being seen but not heard did not stop me thinking, because if anything it drove more of the thinking underground, where it could grow unchecked and come back later looking for somewhere safe to go.

That habit stayed, although it would take many years before I recognised it as a habit rather than simply the way I was. It would later become useful in accounting offices, client meetings, boardrooms, sporting clubs and all the other rooms where people say one thing while the numbers, the shoulders, the pause and the unpaid tax debt say something else altogether. Back then it was not professional skill, because there was no profession attached to it and no invoice to follow. It was childhood navigation, built out of necessity rather than ambition. I was learning how to read the room before I even had a proper room to read. The paddock was the first room, the kitchen table was another, the shed was another, the front seat of a vehicle was another, and each one came with its own rules about how much a child could say before the air changed.

Parents, in that world, were not just parents, and I say that with the full recognition that all children probably think their parents have been issued directly by the Department of Final Decisions. On a property like ours, they were the government, the judiciary, the weather bureau, the bank, the emergency services, the Lord High Executioner and the appeal court, although the appeal court rarely sat and almost never found in favour of the applicant. Their authority was not merely emotional; it was practical. They knew where things were, what could be touched, what must not be touched, when work started, when it finished, and whether a complaint had enough merit to survive first contact with adult exhaustion. To a child, that kind of authority does not feel like a social arrangement. It feels like gravity, and nobody sensible wastes too much time arguing with gravity.

I do not say that as criticism, because children need authority and farms probably need it more than most places. There are settings where explanation has its place, and there are settings where explanation arrives too late, usually after the scream, the splash, the bite, the fall, or the sound of metal doing something to flesh it was never meant to do. A dam is not made safer because a child has been given a voice in the matter, and a snake does not become less venomous because someone has encouraged open dialogue. A tractor, horse, auger, axe, fire, storm or loose bit of wire does not pause for a family meeting while everyone processes their feelings. There are parts of life where negotiation is civilised, and there are parts where negotiation is just a slower route to an avoidable injury.

Parents in that world dealt in absolutes because the world around them often did the same. There were things you did and things you did not do, places you went and places you stayed away from, instructions that did not come with a discussion paper attached. “Don’t go near the dam” did not mean “unless you feel confident.” “Watch where you put your feet” did not mean “when it suits you.” “Stay there” did not mean “wander off and test the boundaries of independent thought.” Those orders could sound hard, and I have no doubt they sometimes felt hard, but they had been shaped by a life where accidents, illness and the vagaries of being away from the mainstream did not leave much room for softness.

Distance changes parenting, and it probably changes childhood too. When a doctor, neighbour, ambulance, mechanic or spare pair of adult hands is not just around the corner, the household develops a certain hardness. Not cruelty, or at least not necessarily cruelty, but hardness. People become practical because practical is what keeps the day moving and sometimes keeps everyone alive. Illness is managed until it cannot be managed, accidents are dealt with before they are discussed, and pain is measured against necessity rather than against what might be ideal in a kinder world. Fear is acknowledged only long enough to work out what has to happen next, while the emotional part of things is often left standing in the dust, waiting for a quieter day that may or may not arrive.

That sort of life builds resilience, but resilience is not always the clean virtue people later make it sound like. It can come with calluses on the inside, the sort that allow you to keep going while also making it harder to feel certain things when they first knock. A child learns to get up, keep going, not make too much fuss, not add to the burden, and not expect every hurt to become an event. He learns that worry on an adult’s face matters more than worry in his own chest. He learns that the quickest way back into safety is obedience, and the quickest way into trouble is arguing with someone who has already seen more consequences than he can imagine. There are times when “because I said so” is not lazy parenting but the shortest safe distance between stupidity and survival.

Still, when authority fills the horizon, a child learns to edit himself. He learns when to ask, when not to ask, when to wait, when to disappear, and when to turn a thought into something small enough to pass without causing trouble. He learns that not every thought is welcome simply because it is true, and not every question improves the moment simply because it is fair. He learns to read the adult weather before speaking, because the mood in the room can be as important as the weather outside. He learns that even curiosity can be inconvenient when everyone is tired, worried, short of money, short of rain, short of time, or simply worn down by the demands of the place. None of that needs to be announced as a lesson, because a child absorbs it from the face, the sigh, the quick answer and the moment when the room closes before he has finished opening his mouth.

