DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 14

Falling Into Accounting

I opened my eyes to the weight of the Sydney Morning Herald landing across my sleeping body, which is not the gentlest way to be introduced to your future. I had gone to Sydney for a party weekend at my cousin’s place, not a life rearrangement, and certainly not a career consultation conducted from somewhere beneath a crumpled newspaper and the remains of the night before. My aunt, with the sort of whimsical practicality adults used when they were either joking or changing the course of your existence, said something like, “Let’s see if there are any jobs you might be able to apply for.” It was an ordinary line delivered in an ordinary room, yet it carried the peculiar force of something that had perhaps been waiting for me before I had even arrived.

That was the beginning of it, although I did not know that at the time, because beginnings rarely announce themselves properly. They usually arrive in ordinary clothes, carrying yesterday’s newspaper, while you are still trying to work out where you left your socks and whether you have embarrassed yourself the night before. I had come to Sydney for the weekend, and in the simple geography of the plan I was supposed to go home again, because that was what weekends did when they behaved themselves. This one did not behave itself, and neither, from that point, did the shape of my life.

I did go back, of course, in the physical sense, because life is rarely so neat that one moment cuts everything cleanly in two. I visited, and later, when I was genuinely sick, I convalesced there, because illness has a way of temporarily restoring old arrangements and letting everyone pretend the map is still the same. But truly going home, in the way a person means home when they say it without thinking, never really happened after that weekend. The place remained real, and the people remained real, but something in my own belonging had quietly shifted while I was still young enough to think a job advertisement was just a job advertisement.

Whether it was a conspiracy between my parents and my cousins, or only one of those family manoeuvres everyone later pretends was casual, I cannot say with certainty. Families are very good at arranging your future while calling it a suggestion, especially when the suggested person is young enough, uncertain enough, and not yet suspicious enough to understand the meeting may have been held before he entered the room. I had a sense, even then, that adults could talk around a young person with remarkable skill, leaving him to discover the conclusion after everyone else had already accepted it. That weekend marked the start of the rest of my life, although at the time it felt more like waking up in Sydney with a paper on my chest and a dull sense that the adults had been talking while I was asleep.

I have wondered since what they saw, or thought they saw, when they looked at me then. Were my parents simply sick of watching me waste a life that had not yet properly begun, earning money in the shed and mistaking movement for direction? That would be a neat explanation, except it does not quite fit the history, because up to that point there had not been a great family obsession with my academic future, apart perhaps from the famous two lost marks in primary school, which seemed to cause more disturbance than my later drift ever did. If there had been deep anxiety about my schooling, my results, or the collapse of any grand academic promise, it had not been communicated to me in language I was able to hear, which is not quite the same as saying it had not existed.

Perhaps they saw something more practical and more worrying than a report card. Perhaps they saw a young man with a quick mind, a restless nature, and enough money coming in to make the absence of direction look temporarily respectable. That is a dangerous combination, because wages can disguise drift very well, especially when you are young and the pay packet arrives regularly enough to quieten the larger question. I did not feel lost in the dramatic sense, because I was working, earning, and carrying myself as if that should have been answer enough, but sometimes not being lost is only another way of standing still with confidence.

But earning is not the same as becoming, and perhaps they understood that before I did. Maybe they looked at the countryside of my birth, at the rhythms of the land, at the lives of the forefathers who had done what had to be done because that was what the land required, and quietly decided there was not enough room there for whatever was turning over inside me. That is not a criticism of the land, because the land has its own intelligence, discipline and dignity, and it had shaped better people than me across generations. It is only to say that what satisfied one generation does not always satisfy the next, even when the next generation has no idea what it is hungry for and would probably deny being hungry at all if challenged.

If there was a plan, I was not a party to it. Nobody sat me down and said, “Jeff, we think you need to leave before the life you are in becomes the life you cannot escape,” and nobody explained that the money I was earning might become its own trap, comfortable enough to keep me still and insufficient enough to build a future around. Instead, there was a party, a weekend in Sydney, a newspaper dropped on my body, and the faintly comic suggestion that we might as well see whether there were any jobs I could apply for. It was a strange kind of family intervention if that is what it was, because it arrived without solemn faces, without speeches, and without anyone giving me the dignity of being offended.

