Making an Unordinary Accountant Chapter 3 - Guns and Me

MAKING AN UNORDINARY ACCOUNTANT

CHAPTER 3 – Guns and Me

Guns came into my life long before I ever understood what they really were. At twelve years old, when most kids were still mucking around with cricket bats and battered footballs, I unwrapped an air rifle on Christmas morning. To anyone else it might’ve looked like a toy, something to plink cans off a fence with. But in our house, with the tension that simmered just below eye-level every day, it felt more like I’d been handed a tool. A responsibility. A way of having something I could control when everything else felt completely out of reach.

I didn’t see it that clearly then, of course. At twelve you don’t think in metaphors. You think in targets. Empty jars. Fence posts. The odd rabbit if you were quick enough and lucky enough. I remember the feel of that air rifle, light, simple, something that needed pumping before each shot. It was the first thing in my life that made a straight line between my effort and the result. No tempers. No unpredictability. No walking on eggshells. You aimed. You fired. You hit or you didn’t. Cause and effect. It was oddly comforting.

By sixteen I’d graduated, because that’s what it felt like, to a .22 calibre Winchester repeater for my birthday. That was no toy. That was real. Wood, steel, weight… and a metallic click-clack to the lever action that became almost meditative. That sound still lives somewhere in the back of my head, like a soundtrack to every teenage frustration I never said out loud.

I roamed the hills around home like I owned them, that rifle slung over my arm. Rabbits, foxes, crows, whatever was considered vermin on the property, I made it my mission to deal with it. Call it pest control. Call it growing up on the land. But for me, it was more than that. Each shot was a release valve. A moment where I wasn’t powerless. Where the chaos inside the walls of the house couldn’t touch me.

Looking back now, it’s frightening how good I became at it. Not just good, obsessed. Efficient. Almost clinical. But part of that didn’t come from nowhere. It came from the men around me, the ones who shaped what “good” even meant.

My father, for one, could handle a rifle better than most blokes ever admitted. He wasn’t the kind to boast about anything, not guns, not work, not life, but when he lifted a rifle, it was like watching someone slip into a language they didn’t speak out loud but understood in their bones. He had this steadiness, this natural stillness that made his shots look effortless. The kind of quiet competence you only get from growing up on the land, shooting because you had to, not because you were trying to prove anything.

If there was a fox in the chook yard, he didn’t flap around yelling. He didn’t grab the first thing in reach. He’d just walk inside, get the gun, walk back out, raise it, breathe once…and that would be that. One shot. Clean. No drama. No apology.

Watching him, I learned that shooting wasn’t about aggression or noise or showing off. It was about control. Respect. Doing things properly.

But it was my Uncle Peter who took that raw understanding and sharpened it into something precise. He was a benchrest shooter, one of those blokes who could put three shots through a five-cent piece at ridiculous distances and then tell you why each one landed in the exact hole it did. He lived in the realm of millimetres. A perfectionist in a sport that rewards nothing else.

When he spoke about rifles, he didn’t talk like someone discussing a hobby. He talked like an engineer, a scientist, an artist. He taught me the difference between “hitting the target” and understanding the shot. He taught me about barrel harmonics, bedding, ballistics, and why some rifles seemed to have a personality and others didn’t. Most importantly, he taught me patience, the discipline to wait for the wind to shift, to feel the heartbeat in your trigger finger, to stop rushing just because you’re eager to see the result.

With Dad, I learned steadiness. With Peter, I learned precision.

And somewhere between the two, between Dad’s instinct and Peter’s science, I found myself becoming something different. Something more driven. More analytical. I didn’t miss often. And when I did, I couldn’t just shrug it off. If I didnt immediately sneak off another round to correct my error, I’d go back and work out why. Wind. Distance. Drop. My stance. My breathing. My grip. My mood. Every variable mattered.

There was a part of me constantly trying to engineer myself into something dangerous, something sharp-edged, something that could survive whatever was thrown at me. But always, always, within the rules. Safe. Controlled. Never reckless. Danger without risk. I walked that line like it was a tightrope and my life depended on it.

Because in a way, it did.

By the time I was earning prize money from the horses and a bit from other shooting activities, I had saved enough to buy something serious. But the moment it actually happened is etched into my memory far more clearly than the decision.

It was on the way home from the NSW Schoolboys Cricket Championships in Dubbo. We’d stopped at one of those old-style gun shops, timber racks, the smell of oil and dust, the faint metallic tang in the air that only shooters really notice. Uncle Peter was with me, which, in hindsight, was like having the world’s calmest, most precise enabler whispering over my shoulder. If Dad taught me steadiness, Peter taught me discernment. And that afternoon, he was in full teacher mode.

I’d been wanting a .222 for a while, something with real reach, real consistency. Most kids my age were thinking about cars. I was thinking about bullet weights and group sizes.

The salesman pulled out a few options. Sportco. Brno. A couple of second-hand pieces with decent barrels but a bit too much history. Then he laid the Tikka on the counter.

Even before he spoke, I heard the little approving exhale Uncle Peter made. Not a word. Just that sound, the sound of something passing an unspoken test. The handgrip stock and the feel ready for action.

