But that was the world I grew up in. You didn’t need reasons to be smacked, or worse, only timing. A version of Cat Stevens Father & Son delivered long before the song became a hit where “from the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen” became the path.
MAKING AN UNORDINARY ACCOUNTANT
CHAPTER ONE — The Start of Things
I grew up seven miles from the nearest public school and about twenty miles from the two “big towns” that passed for civilisation on the southwest slopes of New South Wales. Back then, I didn’t think of it as remote. It was simply home, a pocket of country stitched together with ridgelines and creek beds, where the land seemed to breathe in long, slow rhythms older than anything we were doing on top of it.
From the kitchen window, you could see the hills roll away in soft, deliberate folds, the kind that look gentle from a distance but will burn your legs if you try to walk them on a summer afternoon. They were bigger when I was small, of course. Everything was. The rises seemed like mountains, and the dips between them held mysteries that only kids and kangaroos understood. In the mornings the fog sat low, draped across the paddocks like someone had smothered the world in wool batting. By midday the sun would lift it off, revealing the same patchwork of grass, blue granite outcrops, and gnarled gum trees that had been there long before any of us arrived.
There were times when this vista was green with the lushness of what the land can bring, and other times brown and white with the spinifex and ryegrass and the dirt of drought in the relentless change of seasons.
My father was a fifth-generation white Australian, descended from people who had anchored themselves to this land not long after Hume and Hovell trekked from Sydney to Melbourne in 1824 and passed through this very country. Something about the Pudman Creek, Blakeney Creek, and Rye Park area must have spoken to them, maybe the good water, maybe the soil, maybe just the feeling of space, although at the time when they first settled, the area must have been covered in the bush of the gums and the other vegetation of the wild at the time, enough for them to settle at Wheel Grace and later expand to Mt Buffalo where I grew up. They carved their lives out of these hills with horses and stump-jump ploughs, fighting roots and rocks and the unpredictable tantrums of weather, long before diesel engines did the heavy lifting.
Those early generations didn’t have the luxury of big tractors, hydraulic front-end loaders, or GPS-guided anything. They had sweat, stubbornness, and the unspoken pact that the land only gave what it thought you’d earned, and sometimes not even that. Every inch of progress came at a price, and the land always collected its due.
I grew up hearing the stories, the kind that made farming sound both heroic and slightly mad. Stories told at kitchen tables, around shearing sheds, or over fence posts while leaning on a shovel. The men spoke about those days with a mixture of pride and quiet resentment, as if they respected the hardship but wished it hadn’t been quite so relentless.
Men walked behind ploughs that didn’t glide so much as fight. The stump-jump plough was considered advanced in its day, but it still jolted violently when it struck a root or a rock buried deep under the surface. A man gripping the handles felt every shudder in his bones. The horses pulled, the plough bucked, the soil resisted, and between them all, they tried to drag a living out of the earth.
There was nothing romantic about it then. It was raw. Backbreaking. And mostly unforgiving.
The women carried their own share of the burden. They baked bread in wood-fired ovens that turned kitchens into furnaces, stirred pots on stoves that left them sweating year-round, and raised children in an environment where danger was normal. Kids ran around near hooves and machinery with no guards, and the mothers were constantly on high alert, always one breath away from dragging a toddler out of harm’s way, be it from a whirling saw blade or the teeth of a venomous snake.
And through it all, the land didn’t care. It didn’t bend, it didn’t negotiate, and it certainly didn’t reward effort with fairness.
Seasons swung wildly, too dry, too wet, too cold, too hot. A late frost could undo a year’s hope. A windstorm could scatter topsoil like confetti at a bush wedding. A sick animal could become a dead one before you finished your morning cup of tea. The unpredictability wasn’t exciting; it was exhausting.
Families learned quickly that sentimentality had no place in survival. You could love the land, and you could also curse it in the same breath. And those curses, that frustration, had to go somewhere.
The temper that brewed in men who rose before dawn and worked until the light gave out wasn’t random. It came from days where everything went wrong and there was no one to blame. Machinery broke. Weather turned. Stock wandered. Paddocks flooded. Sheep died. Bills piled up. Drought set in like a slow suffocation.
There was no safety valve. No counsellors. No mental health days. Just swallowed anger that needed a target.
And invariably, that temper spilled onto those in closest proximity, wives, children, neighbours, dogs, anyone who stepped into the blast radius at the wrong moment. It wasn’t right, but it was common. Expected, even. Passed down like a grim inheritance.
My father learned it from his father. His father learned it from his. And so on, all the way back to the first generations who broke their backs carving farms out of those rolling hills.
People often talk about generational wealth. Out here, what you inherited was generational grit, and generational temper. A kind of emotional muscle memory, shaped by the harshness of the land and normalised over time. If your plough hit a stump, you swore. If the weather ruined your crop, you swore louder. If you were tired, frustrated, overworked and cornered, the nearest person, usually someone you loved, wore the brunt of it.