That may have been the earliest version of dumbing it down, although it would be unfair to call it that too soon. There was no humiliation in it then, not consciously, because there was simply adjustment. A boy with a head full of movement learns that the world does not always welcome movement, especially when adults are trying to get through a day that already has too many moving parts. He learns that the thought in its full form may be too long for the moment, too complicated for the adult, too inconvenient for the job being done, or too likely to earn the old parental look that says, without words, that the next sentence should be chosen with care. So he shortens it, makes it practical, and removes the branching parts, the why, the what if, the pattern he thinks he has noticed, and the small private theory he has been building while everyone else thought he was just standing there.

In time, that shortening becomes instinctive, which is when it becomes more than a childhood tactic. The boy does not yet know he is doing it, and he certainly does not think, “I must reduce this thought so it can survive the room.” He simply learns which version of himself causes less friction. He turns “I have been thinking about the wider pattern of events leading to this difficulty” into “Should I shut that gate?” He turns fear into obedience, curiosity into watching, confusion into usefulness, and the first stirrings of inner life into something quieter and more acceptable. The outside world may have been teaching him resilience, but it was also teaching him hardness, and hardness is a useful shield until you realise how long you have been wearing it.

That last version usually worked better because it had an immediate use, and immediate use is always easier for people to value than unseen thought. It did not ask anyone to enter the maze inside my head, and it did not require patience they may not have had. It did not expose the full branch system of the thought, with every side track, warning light and possible conclusion trying to get out at once. It made me handy, and being handy is one of the approved ways a child can exist in a working environment. You may be confused, frightened, lonely, bored or bursting with questions, but if you can be handy, people know what to do with you. That is comforting for everyone, including the child, until he begins to suspect that being known only by his usefulness may not be the same as being known.

There is comfort in being useful, and I do not want to pretend there is not. Usefulness gave me a place to stand when belonging was still too large and mysterious a word. It gave me approval, even if the approval was brief and practical, and it gave me a way of entering adult spaces without demanding the emotional attention I did not know how to ask for. It gave me something to do with the restlessness inside me, which might otherwise have had nowhere useful to go. If I could not always be understood, I could at least be of some use, and for a boy living beyond easy reach of other voices, that was not a small consolation.

But usefulness has a shadow, as most respectable virtues do once they have been overworked. If you learn too early that your value lies in anticipating needs, solving problems, avoiding fuss and making other people’s lives easier, you can carry that lesson far beyond the paddock. You can build a profession on it, a family role on it, and a whole life on being the one who sees the problem forming and steps in before the wall arrives. People will even thank you for it sometimes, provided you do not explain too clearly that there was a wall in the first place and that they had been walking towards it for some time with admirable confidence. The trouble is that the earlier you learn to be useful, the easier it becomes for others to expect the use and miss the person doing the work.

On the farm, the wall was not yet brick, and there was no grand metaphor attached to it. It was a fence, a dam bank, a machinery guard, a patch of long grass where a snake might be lying, or a distance too far for help to arrive quickly. It was visible because the world made consequences visible, and perhaps that was the strange mercy of the place. I did not yet have the language for frustration, or the adult experience of watching people ignore warnings until disaster became more expensive than prevention. I simply knew there were things you had to notice. I knew some things could hurt you whether you understood them or not, and understanding them late was rarely much comfort.

That is a hard lesson for a child, but it is also clarifying in a way softer childhoods may not be. The property gave me an early education in cause and effect, although no one wrote that on a report card and gave me a mark for it. It taught me that wishing did not move stock, rain did not fall because people deserved it, and trouble rarely announced itself in a form convenient to the human timetable. It taught me that adults could be competent and still worried, authoritative and still uncertain, loving and still too busy to notice everything. It taught me that the world was large, and I was small, and yet my mind did not always feel small enough to match my place in it.

That mismatch is difficult to describe without making the child sound more self-aware than he was, and I do not want to pretend I spent my early years wandering around feeling tragically misunderstood by the gum trees. I was simply taking in more than I knew what to do with. The space around me was vast, at least in my mind, and the emotions inside me were still being assembled from whatever parts childhood had made available. Fear came before explanation, curiosity came before permission, pride came before humility had time to catch up, and hurt came before the language to name it. Loneliness often wore the disguise of being busy, which is a disguise I would come to recognise far too well in later life.

I think now that being out of voice reach did two things at once. It made me more independent, and it made me more watchful. Independence sounds admirable when written on a school report or spoken about over a beer years later, but in a child it can also mean he has learned not to expect too much interruption from rescue. Watchfulness sounds like intelligence once it becomes useful to other people, but before that it is simply a small nervous system trying to map a large world. Put the two together and you get a boy who learns to think ahead, read signs, manage himself and become useful before he fully understands that he is also lonely. That does not make the childhood tragic, but it does make it more complicated than the clean bush version people sometimes prefer.

