DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 12

215 Out of 500

I was lying in bed, awake before I needed to be, annoyed that an exam had found a way to interrupt a perfectly usable day in the shearing sheds. That probably says something about where my head was by then, because the Higher School Certificate was meant to matter. It was meant to be the doorway, the scoreboard, the official measure of all those years of schooling, and I was lying there thinking about the money I would not earn while I sat in a room proving something I no longer believed was worth proving. The odd thing is that I was not nervous about the exam in the way a student is meant to be nervous. I was irritated by it, as if school had come back one last time to put its hand on my shoulder and remind me I still belonged to a system I had already begun to leave.

The dream of flying had not simply gone. It had been ripped away, or at least that is how it felt from inside the boy who had built too much of his possible future around it. It was not a neat disappointment, not one of those tidy life adjustments people describe years later as a blessing in disguise, as if every closed door is just God or fate rearranging the furniture for your benefit. At the time it felt more brutal than that, because the dream had not been a hobby, a passing fancy, or one of those youthful enthusiasms that can be replaced by another one after a decent night’s sleep. It had been the shape of escape, the proof that life might lift beyond the paddocks, classrooms, local expectations and small rooms where people had already begun deciding what you were allowed to become.

It did not disappear cleanly, with a bugle playing somewhere in the distance and me saluting the brave version of myself who had at least tried. It went in pieces, through circumstance, doubt, pride, confusion, money, timing and that awful private knowledge that sometimes the thing you want most is also the thing you may never be properly tested against. Dreams can be dashed by failure, but they can also be dashed by never getting close enough to fail properly, and that leaves a different kind of wound. There is no final mark, no official rejection, no dramatic crash scene to explain it. There is just the slow removal of possibility, until one morning you wake up and realise the sky is still there, but it no longer seems to include you.

What was left was not another dream waiting politely in the wings. There was no replacement ambition standing there with its hand up, ready to reassure everyone that the promising boy had merely changed direction. There was a void, and I do not use that word for decoration. It was an actual emptiness of purpose, a hollow space where the future had been rehearsed so often that its sudden absence had weight. I could still think quickly, still calculate, still observe, still see patterns forming before other people noticed the first line, but none of that had anywhere to go. Intelligence, apparently, remained on the shelf, but the thing it had been aimed at was gone.

That morning, lying in bed, the HSC did not feel like the gateway to adulthood. It felt like an administrative nuisance attached to a future I could no longer see. Half a day in an exam room meant half a day not earning money in the sheds, and by then money had begun to look more honest than dreams because at least it arrived after effort and did not ask you to believe in anything too much. I was annoyed at losing the wages, but underneath that annoyance was something deeper and less respectable. I was angry that the exam still expected me to care, as if the machinery of school had not noticed that the boy who once needed the result had already walked out of the room.

There is a strange kind of numbness that comes when the mind stops reaching forward. It is not peace, and it is not acceptance, although from the outside it can pass for both if no one looks too closely. It is more like standing in the middle of your own life after the furniture has been removed, recognising the room but no longer knowing what it is for. You keep moving because stopping would raise questions, and questions are dangerous when the answers have gone missing. So you reduce the day to what can be done, what can be earned, what can be endured, and what can be put off until tomorrow. It is not a plan, but it can look enough like one to keep people from asking.

I had intelligence, apparently, but intelligence without a destination is not much of a comfort. It is a noisy engine sitting in the paddock with no road in front of it, revving itself hot while everyone else asks why you are not grateful to own an engine. The IQ number meant nothing if there was no dream to append it to, no direction in which it could be spent, no larger purpose to justify the strain of carrying it. So the mind began to pack itself away, not because it was finished, and not because it had become ordinary, but because there was nowhere safe or useful for its full force to go. What remained was work, money, silence, and the first dull outline of a void I did not yet know how to name.

The number that eventually came back was 215 out of 500. On paper, that looks like failure, or at least the sort of underperformance that would have produced a concerned expression from people who enjoyed concerned expressions. It was largely held together by mathematics, which was fitting enough, because maths had always been one of the few places where the answer did not ask how I felt before deciding whether it was true. The rest of the score looked like a young man had walked away before the paperwork had finished chasing him. There was no need for the system to ask why, because the system had the one thing it trusted most: a number.