Looking back, that may have been the kindness of it. Had anyone presented it as a rescue mission, I would probably have resisted out of pride, stubbornness, or the simple irritation of being managed by people who had not asked my permission to improve me. Had they told me I was wasting myself, I might have defended the very life I was already beginning to outgrow, because no young man enjoys having his confusion named by someone else. So perhaps the adults did what adults often do when they are worried but do not want to start a war; they shifted the scenery, opened the newspaper, and let fate take the credit.

I still do not know whether they were disappointed, concerned, hopeful, strategic, or simply tired of waiting for me to develop a plan of my own. Maybe they saw a need, not clearly enough to explain but strongly enough to act upon, and maybe they understood that the countryside had given me my beginnings but not necessarily my next step. A mind like mine might either stretch or sour if it stayed too long in a place where its questions had nowhere useful to go, and that is a difficult thing for a family to say without sounding as if it is insulting both the person and the place. They may have seen it clumsily, partly, or even wrongly, but clumsy sight can still sometimes move a person in the right direction.

That is the strange mercy and irritation of family. They can see you wrongly, partly, clumsily, and still sometimes move you toward a doorway you would not have found for yourself. I had not asked to be moved, and I certainly had not agreed to any larger strategy, but life does not always wait for consent before rearranging the furniture. That weekend, whether by design, instinct, accident or some mixture of all three, I was quietly pushed through a doorway I had not known how to find and was still half-asleep when it opened.

The paper was opened at the wanted advertisements, which is where young people once went looking for possibility before possibility was dressed up as a platform, a profile, or a networking opportunity. I waded through them with the optimism of someone who had no real idea what he was qualified to do and the caution of someone who was beginning to suspect the answer might be “not much.” The world, in print form, was quite clear about what it wanted, and a young inexperienced country lad with a less than modest HSC result, no plan, and a work history shaped more by sheds and effort than by office polish did not appear to be at the top of its list. It is hard to feel destined for greatness when the employment section is quietly explaining that you have arrived underqualified for nearly everything.

Most of the advertisements might as well have been written in another language. They wanted experience, qualifications, confidence, shorthand, typing, sales flair, city awareness, or some mysterious mixture of maturity and youth that only employers seemed able to imagine. After all the circling, reading, re-reading and lowering of expectations, there were about four I could even consider applying for without feeling I was committing a minor fraud. That number did not crush me exactly, but it did give the morning a more realistic shape, which was probably useful because young men with no direction are not always in danger of too much realism.

There was something almost comic in that reduction, though it did not feel comic then. A whole newspaper full of employment, a city full of offices, shops, factories and firms, and I had found four small cracks in the wall that did not immediately reject me on sight. It was probably the first professional audit I ever performed, although the conclusion was fairly brutal: assets limited, experience negligible, confidence uneven, future uncertain. The report might have been unflattering, but it had the advantage of being accurate, and accuracy was already becoming something I trusted even when it was inconvenient.

One of those advertisements was for an accounting firm, though at that stage accounting did not arrive in my mind as a calling, a vocation, or anything grand enough to deserve a serious soundtrack. It was simply one of the few doors that did not look bolted from the other side. I had no childhood dream of becoming an accountant, no vision of myself one day reading trial balances with the intensity other boys reserved for racing forms, and certainly no idea that numbers would become the place where other people’s choices came home to roost. If there was destiny in it, destiny had disguised itself very well as a practical opening for a boy who needed work.

I picked up the phone on that Saturday with the innocence of someone who did not know he was doing something slightly ridiculous. A wiser city boy might have known not to ring an accounting firm on a weekend, because firms were not supposed to be sitting there waiting for country boys to wake from parties and join the workforce. But naïveté is not always a weakness, and sometimes the thing you do because you do not know better becomes the very reason something happens. I rang because the number was there, because I needed a job, and because it seemed reasonable to me that a person advertising a position might be willing to talk about it.

The phone was answered, which was surprising enough, but the real surprise was who answered it. Not an answering service, not a bored junior, not silence, but the senior partner of the firm himself. That detail still amuses me, because it sounds too neat, as though someone writing the story had become lazy and decided fate could be introduced by telephone. Yet there he was, in the office on a Saturday, answering the phone to a young bloke who had no idea how unlikely that probably was.