There were probably easier places to begin a life, although that is an observation, not a complaint. There were probably softer ones, noisier ones, more crowded ones, places where a child’s thoughts were diluted by other children before they became too concentrated. Mine began with distance, authority, work, danger, observation and a great deal of sky. It began in a place where the nearest settlement was seven miles away, the nearest farm was beyond the reach of a shout, and the mind had to make its own company more often than was probably ideal. A child can survive that, and I did, but survival is not the same as remaining untouched by the arrangements that made survival necessary.

I did not know then that this would become the first shape of the rest of my life. I did not know that I would spend decades entering rooms and measuring how much of myself could safely be allowed to speak. I did not know that the habit of becoming useful would eventually become both a strength and a trap. I only knew that there were things to watch, things to avoid, adults to obey, gates to shut, dams to respect, snakes to give a wide berth, and a world so large that a child’s emotions had to grow into it slowly. What I also knew, though I could not have explained it, was that there were places inside my own head where I could go when the outside world had either become too large or too fixed in its authority.

So I fell into fantasies, though not the grand, theatrical sort that required costumes, applause or anyone else’s cooperation. They were the private kind a child builds when he has more space than company and more thoughts than places to put them. Rocky outcrops could become forts, and bales of wool could become walls, towers, hideouts, castles, ships, or whatever else the mind needed them to be on that particular day. A shed was not just a shed, a paddock was not just a paddock, and a clump of trees or a rise in the ground could become part of some other world where I controlled the rules because the real one had enough rules already. It was play, but it was also more than play, although I would not have had the language or the courage to say so.

I could be hiding in plain sight, which is a useful trick for a child who has learned that disappearance does not always require leaving. To an adult, I may have looked like a boy mucking around, wasting time, or standing where he should not have been standing. Inside my head, though, whole arrangements were forming. I was building defences, escapes, lookout posts and imaginary kingdoms from whatever the property offered up. There was no audience for any of it, which was probably why it mattered. Nobody had to approve it, correct it, dismiss it, hurry it up, or tell me I was getting carried away, and for a child learning early that much of life belonged to adults, that private ownership of thought was no small thing.

Looking back, I can see that those fantasies were not simply play, and I can see it without needing to turn the child into a case study. They were rehearsal, retreat and invention all tangled together. They gave my restless mind somewhere to run when my body was still stuck within the boundaries of childhood. They allowed me to be brave without danger, powerful without authority, useful without being ordered, and alone without having to admit loneliness. The boy who had to be seen but not heard could still be heard by himself. He could still explain things to himself, test things, imagine outcomes, build worlds and knock them down again without anyone asking what the point was.

But even that private shelter had a cost, which is something you rarely understand while the shelter is still protecting you. Without knowing it, I was building my own cone of brittleness, a small invisible structure around myself that looked like imagination from the outside and protection from within. It was not weakness, and it was not fragility in the simple sense. It was more like a hardening shell formed too early, useful enough to survive the weather but not always flexible enough for the years ahead. The more I learned to retreat inward, the more the inner world became both refuge and prison. It kept me safe, but it also trained me to disappear without leaving the room, which would later prove a very efficient and very dangerous talent.

Out there, beyond voice reach, my mind began gathering input from whatever it could find. It did not yet know it would later collide with classrooms, offices, clients, committees, family expectations, retirement, depression and the strange brick walls people build out of pride, fear and habit. It did not yet know that the forts in rocky outcrops and the secret places amongst bales of wool were early versions of a habit I would carry for decades, standing in the open while part of me had already withdrawn to a safer place. It only knew the paddocks were wide, help was distant, and authority lived close by in the form of parents who knew more, decided more, and carried the final word with the calm certainty of people who had earned it. That was enough for the child, because childhood does not require a theory before it begins building the adult.

In that vast land, where a dam could drown you, a snake could kill you, and a parent’s instruction was not a suggestion but a ruling from the bench, the boy inside me was still learning what to feel, what to say, and how much of himself to keep out of reach. He was learning to watch the world, serve the moment, obey the adults, feed the mind, and build hidden shelters from imagination before he understood why he needed them. The walls were not brick yet, and the rooms were not yet classrooms, offices, client meetings or any of the later places where the same pattern would return wearing better shoes. They were rock, wool, silence, distance and childhood authority, but they were already teaching me the shape of things to come. The child did not know that, of course, because he was still out there in the paddocks, gathering input, measuring danger, and trying to grow emotions large enough for a world that seemed to stretch beyond the reach of any voice.