I am not going to dress that number up as some misunderstood triumph. It was 215 out of 500, and there it sits, blunt as a fence post and about as comforting. I did not conquer the HSC, I did not emerge with a shining certificate and a pathway laid neatly before me, and I did not provide the system with the tidy ending it prefers for boys who had once looked promising. The number looked ordinary, and in the official language of that world, ordinary was close enough to failure to do the same damage. It had the flat finality of a mark that did not know what had collapsed before the exam paper was even placed in front of me.

What made the number more complicated was the question of what achievement was supposed to mean from there. In theory, achievement might have meant university, some clean continuation of education where the clever boy took his place among lecture theatres, libraries, tutorials and people who used words like “semester” as if they had been born knowing where the student union was. In my mind, university was not a practical place with timetables, forms, fees, tired students and ordinary human confusion. It had the feel of those cloaked young men in Chariots of Fire, walking through the halls of Cambridge as if history itself had been polished for their arrival. That was probably a ridiculous image for an Australian country boy to carry around, but ridiculous images can still do real damage when they become the measure of where you do not belong.

That image was probably unfair to university, but perception matters when you are standing outside the gates. I did not see it as a place where a boy from my background simply turned up with a bag, a few books and a hopeful expression. I saw stone buildings, long corridors, gowns, lawns no one seemed to mow, and people who understood how to belong before the first lecture had even begun. It looked like a world where confidence was inherited, not learned, and where even uncertainty had been given a decent blazer. The fact that Australian universities were not all Cambridge corridors and polished footsteps did not help much, because the emotional picture had already done its work.

That was the respectable path, of course, the one that gives adults something easy to say when someone asks what you are doing next. He is going to university sounds much better than he is going back to the sheds and seeing what happens. The first suggests direction, promise, polish and future introductions at dinner tables where people ask what you are reading rather than how many sheep are in the next run. The second sounds like drift, even when it is actually work, survival, money and the only practical option within reach. Society has always been better at admiring some forms of effort than others, usually the ones that arrive with a certificate frame and do not smell of lanolin.

So achievement sat there in two forms, and neither felt entirely mine. On one side was the official version, wrapped in sandstone, ceremony and that Chariots of Fire sense of young men moving through corridors toward destinies already half-written for them. On the other side was the shed, immediate and blunt, where no one cared what you might have become if the world had arranged itself differently. Between the two stood 215 out of 500, a number that made the university dream look ridiculous and the shearing shed look inevitable. It was not that I chose the shed from a wide menu of noble alternatives. It was more that the menu had closed, the waiter had gone home, and the shed was still open for business.

But university was not simply sitting there waiting for me like an open gate. It cost money, and money was not an abstract problem in our world. There were no family resources sitting quietly in the background, ready to pander to that path or cushion the experiment while I discovered whether I belonged there. We were not a family where higher education could be treated as a natural extension of childhood, with someone else absorbing the awkward bits while you found yourself among books, ideas and people who had the confidence to take delay for granted. A clever mind may impress a teacher for a moment, but it does not pay board, buy books, cover travel or replace the wages a young bloke might otherwise bring in.

That is one of the first class divides, although I would not have called it that then. Some people grow up with university as an assumption, not a gamble. It sits ahead of them like Year 13, 14 and 15, just another continuation of the track they have already been placed on. For others, university is not merely a decision about study. It is a financial risk, a family disruption, a cultural trespass and a leap into a place where everyone else seems to know the rules before you have even found the door. The divide is not always announced loudly, which is one of the reasons it works so efficiently.

My father’s education had gone only to Year 6, and in the world he came from that was not regarded as some grand social tragedy. For a man on the land at that time, it was enough, or at least it was treated as enough by the people who made the rules and the people who had to live under them. You learned by doing, by watching, by being corrected, by making mistakes that cost time or skin or money, and by developing the practical judgement that kept a place going. Schooling had its purpose, certainly, but the land had its own examination system, and it did not hand out marks in neat columns. It handed out consequences, which are not as tidy but tend to get your attention.