The firm was Ruwald & Evans, and the man who answered was George Evans. In time there would be Bruce Houston and others as well, names that would become part of the shaping of the advisor I eventually became, although I could not have known that as I stood there with the newspaper and the future pretending to be an advertisement. At that first moment, George was simply the senior partner in an accounting firm, speaking to a young country bloke who had probably not yet learned how little he knew. There are worse ways to begin a career, though I have always suspected there are also more dignified ones.

There are moments in life when ignorance presents itself as courage and nobody corrects the label until much later. I made the call because the number was there, because the possibility existed, and because my mind has always had trouble ignoring a line that seems to run from one fact to the next. That may have been hopelessly unsophisticated, but it also carried a kind of clean logic I have always found hard to abandon. If there is a door, try the handle; if someone answers, speak; if a chance appears, do not stand there debating whether chance has filled in the correct paperwork.

I cannot pretend there was a sudden recognition of destiny at the other end of the line. There was no swelling music, no deep internal voice saying, “Jeff, behold your future in depreciation schedules and human disappointment,” and no sense that my life had just been promoted to something more significant. There was only a conversation, an opportunity, and the beginning of a relationship that would take me from physical labour into a world where effort was still required but the bruises were more often internal. I did not yet understand that distinction, but I would have plenty of time to learn it.

Before that, I had been earning $234 a week working in the shed, which was real money to me at that stage. It was money you could feel in your hands, money that came from obvious labour, money that carried the blunt honesty of being tired for a reason. Then accounting welcomed me with a first pay of $70 a week, which was not so much a pay cut as a small financial ambush. It was a strange introduction to ambition, because ambition is usually sold as upward movement and mine began by removing most of my income.

From that $70, I had to contribute $20 to the family budget in the home of my aunt and uncle. They were Salvation Army officers, and as Army officers do, they moved around according to a calling and a system that did not place my convenience at the centre of its operations. They gave me a place to live, and I remain grateful for that, because shelter is not a small thing when you are young and have managed to step into adulthood without much of a map. Gratitude and dislocation, however, can occupy the same room without cancelling each other out, and I learned that fairly early.

From that weekend until my first marriage I had houses to live in, but not a home in the way I had once known it. My aunt and uncle saw to my shelter, and there is no small thing in that, especially when the alternative may have been drifting back to the life others had perhaps decided I needed to leave. But a house is the structure around you, and home is the feeling that the structure expects you back. I do not say that with self-pity, or at least I try not to, because plenty of people have had less and made more graceful work of it, but leaving home by accident, if that is what it was, left a mark.

I had not stormed out, declared independence, or made some heroic break from the past. I had simply followed the next available opening and found, after the event, that the door had quietly closed behind me. That kind of departure can be harder to explain than a dramatic one, because there is no argument to return to and no grand wound to point at. There is just a young man who went to Sydney for a party, woke up under a newspaper, and gradually realised that the old definition of home had become something he could visit rather than inhabit.

That might be why accounting suited me before I understood that it did, although the truth is I had no real idea what accountants actually did. I knew they worked with numbers, wore office clothes, sat behind desks, and had an air about them that suggested the world was supposed to balance if everyone behaved properly. Even the office clothes defeated me early, because on my first day I turned up in casual clothes wanting to keep my suit from getting wet, which led to me spending the day filing in the compactus so clients did not see me out of uniform. It was a modest beginning, hidden among files like a clerical fugitive, but it did at least establish that I could make a poor impression quietly.

The early days did not clarify much, because I was not immediately placed at the centre of great financial mysteries. I was a small cog in a large wheel, and small cogs are not usually invited to ask what the machine is trying to produce. I was given tasks, files, messages, bits of paper, and instructions that seemed clear to the person giving them, which did not always mean they arrived in my head in the same condition. It is possible that some people begin their careers with a firm grasp of professional purpose, but I began mine by trying to work out where to stand, what to wear, and how not to look as lost as I felt.

On my second day, I was handed a briefcase full of share certificates and sent into the city to visit various share registry offices. The job was to have the certificates transferred from a client’s name into the name of his investment company, then return to the office with the work done and the briefcase still in my possession. In the calm imagination of the office, this was probably a job that should have taken a couple of hours, a simple errand for the new junior while the real accountants got on with whatever real accountants did. In my imagination, which had not yet adjusted to Sydney, it became an expedition carrying someone else’s wealth through hostile territory.