Not because they deserved it, but because they were there.
And that’s the world I was born into. A world where the land shaped the people, and the people shaped the children, and the temper didn’t ask permission to move from one generation to the next. It simply did.
We didn’t talk about these things then. But we lived them. Every day. And even as a child even before I understood words like “legacy” or “trauma”, I could feel that weight in the walls of our home, in the set of my father’s jaw, in the way silence could sometimes be louder than a shout.
It was in the land. It was in the blood. And it was in me.
By the time I came along, Mt Buffalo had been in the family for generations, long enough that no one bothered counting the years anymore. The boundary lines had been walked, argued over, and re-fenced so many times they were stitched permanently into family lore. The shearing shed had absorbed seventy years of lanolin and gossip. The sheoaks and willows along the creek had seen births, funerals, droughts, and bumper seasons come and go.
To me, though, it was just the place where my father and grandfather went out before dawn, where sheep dotted the hills like flecks of chalk, and where dust hung in the warm air after a mob was moved. I had no understanding of heritage or hardship or the sheer audacity it took to survive as a primary producer in Australia. All I knew was that the country around me felt vast and alive, and that our farmhouse sat in the middle of it like an afterthought.
And yet, in its own quiet way, that land held everything that shaped me, not just the boy I was, but the man I would become. The wide silence. The wind rumbling through the red gums. The distant hum of a tractor working somewhere beyond the ridge. At the time, they were simply the sounds of home. Later in life, I’d realise they were the first hints of how I’d learn to navigate the world.
Out in the paddocks, away from the homestead and its shifting moods, there was a steadiness I couldn’t find anywhere else. The silence wasn’t empty, it was full. It held space for thinking, imagining, planning, even before I knew that’s what I was doing. It was the first environment where my mind could roam freely without fear of interruption, correction, or punishment.
If the house taught me vigilance, the bush taught me possibility.
I didn’t have words for it then, but those wanderings, those quiet hours under red gums, those small adventures across rabbit-riddled paddocks, planted something in me that would later become the entrepreneurial drive. Out there, beyond the reach of tempers and rules, the world felt bigger. Not just physically, but conceptually. The hills stretched in a way that made you wonder what was over the next rise, what else was possible if you just kept walking, especially if you were hunting
Entrepreneurs, at their core, are hunters and explorers. Not with compasses, but with ideas. Not chasing land, but chasing potential.
And I think that instinct began for me the first time I realised the bush didn’t hem me in, it invited me outward.
In that space, there were no instructions. No one telling me what had to be done. No list of chores. No expectations to meet before sundown. Just me, the land, and the sense that I was allowed to think for myself.
Looking back, the bush taught me lessons that no classroom ever could:
Self-direction – you picked your own path, literally. Resourcefulness – if something broke, you figured out how to fix it or get home. Risk assessment – snakes, holes, barbed wire, electric fences… you learned fast. Curiosity – the next hill always promised something different.
Independence – no one rescued you from boredom; you solved it yourself.
These are all entrepreneurial skills, long before the word “entrepreneur” meant anything to me.
Even the silence played a part. It gave my mind room to run, the same instinct that later had me chasing ideas, opportunities, and possibilities with the same restless energy I once used to climb trees and explore creeks. I didn’t know it then, but those hours alone in the bush were shaping the part of me that would never quite settle, the part always looking for something new, something better, something just out of reach. And perhaps most importantly, the bush offered the opposite of what the house offered.
At home, stillness meant danger; movement kept you safe. In the bush, stillness opened imagination; it wasn’t a threat, it was a spark.
It rewired something in me. It gave me a private world where my mind could stretch, where ideas could begin, where I could question without consequence.
People often assume entrepreneurs are shaped by ambition alone. Sometimes, though, they’re shaped by escape. By the place that lets them breathe. By the place that teaches them that the world is bigger than the four walls of childhood.
For me, that place was the bush. And without knowing it, those hills, those trees, that silence, they were the first mentors I ever had. They taught me to step forward, to search, to explore, to believe in possibility even when the world around me felt limited and tense.
They taught me that there was always something beyond the next rise… and that the only way to find it was to go and see for myself.
That’s where the story really begins.
The land was supposed to pass from father to son, neat and clean and simple. But life rarely listens to tradition. When my grandfather’s time came, the three brothers, my father and his two brothers, were suddenly co-owners, partners in a life none of them had been trained for emotionally. They worked it out the way countrymen do: nothing said aloud, everyone slightly unhappy, and the job still getting done.