That is not a criticism of him. It is almost the opposite. He had survived and worked in a world where usefulness was measured by what you could do, fix, carry, endure, judge or prevent before it became a problem. His schooling may have stopped at Year 6, but his life had not stopped there, and it would be arrogant to pretend formal education is the only kind of intelligence that matters. Still, it left a gap between what school might have seen in me and what my family world knew how to do with that seeing. Potential is difficult enough to manage when everyone knows the road; it becomes something stranger when the people around you can see that you might be different but have no map for where that difference should go.

Asking a man who had never seen secondary school to properly consider tertiary education was a bit like asking someone to give directions through a city he had never visited. He might want the best for you, and he might even believe you were capable of something, but belief is not the same as a map. There was no lived experience to draw upon, no family story of someone heading off to university and coming back with a degree, a profession and proof that the sacrifice had been worth it. There was only the unknown, and the unknown is a difficult thing to fund when the known already has bills attached. It was not ignorance in any insulting sense; it was the hard boundary of experience meeting a path that did not exist in family memory.

That was the rock and the hard place. On one side sat whatever ability I was supposed to have, whatever potential teachers may have glimpsed, whatever intelligence could be discussed in reports or whispered about in the slightly puzzled tone adults use when a child does not fit the expected box. On the other side sat a family history in which work came early, practical skill mattered, money was real, and education beyond the necessary was not a pathway anyone had walked far enough to explain. I was caught between a system that could identify potential but not carry it, and a family world that could support work because work was understood. If I had said I was going to earn money in the sheds, everyone knew what that meant; if I had said I was going to university, the sentence itself would have needed a support crew.

There is a particular helplessness in that sort of divide, because no one has to be the villain for the damage to happen. My father was not standing at the gate of university with a pitchfork, barring my entry in the name of ignorance. The school was not necessarily conspiring to leave me stranded once my marks stopped looking impressive enough to justify attention. Yet between those worlds there was a space no one filled, and that space was large enough for a future to fall through. It is one thing to be told you have potential; it is another to be shown how to carry it through the world without dropping it on your foot.

University also required a kind of cultural confidence I did not yet possess. It was not simply about being smart enough, because intelligence and belonging are not the same thing. I could answer questions, see patterns and do the work in areas that caught my mind, but I did not know whether I could enter that world without feeling like a farm dog that had accidentally wandered into the dining room. The mind may have been quick, but the self around it was not so sure of its welcome. That is the part many people miss when they talk about opportunity as if it is only a door and not also the courage to believe you have a right to turn the handle.

That is where class becomes more than money. It becomes the way you carry yourself into rooms. It becomes whether you think the room was built with someone like you in mind, or whether you are visiting on sufferance and should avoid touching the good furniture. It becomes whether ambition feels natural or slightly embarrassing, as if wanting more is somehow an accusation against where you came from. It becomes whether you can even imagine asking for a future nobody in your house has ever needed to describe. Those things do not appear on a school report, but they can sit behind every decision made after it.

I do not say that with bitterness toward my family. It was just the shape of things. You did not wander off into years of study because it sounded intellectually nourishing and then send the bill home to people already living in the real world of work, weather, bills, repairs, illness, vehicles, stock, uncertainty and whatever else had to be carried that week. The idea of university needed more than ability. It needed money, support, confidence, direction, and the luxury of believing that delayed reward would eventually arrive with enough certainty to justify the present cost. In families where everything has to be earned close to the ground, delayed reward can look suspiciously like not working.

That luxury matters more than people admit. It is not only the tuition or the books or the travel, although all of those things have teeth. It is the permission to spend years not earning properly, or earning only at the edges, while claiming you are building something that may or may not later pay you back. Some families can afford that kind of faith. Others live in worlds where faith is lovely, but the electricity bill remains unimpressed. The class divide often lives in that quiet sentence: we believe this will be worth it, and we can survive long enough to find out.