I set off armed with the briefcase, the instructions, and a photocopy of a Gregory’s street directory, which is not quite the same thing as competence. The city might as well have been a foreign country to me, except the signs were in English and the traffic seemed to have taken a personal dislike to anyone who hesitated. I had come from country roads, open distances and the sort of geography where a wrong turn could usually be corrected by finding a fence line, a creek, or someone who knew your father. Sydney offered none of those comforts and seemed, from memory, to take a certain pleasure in withholding them.

Sydney had corners that turned into other corners, buildings that looked alike, footpaths full of people who appeared to know where they were going, and streets that seemed to rearrange themselves behind me out of spite. I fought the concrete jungle with a briefcase full of someone else’s wealth and a photocopied map that had clearly never met panic in the wild. Every time I thought I had found a pattern, the city found a way to make me reconsider it, which was rude of it given I was only on my second day. I was not yet dumbing down a complex professional thought; I was reducing my ambition to the next street sign and the hope that it existed where the map claimed it did.

I was lost many times, although I prefer to say I conducted a broad reconnaissance of the city’s commercial registry network. I found offices by accident, by stubbornness, by asking directions, and by the simple refusal to admit that returning without finishing the job was an available option. Somewhere underneath the confusion was the same old mechanism: do what has been asked, solve the problem in front of you, keep moving, and hope the room will understand the effort even if it never sees the mess behind it. That mechanism would serve me well later, but on that day it mainly served to keep me walking.

By the time I arrived back at the office, it was about an hour after closing time. Bruce was just hanging up from the police, and his relief at seeing me was mixed with the reasonable concern that I had either been lost, mugged, flattened by Sydney, or had disappeared with the scrip. I had not stolen anything, which was a useful professional foundation, but I had been thoroughly educated in the difference between being given a task and understanding the world in which the task had to be completed. I suspect Bruce was glad to see both me and the briefcase, though not necessarily in that order.

There was humour in it, but only after I was safely back. At the time, I was not laughing so much as surviving, carrying that briefcase as if it contained the Crown Jewels and my entire future reputation. As the mob from The Man from Snowy River might have appeared after a hard ride, I returned cowed and beaten, but I had found my way home. It was not home in the deep sense, of course, but that afternoon the office became the place I had to get back to, the place where the task ended and the worry stopped.

That small word, home, had already started changing its meaning. The office was not home in the sense of family, belonging or childhood memory, but it became a point of return, and for a displaced young man that was not nothing. I had left the building as a junior clerk with a briefcase and too much confidence in a photocopied map; I returned as someone who had discovered that adulthood often gives you responsibility before it gives you understanding. That discovery has never really left me, because a great deal of professional life is only a better-dressed version of the same problem.

It was an early lesson in accounting, although not the sort found in textbooks. The profession was not going to be only ledgers, figures, rules and tidy columns, no matter how orderly it looked from the outside. It was going to involve errands no one explained properly, systems I did not yet understand, people trusting me with things before I trusted myself, and the constant pressure to make sense of a world already moving faster than I could comfortably follow. If accounting had looked like certainty from the footpath, inside the office it felt more like being handed fragments and expected to know which drawer they belonged in.

Of course, the more I stayed, the more I began to see that the first impression of accounting as neatness was misleading anyway. The numbers in those early days were orderly, or at least they tried to be, but the lives behind them were not. People made decisions, avoided decisions, justified decisions, forgot decisions, denied decisions, and eventually arrived with paperwork hoping the figures might tell a cleaner story than the facts deserved. The ledgers had columns, but the people who produced them rarely lived in straight lines.

That was where the work eventually began to interest me, even if on the second day I was mostly interested in not being arrested, robbed, or permanently misplaced. I came to respect numbers because they refused to be talked into nonsense, but I came to understand accounting because the numbers were only the footprints left by human behaviour. Under every set of accounts there was usually a trail of fear, ambition, confusion, pride, avoidance, hope, and occasionally a level of optimism that should have required a doctor’s certificate. The trick was learning to read the trail without making the client feel like you had followed them home with a torch.