My father wasn’t the oldest, but he was the one left to pick up the pieces. His older brother had gone to the Army and risen through the ranks, then settled near Cowra. His younger brother had gone to a different Army, the Salvation Army, and forged his life through his faith. But once my grandfather died, the one who had looked after and nurtured the land now had to share it with two others. And that created all sorts of family angst. It left my father not having a purpose of his own selection, but rather now working for two others and sharing the profits accordingly, without their daily input.
At the start of the story I’m four years old, full of restless energy, no one had a name for back then. If it were today, someone would have pulled out a checklist and diagnosed me with ADHD before I’d finished my Milo. But in those days, you were just “busy” or “a handful” or, in my mother’s words, “enough to send me mad some days.”
And I suppose I was.
We had a cousin living with us at the time, a couple of years older and apparently in need of “grounding.” That was the polite way of saying his own family didn’t know what to do with him and decided a stint on the farm might straighten him out. Maybe they thought sheep had magical moral powers. Or maybe they thought my parents did. Either way, he landed in our house and suddenly Mum had two boys charging around like a pair of startled roos.
One afternoon in September, Mum reached her limit.
No warning, no explanation, just the announcement that we were going to school. That day. Immediately. I don’t remember much of the drive, only that the decision felt like it had been made for her sanity rather than my education. When we pulled up outside Rye Park Public School, I didn’t even really know what a school was. All I knew was that Mum looked relieved to be rid of us for a few hours.
So that’s how I started kindergarten, three months from the end of the year, dropped in with the confidence only a mother at breaking point can muster.
Strangely, those three months were enough. Someone saw potential, or maybe just saw a kid who didn’t sit still long enough to repeat a grade. Either way, they passed me straight through. Infant school felt like one long game to me. It was easy, uncomplicated. I had no sense of being bright or behind, just that the days moved quickly and I moved even quicker.
I didn’t escape completely untouched, though. One day I spoke out of turn, something I did often, apparently, and Miss Mutton cracked me across the back of the hand with a wooden ruler. A neat, sharp welt that taught me more about adults than about discipline. I remember looking up at her, not understanding why the words in my head coming out of my mouth was such a crime.
But that was the world I grew up in. You didn’t need reasons to be smacked, or worse, only timing. A version of Cat Stevens Father & Son delivered long before the song became a hit where “from the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen” became the path.
Home was no softer. We lived on Mt Buffalo, nothing to do with the Victorian mountain, just the name someone long before us had chosen. The third-highest point in the district. The place was mostly sheep country, the kind of land that produced wool people overseas paid top dollar for. And yet our lives never felt flush. Farming rarely gives back in proportion to the work it demands.
My father was left to run the farm with my grandfather, who was still alive then. It was hard going, and Dad carried the weight of it in his shoulders and in his temper. He was well-known for that temper; people talked about it in the same low voice they used for snakes and droughts. Everyone knew about it. No one said anything.
I saw it up close, though. Not the passing mentions, not the uneasy nods, the real thing. The eruptions only sometimes, behind closed doors, the sudden blasts of fury that came without warning. I learned early how to read the air in a room, how to stay small, how to attempt to disappear at the right moment. Skills you pick up without even knowing you’re learning them. Even then, he managed to find an outlet for his anger.
Mum was no gentler. Her discipline came wrapped in rigour and certainty, a belief that the only way to keep kids on track was to keep them in line. Between the two of them, we lived with a kind of constant alertness. Not fear exactly, but vigilance. The way animals go quiet before a storm.
And yet, despite all that, we were still kids. We still found ways to sneak fun into the cracks. We still ran, still laughed, still pushed boundaries because that was our job. And maybe my boundless energy was more than anyone had the tools to deal with, but it was simply me. A four-year-old boy in the middle of nowhere, trying to make sense of a world built on silence, routine, and the unpredictable anger of adults who never said what they really felt.
That’s where it starts, the land, the hills, the temper, the rules, the restless energy no one could name back then. A four-year-old boy dropped into school because his mother needed a breather, a boy who learned quickly that the world didn’t stop for confusion, or fear, or questions. You kept up or you got swept aside. You moved, you watched, you read the room before you stepped into it.
All of it seemed normal at the time. Childhood always does.
Only later do you look back and realise those early days were the first moving parts of a much larger machine, the first cogs turning, almost silently, shaping the way you would walk through the world. The way expectation settled onto your shoulders, the way discipline sharpened your senses, the way the land whispered that survival belonged to those who stayed alert.
None of it felt dramatic then. It was just life. Just another day on a farm between Yass and Boorowa.
But looking back now, I can see the faint outline of the pattern beginning, the momentum, the drive, the fear of falling behind. The first instinctive push to stay ahead of something I couldn’t name yet. A pull toward speed, responsibility, movement.
The first hint of the thing that would shape so much of what came later. The first cog in the wheel.
And with that, the wheel began to turn.
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