I had ability, apparently, but ability does not pay board. It does not buy textbooks, put fuel in a car, cover fares, replace lost wages or make a young bloke feel entitled to sit in a lecture theatre while other people do the earning. Potential looks wonderful in the mouth of a teacher, but it still has to be housed and fed. A school can say, “You could do something with that mind,” then send you back into a world where doing something with it requires resources nobody has thought to provide. It is not enough to point at the horizon if the person you are pointing for has no vehicle, no fuel, and no confidence the road is meant for him.

There is a particular cruelty in being told you have potential without being given a practical bridge to it. It is not cruelty in the moustache-twirling sense, because mostly no one means harm. It is the quieter cruelty of systems that point to a doorway and then fail to notice the moat. Those already standing on the other side call it opportunity, because from their angle it probably looks exactly like that. From my side, it looked like another room where people with smoother pathways and better shoes would know how to behave. I had no wish to be pitied, but there is a difference between pity and a truthful account of distance.

The dream of flying had hidden some of that from me for a while. Flying gave ambition a practical shape, a uniform, a test, a cockpit, a sky and a reason to leave without seeming ungrateful. It was escape with purpose, and purpose makes escape socially easier to explain. Once that dream was gone, university did not step forward as a natural substitute. It looked too vague, too expensive, too far away and too dependent on a version of myself I did not know how to become. If flying had been a clean line drawn across the sky, university was a misty hill somewhere behind buildings I had never entered.

So when people talk about missed opportunities, they should be careful not to make them sound like items left behind on a bench through carelessness. Some opportunities are missed because you are young and foolish, certainly, and I have never claimed immunity from either condition. But some are missed because they were never truly available in the form people later imagine. It is easy, years later, to say I should have gone to university, as if all that was required was a firmer chin, a sharper pencil and a stirring soundtrack. It is harder to admit that a path can be visible enough to haunt you and still not be practically available.

The truth was much less cinematic. There was no spare pool of family money, no cultural habit of sending children off to study, no clear map of how such a thing might work, and no surviving dream strong enough to drag me through the uncertainty. I was not standing at a crossroads with two clear signs pointing in opposite directions. I was standing in scrub, holding a poor result, a working body, a restless mind and the growing suspicion that cash in the hand was the only form of progress anyone around me would recognise. It was not a heroic pose, but then most of the important damage in a life does not come with a photographer present.

By then the shearing sheds had become more real to me than the classroom. That was not because agriculture was full of joy, romance and golden light drifting poetically across the wool bales. There may have been golden light occasionally, but it was usually competing with dust, sweat, sheep dung, lanolin, stale sandwiches, machinery, barking dogs and men who communicated in a language built mostly from grunts, insults and practical necessity. If school had been a place where the mind had to be managed, the shed was a place where the body had better turn up on time and keep moving. In that sense, the shed was brutally honest, even when the people in it were not always gentle.

I moved between sheds under George Johnson, part of the Kelly family orbit, and that world had its own rhythm and hierarchy. There were the Crossleys up the road, Brooklands next door, places like Red Hill at Bowning, and the sort of properties whose names carried more weight locally than any subject mark on a school report. You learned where you were by the way people spoke to you, by how quickly they trusted you with work, and by whether you could keep up without making a show of your effort. No one asked for your theory of anything when there was a pen full of sheep waiting and a day’s work to be got through. It was not anti-intellectual in any grand philosophical sense; it was simply a world with no spare room for thoughts that did not help move the next fleece.

There is a particular numbness in shearing that has nothing to do with laziness or lack of feeling. It comes from repetition, from the next sheep and the next fleece and the next job and the next shed, until the days seem to fold into one another like wool being pressed into a bale. You become useful in a very immediate way, which is both satisfying and dangerous, because usefulness can start to feel like purpose if you do not look too closely. I was young enough to want the money, tired enough not to ask too many questions, and wounded enough to prefer a world where no one expected me to explain myself. The shed gave me a place to put my body while the rest of me stayed deliberately vague.