In that sense, accounting slowly became less a profession of numbers than a translation service. Clients came in with chaos and expected it to become order, preferably before lunch and without too much personal discomfort. My job, though I could not have said it properly then, was to turn that chaos into something the Tax Office, the bank, the client, and occasionally reality itself might accept as coherent. It was not simply arithmetic; it was interpretation, judgement, tact, and sometimes the delicate art of making an unpleasant truth small enough to fit through the door.

I had no idea then how much of my life would be spent doing that. I did not know I would become useful in ways that were both satisfying and exhausting, or that usefulness could become a trap if you were not careful. I did not know that being able to see the wall before other people hit it would not always make them grateful when you pointed it out. At that stage, I was still learning where the registry offices were and how to survive a day in the compactus without turning a wet suit into a career metaphor.

At Ruwald & Evans there was a cartoon in the tea room that summed up the absurdity of my sudden professional rebirth better than any career adviser could have managed. The caption said, “6 munce ago I couldnt even spell akkountant – now I are one.” It was funny because it was stupid, and it was uncomfortable because it was a little too close to the bone. I had not been reborn as an accountant in any meaningful sense, but I had been issued a chair, a place in the office, and enough responsibility to make pretending necessary.

There I was, the country boy who had gone to Sydney for a party and somehow become an accounting employee before the weekend had properly finished. Six months earlier, I had never heard of, much less imagined, a future in balance sheets, tax returns, client meetings or the careful management of other people’s panic. Now I was inside the machine, trying to learn the language quickly enough that nobody would notice how recently I had arrived. It is difficult to look competent when your inner life is still wearing work boots and checking the map.

That tea room cartoon stayed with me because it carried a truth I could laugh at without having to explain myself. I was not yet an accountant in any meaningful sense, but I was becoming one by proximity, repetition and necessity. I suspect many professions are like that; first they give you a chair, then a file, then a responsibility, and by the time you realise you are out of your depth, someone has already given you another file. The trick is to keep learning quickly enough that panic does not become the most obvious thing about you.

The money made no sense if measured only by arithmetic. I had left $234 a week for $70, and then handed over $20, which left me with enough to confirm that ambition can be expensive even when it pays badly. If someone had drawn the comparison on paper, it would have looked like madness, or at least like a young man volunteering to become poorer in a more respectable shirt. Yet numbers do not always reveal the whole bargain, which is a useful thing to say in a chapter about accounting.

The shed had a ceiling I could already feel, even if I did not have the language for it. It paid better immediately, but it did not open the same doors, and it did not ask the questions my mind was beginning to need. Accounting, for all its early poverty, strange rituals and small humiliations, offered something that looked like movement. I could not yet have explained where that movement might lead, but I could sense that standing still with good wages was not the same as being in the right place.

There was pride in that, though I would not have admitted it too loudly. There was also embarrassment, because starting again in an office after earning adult money in physical work carried its own little humiliation. I had to accept being junior, ignorant, underpaid and corrected, which is not easy when your mind runs ahead of your experience and arrives at conclusions before your status permits you to speak them. That is one of the first professional disciplines I learned, and I cannot pretend I learned it gracefully.

The office taught me that it was not enough to see something. You had to earn the right to say it, then choose the safest way to say it, then wait while the room decided whether it was prepared to hear it. In the shed, if something was heavy, it was heavy, and the argument ended when someone tried to lift it. In accounting, something could be financially heavy, legally heavy, emotionally heavy or heading toward disaster, and people could still spend a remarkable amount of energy explaining why it was actually quite light.

That fascinated me and frustrated me in equal measure, which is probably as good a description of my future career as any. I began learning the work, but I was also learning people, and people were never as tidy as the accounts pretended to be. A client could be confident and completely wrong, anxious and completely right, charming and evasive, hopeless and honest, or successful in every visible way while quietly making a mess of the parts that mattered. I learned that the numbers did not judge in the way people did, but they did remember, and memory without emotion can be a terrible thing.

George Evans and Bruce Houston, among others, became part of that education. Not only in the formal sense of teaching procedures, expectations and standards, but in the less obvious sense of showing me that advice is never only advice. Advice has to pass through ego, fear, habit, pride, marriage, business pressure, family expectation and the strange human capacity to ask for help while resisting every useful part of it. That is where accounting began to become the main proving ground for the mind I had been trying to manage since childhood.