The sheds could be funny, of course, because bored men and young blokes with too much energy will eventually turn any workplace into a small travelling circus. There were antics, most of them pointless, some of them inventive, and a few that probably looked better in memory than they would have looked on a workplace safety form. Someone would find a way to stir someone else, a practical joke would get out of hand, or a moment of boredom would become a performance put on for the benefit of people pretending not to laugh. It was not sophisticated humour, but neither were we operating out of a Viennese salon, unless Vienna had taken a sudden interest in sheep, sweat and men in singlets. The shed did not produce refined comedy, but it did produce consequences, which are often funnier years later than they were while you were still covered in dust.

One day, a table hand decided to make himself useful in the most dangerous way available to a man in a shearing shed. He opened his mouth. The call went up for “more wool,” which in shed language was not a polite request for improved supply-chain efficiency. It was a suggestion that the shearers were coasting, loafing, easing along, perhaps having a little holiday on the boards while the rest of us waited patiently for them to remember the purpose of the day. It had the advantage of being short, clear and idiotic, which is not a combination to recommend in a shed full of men already near the end of a shift.

That is not the sort of thing a sensible man says near shearers late in a shift. Shearers may possess many fine qualities, and some of them can be detected after careful investigation, but they do not respond gently to the suggestion that they are not producing. It is a direct challenge to pride, stamina, masculinity, reputation, income, and whatever else had been sharpened during a life spent bent over sheep in heat, dust and noise. The table hand might as well have wandered into a pub on grand final night and announced that both teams looked a bit soft. Even if he had been technically joking, the sheep, the clock and the shearers’ pride failed to appreciate the nuance.

The problem, of course, was that I was the rouseabout standing between their pride and the growing mountain of wool. I was already doing the work of two, because we were short a compatriot and I had apparently made the mistake of handling the previous shed without him. That is one of the punishments of competence in the working world: once you prove you can survive something unreasonable, someone quietly records it as normal. I had not volunteered to become a one-man wool-moving department, but the shed had decided I was good enough, which is not always the compliment people think it is. Being good enough can be a dangerous condition when other people are short of labour.

For most of that day I had been walking with purpose, which is a polite way of saying I was working hard enough to keep up while still maintaining the illusion that I had legs rather than pistons. Then the call for “more wool” landed, and the shearers, insulted by the accusation of coasting, did what shearers do when their pride is poked with a stick. They doubled down, and I had the privilege of being the young bloke expected to absorb the practical effects of their wounded honour. In the last hour of the day, the pace lifted from hard work to organised punishment, and I went from walking with purpose to running because walking had become a form of surrender. It is remarkable how quickly a workplace can become a proving ground when the wrong fool says the wrong thing loudly enough.

The wool came off the boards faster than I could clear it. Fleeces arrived, pieces had to be gathered, bellies had to be dealt with, the table needed feeding, and the floor seemed to regenerate wool the moment I turned my back. There is a point in hard physical work where the body stops asking questions and simply obeys, which is useful, because if the mind gets involved it may start writing letters of resignation on behalf of the lungs. By the time the shift ended, wool was piled up everywhere, not in one neat productive heap, but in the scattered evidence of a young bloke being used as the lesson plan for someone else’s stupid comment. I had not asked to be part of the experiment, but the experiment had gathered momentum without consulting me.

It took nearly an hour after knock-off to clear what should never have been allowed to accumulate in the first place. That hour had its own special flavour, because the shearers were finished, the day was finished, the joke was finished, and I was still dealing with the consequences. Nothing improves a young man’s attitude quite like cleaning up after someone else has lit a fire and walked away pleased with the warmth. The table hand, who had started this little festival of stupidity, was not viewed with the tenderness normally reserved for valued colleagues. Even my sense of humour, which has survived a few poor conditions over the years, was not operating at peak generosity.

His eventual trip into the dam was therefore not entirely surprising. It was the middle of spring, still cold on the Southern Highlands, which added a certain educational sharpness to the exercise, and I suspect the lesson stayed with him longer than any verbal counselling might have done. I am not presenting it as noble conduct, and it probably would not survive the scrutiny of a modern human resources department, assuming HR could be persuaded to enter the shed without protective clothing and a support animal. But in that world, at that age, with that much wool still sitting on my shoulders, it felt less like violence and more like agricultural justice delivered by a committee of the aggrieved. There are lessons in life best delivered gently, but that was not one of the shed’s preferred teaching methods.

Looking back, what strikes me is not just the stupidity of the call or the comedy of the dam. It is the way work, pride, boredom and rage could combine so quickly in a shed until everyone was performing some rough version of themselves. The shearers performed outrage by producing harder, I performed competence by trying not to collapse, and the table hand performed foolishness so completely that he ended up wet, freezing and wiser. If there was a moral to the story, it was probably this: never accuse shearers of coasting unless you are willing to help clear the wool, or you have first checked the distance to the nearest dam. That may not sit comfortably in a leadership manual, but it would have improved the day considerably.

The sheep were the only ones in the shed with a consistent opinion, and even they expressed it poorly. They objected to almost everything, usually with hooves, weight and the dead-eyed determination of creatures who had not been consulted about the day’s arrangements. The work had a rough honesty to it, and I do not want to pretend I was above it, because I was not. There is a kind of dignity in hard physical work, even when the work itself gives you no sentimental reason to love it. The shed may not have offered a future in the way a guidance counsellor would have phrased it, but it offered a day’s evidence that I had turned up and done something.

Money became the driver because money had the great advantage of being measurable and immediate. You worked, you got paid, and the calculation did not ask whether your dreams had survived the week. It did not care whether you had once imagined yourself in a cockpit, above the paddocks, above the towns, above the small rooms where ability had to be explained or hidden. Cash had a blunt simplicity to it, and at that age blunt simplicity had an appeal. It was not a philosophy, but it had the decency to arrive without demanding a speech.

The trouble was that accumulation had no end game. I was not building toward a clear future, not really, because the future had become foggy in a way I did not yet have the emotional vocabulary to describe. I was not saving for a grand plan, a house, a business, a university course, or the brave reinvention of myself. I was earning because earning proved I existed, and because in that world nothing much counted unless physical effort had been expended first. A bank balance can look like progress for a while, especially when you do not yet know what progress is supposed to be.

That was one of the early lessons that sat awkwardly beside everything else I had learned. In the classroom, I had been told that thought mattered, that marks mattered, that getting the right answer mattered, provided it arrived in the right form and did not upset the room. In the sheds, thought was tolerated only if it helped the work happen faster, cleaner or with fewer complaints from the sheep and the men handling them. A fast mind was no crime there, but it was not exactly legal tender either. It had to earn its keep by becoming practical or staying quiet.

I do not think I dumbed myself down in the sheds in the same way I later learned to do in offices and client meetings. The shed did not require polished explanations, tactful warnings or the softening of ideas until they could be swallowed without anyone choking on pride. It required a different reduction, a narrowing of the self to the next task, the next instruction, the next hour, the next envelope of pay. The mind did not disappear, but it was packed away like gear not needed for that particular job. It was still there, but it had been told to wait in the ute.

That packing away was not harmless. I can see that now, although at the time I would have treated such a statement with the contempt young men reserve for anything that sounds like feelings wearing a cardigan. The unused parts of the mind do not simply sit quietly forever, especially when they have been trained to move quickly, make patterns and look past the first explanation. They start turning inward, and that is when intelligence becomes less like a gift and more like a dog locked under the house, awake all night and chewing through the floorboards. A busy body can silence that for a while, but silence is not the same as peace.

The HSC result, then, was not just a number. It was a public mark on a private collapse, or at least a private retreat, and there is a particular indignity in having that sort of thing printed neatly as if it explains you. It said 215 out of 500, but it did not say the boy who sat those exams had already begun measuring life in lost wages, physical effort and the dull hope that money might stand in for direction. It did not say the dream had not been replaced by another dream, only by the need to keep moving before the emptiness caught up. A result can look final because it is printed, but paper has never been especially good at understanding the person holding it.