The work gave my mind somewhere to go, but it also taught it how often it would have to slow down before entering the room. I could see patterns quickly, sometimes too quickly for comfort, and once seen they became difficult to ignore. The problem was that the room did not always want the full pattern; it wanted the useful part, the tolerable part, the bit that could be turned into an action without forcing anyone to reconsider the story they had been telling themselves. That was not stupidity on their part so much as human nature, though I was not always generous enough at the time to make that distinction.

So I began, without naming it, the habit of reducing the thought before letting it out. I softened warnings, shortened explanations, trimmed the branches, and presented conclusions in smaller parcels, often with more patience than I felt and less explanation than I wanted to give. It was not cowardice exactly, though there were times it probably looked like diplomacy and felt like surrender. It was a working method, a survival method, and eventually a professional reflex that I could use so often I forgot how much of myself it required.

That habit had already been forming in school, sport and family life, but accounting gave it a new arena and a daily purpose. Here, dumbing it down was not merely social survival; it became part of the job. You could not sit across from someone and unload the entire architecture of their financial problem in one go, because people do not thank you for dropping a house on them just because you have carefully drawn the plans. The full structure might have been accurate, but the listener still had to survive the conversation.

The strange thing is that accounting also rewarded the very mind it restrained. I was useful because I could see links, risks, contradictions and consequences, but I was only effective when I learned how to translate that sight into something another person could bear. The full-speed version of my thinking might have been accurate, but accuracy by itself is not advice if the client walks away bruised, confused or defensive. That is an irritating truth for a young man who still thinks being right should matter more than being palatable, and I had to be taught it more than once.

It is harder again when you sense that the wall is coming and the person in front of you would prefer to debate the colour of the bricks. You learn, slowly and not always gracefully, that the warning has to be shaped to fit the listener, even when the wall itself is not prepared to negotiate. You also learn that some people will still hit it, then look back at you as if the wall was an accounting invention designed to inconvenience them. I could laugh at that later, sometimes, but there were days when it left a bruise I carried home without having anywhere useful to put it.

Looking back, I can see how much of my later professional life began in that first office. The work trained my mind, but it also trained my restraint, and perhaps restraint was the more difficult subject. It taught me that evidence matters, but so does timing; that intelligence is useful, but not always welcome; and that people often seek advice when what they really want is confirmation with a receipt attached. Those lessons were not written on the wall of Ruwald & Evans, but they were there in the files, the conversations, the errands, the silences and the small corrections that accumulated into a profession.

I was not saintly in any of this. I could be impatient, blunt, sarcastic and privately furious when people ignored what seemed obvious to me, particularly when the consequences later arrived exactly where I had said they were waiting. But I was also young, learning, displaced, and trying to turn a weekend accident into a life that made some sort of sense. If I sometimes judged the room too harshly, it was partly because I had not yet understood how often the room was also judging me.

The $70 pay packet did not feel like destiny. The $20 board did not feel like character building, although I suppose adults have always enjoyed calling young people’s discomfort by more uplifting names. The small office, the classified advertisement, the Saturday phone call, the compactus, the share certificates and the tea room cartoon did not feel like the opening chapter of anything grand. They felt like pieces I was carrying around, hoping someone else might eventually explain the picture on the box.

Yet it was there that the practical doorway opened. Not into a world of numbers, as I first imagined, but into a world where numbers became the last honest witnesses after everyone else had finished explaining themselves. It was there I began to understand that accounting was not about adding up columns so much as reading the damage, the hope, the avoidance and the ambition that had produced the columns in the first place. That understanding did not arrive all at once, and it certainly did not arrive on the day I was lost in Sydney with a Gregory’s photocopy, but the first clues were already being placed in my hands.

I had gone to Sydney for a party and woke up under a newspaper. I found four possible jobs, made one unlikely phone call, and stepped into a profession that would use my mind constantly while teaching me, just as constantly, not to use it too freely. It was not planned, not romantic, and certainly not well paid, but life does not always send the right thing dressed as the right thing. Sometimes it arrives as a wet suit left unused, a day in the compactus, a briefcase full of scrip, a worried partner hanging up from the police, and the quiet realisation that life had plonked me right where I needed to be at that point in time.