In some respects, shearing gave me somewhere to hide from that number. Not hide in the cowardly sense, although perhaps there was some of that too, if I am being honest enough to earn the chapter. It gave me a world where the HSC did not matter, where no one was asking for my marks, my plans, my academic future or my explanation for why promise had come back looking so ordinary on paper. The shed did not care whether I had disappointed the education system. The shed cared whether I turned up, kept up and did not make someone else’s day harder. That was not a broad philosophy of life, but for a wounded young bloke it had practical appeal.

That was a strange kind of mercy. In the sheds, the evidence of worth was immediate and physical, not official and delayed. You could be judged harshly there too, and often were, but the judgement came from work done in front of people who could see the effort. If you moved fast, cleared the wool, stayed useful and survived the day, then for those hours at least the certificate did not get a vote. It sat somewhere else, folded away with other things I did not want to look at too closely. The marks could not follow me across the boards unless I let them.

Of course, hiding in work is still hiding. It can look respectable because sweat has a way of making avoidance appear noble. A young man earning money is not usually accused of running away from himself, especially in a world where labour is understood and introspection is treated with suspicion unless it can be done quietly and without interfering with smoko. So I worked, and the work gave me cover. It let me appear practical, busy, tough enough, and sensible enough, while the more awkward truth remained underneath: the marks had humiliated me, and I had no language for the particular mix of anger, shame and emptiness they left behind.

I have wondered since whether people looked at that result and quietly adjusted their expectations of me downward. Perhaps they did, and perhaps they had every right to, because results are what institutions use when they do not have time to understand people. A certificate cannot record the difference between a lazy mind, a wounded mind, a rebellious mind, a distracted mind and a mind that has simply stopped believing in the game being played. It can only print the number and let the world draw its lazy conclusions. The unfairness is not that numbers exist; the unfairness is how often they are mistaken for the full story.

The shearing shed, for all its dust, noise and rough justice, allowed me to live outside those conclusions for a while. It was not a better dream, and it was not a grand alternative path forming itself quietly in the background. It was a place to put the body while the mind tried not to look back at the scoreboard. The work was hard enough to narrow the day, and narrowing the day can feel like survival when the larger picture has become too humiliating to contemplate. I could not repair the result, but I could at least step into a world where it did not have to be mentioned.

The joke, if there is one, is that I later spent much of my working life solving complex problems for people who possessed far better-looking certificates. I do not say that to mock them, because plenty of capable people have good marks and deserve them. I say it because the scoreboard contradiction stayed with me, and it shaped the way I came to understand evidence, judgement and the limits of official measurement. The number said one thing, the sheds allowed me to disappear from its reach for a while, and the life that followed kept offering contrary material. It is hard not to develop a certain suspicion of scoreboards when the scoreboard gets one of the earliest and most important readings of you so badly incomplete.

That is the part no mark sheet could have known. It could not know that the boy hiding in physical work was not finished, only buried for a time under wool, fatigue, wages and the bruised practicality of having to get on with things. It could not know that the mind being written down by one system would later become useful in another, even if usefulness itself would bring its own traps. All it could do was state the result, and all I could do then was find a place where the result did not have to be spoken aloud. For a time, that was enough, although enough is sometimes only another word for surviving the week.

Accounting, when I eventually fell into it properly, was not just numbers either, though that is what people who dislike accountants prefer to believe. Numbers were where the evidence landed after people made decisions, avoided decisions, forgot decisions, justified decisions or denied decisions altogether. The real work was pattern recognition, translation, prevention, rescue and the exhausting business of seeing the brick wall before the client had finished accelerating toward it. No HSC score ever measured that, and perhaps no school exam could. There is no neat subject called watching people ignore the obvious until the obvious becomes expensive.

That does not mean the result did not matter. It mattered because it became part of the story I had to carry, one more awkward piece of evidence that did not fit neatly with the other pieces. I could be quick, observant, useful, funny, resilient and capable of solving problems that had other people wandering in circles, and still have 215 out of 500 sitting back there like a smirking clerk. It is amazing how long a number can live rent-free in a man’s head, especially when it arrived at a time when he had already begun doubting the shape of his future. You can outgrow many things, but some marks keep a copy of the key.

At that age I did not know how to grieve the loss of a dream. I would not have called it grief anyway, because grief was for funerals, tragedies and things adults spoke about in lowered voices. A lost possibility seemed too indulgent to mourn, especially when no one had died and there was work to do. So I did what many young men do when they do not know what to do with hurt: I made myself busy, earned what I could, said less than I felt, and let the silence harden into something that looked enough like toughness to get by. It fooled enough people, including me on some days, which is probably why it lasted as long as it did.

The dream of flying had probably carried more than flying inside it. It had carried escape, status, testing, distance, purpose and the fantasy that ability might one day be measured in a wider sky than the one above a schoolyard or a local paddock. Once that was gone, the world did not become tragic in any theatrical sense, but it became smaller. The oyster, if it was at my feet, was closed, muddy and in no hurry to reveal a pearl. There may have been possibilities somewhere, but I was not in the mood to admire possibilities that had no practical doorway.

I can see now how dangerous that smaller world became. When there is no dream to append intelligence to, the intelligence does not vanish; it starts interrogating the walls. It asks what the point is, then asks again, then asks in six different ways before breakfast, and none of the answers provided by routine, money or physical exhaustion quite hold. That is where the Black Dog begins to move in the distance, not always as an obvious beast, but as a shadow that keeps pace beside you while you pretend not to notice. The pretending can become quite convincing if everyone around you prefers work to confession.

Back then I would not have described it that way. I would have said I was working, earning, getting on with it, doing what had to be done, and all those phrases would have been true enough to be useful and false enough to be dangerous. The surface facts were simple: I had a poor HSC result, I was spending time in shearing sheds, and I was earning money instead of chasing the path people might once have imagined for me. Underneath, the dream had gone, the alternative had not arrived, and the mind was looking for somewhere to put all its unspent force. If it could not go upward, it was always at risk of turning inward.

That is what 215 out of 500 failed to measure. It failed to measure the boy lying in bed, resenting an exam because it had taken half a day’s pay from him and because the future attached to that exam had already lost its colour. It failed to measure the young man moving between sheds, under George Johnson’s watch, among the Kellys, the Crossleys, Brooklands, and Red Hill, learning how quickly a life can reduce itself to work, money and silence. It failed to measure humour in the shed, frustration under the skin, resilience mistaken for indifference, and the private humiliation of knowing the mind had more in it than the official record suggested. It failed because it had been designed to measure performance, not disappearance.

I did not know then that the contradiction would become useful later. I did not know I would spend decades walking into rooms where people needed the very things no school number had managed to value properly: judgement, speed, pattern recognition, blunt honesty, controlled impatience and the ability to translate chaos into something another human being could act upon. I did not know that the same mind I had packed away in the sheds would eventually become the thing people followed, even when they did not always understand what they were following. At the time, I only knew the dream had gone, the money mattered, and the day’s work would not wait for me to become a more coherent person. Coherence, like university, seemed to belong to people with more time available.

So I do not excuse the number. I leave it there, because it belongs there, and because trying to polish it now would be another form of dumbing the story down. It was 215 out of 500, and the world was entitled to make of that what it wanted. But the world should also be careful with its scoreboards, because they have a habit of measuring the visible failure and missing the invisible fight. A number can be accurate and still be incomplete, which is a lesson I would later spend a professional lifetime watching other people learn too late.

At a time when the world should have been an oyster at my feet, I was not opening shells, choosing pathways or striding into adulthood with the confidence promised in school speeches. I was fending off the Black Dog, though I would not have known to call it that with any honesty then. I was standing in a world of uncertainty, trying to justify the purpose of a life that had lost its only clear dream, and doing what I could to keep moving before the wall I could see became the wall I hit. If there was hope in that time, it was not bright or articulate or dressed in the language of achievement. It was stubborn, wordless and mostly hidden under work, which is where many young men put the things they cannot yet afford to feel.