The Tikka didn’t look hugely different from Dad’s Sportco .222 at first glance. Same basic lines. Same no-nonsense bolt-action silhouette. But when you picked it up… the difference was undeniable. The machining was tighter. The action was smoother. The trigger broke cleaner. It felt like someone had taken the general idea of a .222 and removed every compromise.

It was a rifle built by people who expected you to shoot well.

I bought it on the spot. My money. Hard-earned. Fox pelts stretched on boards in the shed, dried in the breeze, salted, and sold to furriers for up to fifty dollars each. In those days fifty dollars felt like real wealth. Enough to make you feel accomplished. Enough to fund the next box of ammo. Enough to keep the cycle going. Shoot foxes to earn money to shoot more foxes, it was its own strange little economy of obsession.

Once I had the rifle, the next decision was the scope. Dad had always run a 4×40 on his Sportco, simple, practical, no frills. But standing there in the shop, with that Tikka in my hands and Uncle Peter next to me nodding very slightly as if to say, Don’t sell yourself short, I chose a 6×40.

It wasn’t a massive leap, but it was enough. Enough magnification to tighten my groups. Enough clarity to push the distance a little further. Enough to say, not out loud, but to myself, that I wasn’t aiming to be as good as Dad or respectable like Uncle Peter. I was aiming to be better.

The moment I mounted that scope, the whole game changed. Suddenly I wasn’t just shooting at whatever popped up in front of me. I was planning shots. Thinking about angles, distances, wind shear. Reading the land the way other kids read surf conditions or cricket pitches. I started learning drop charts, memorising how far a .222 round would fall over 150 metres, 200 metres, further. I began tinkering with ammunition, comparing factory loads to handloads Peter helped me experiment with. We’d sit at his bench, him quietly walking me through the minutiae, powder weight, seating depth, the feel of a perfectly resized case. It felt like alchemy.

Uncle Peter competed at Sporting Shooters events and actually won things, real awards, medals, framed certificates with his name printed properly. Meanwhile, my wins came in the form of fox pelts pegged out neatly on boards and hung in the shed like macabre little trophies. But the competition was there all the same. Not spoken. Not formal. Just a quiet line drawn between us.

Could I shoot like him? Could I understand a rifle the way he did? Could I read a shot before I even took it?

Every improvement felt like a step closer. Every miss felt like a personal failing.

Every perfectly placed round felt like an affirmation, proof that I could control something, even if it was only a piece of lead flying through the air at three thousand feet per second.

And every fox pelt that dried on the line outside was another contribution towards the pursuit of perfection. Another twenty, thirty, fifty dollars funnelled straight back into the obsession. More ammunition. Better projectiles. A sturdier rest. Maybe a new pouch or cleaning kit. Every little improvement mattered because I wasn’t just shooting anymore.

I was crafting. I was refining. I was building myself into something that could hit a target, any target, no matter the conditions.

And deep down, even if I didn’t know it yet, I was shaping the same mindset that would eventually drive me into entrepreneurialism: that perfection isn’t a destination, it’s a habit. 

A way of thinking. A way of surviving.

And a way of proving, if only to yourself, that you can overcome whatever chaos you were born into by becoming good enough, sharp enough, controlled enough to rise above it.

That was the real hook. The perfection. The craft. The quiet certainty that if I could refine a shot down to the last grain of powder, then maybe, just maybe, I could refine myself too. Guns weren’t weapons to me. Not then. They were systems. Machines of cause and effect. Inputs and outputs. A world where the rules didn’t shift depending on who had woken up in a mood. The rifle never yelled. The scope never sneered. The target never moved just to spite me. Everything was stable, predictable, honest.

So of course I wanted to push further.

Factory ammunition could take you only so far. It shot well enough, but it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t tailored to my rifle, my shoulder, my rhythm. Uncle Peter had hinted at it for years: If you really want consistency, learn to load your own.

Once that idea lodged itself in my head, it was inevitable. I bought reloading gear with the same reverence most boys reserved for their first car. Scales. Dies. Primers. Cases. A press that mounted to the workbench with bolts that vibrated gently through the timber every time I pulled the lever. I’d spend hours at that bench, case by case, reload by reload, learning the language of precision.

This was a world where perfection wasn’t a theory, it was measurable. You got it right, or you didn’t. And when you didn’t, there was always a reason. A fix. An adjustment. A better way to do it next time.

I loved that. I loved how absolute it was.

Through trial, error, and a few gentle nudges from Uncle Peter, I found the combination that felt like magic: 19 grains of 2201 powder behind a 50-grain Silver Match projectile. Even saying the numbers now brings back the sense memory of it. The faint smell of powder on the bench. The whispery click of the scale as it settled. The tiny, perfect mound of grains sitting in the case neck like a promise. These weren’t just bullets, they were solutions. Controlled, consistent, competition-grade precision wrapped in brass.

The first time I tested that load properly, everything changed. The groups tightened significantly. The rifle settled into itself. The scope aligned not just with my eye, but with my intention. It felt like the rifle was finally speaking my language.

And the consequences for anything on the receiving end were… immediate.

A fox at distance didn’t get a second chance. Rabbits dropped cleanly, humanely. The paddocks stayed clearer. The neighbour’s sheep were safer. And the pelts, those stiff, stretched trophies that hung on boards in the shed, started earning real money. When a single fox skin could fetch up to fifty dollars in those days, that wasn’t pocket change. That was capital. Reinvestment. A feedback loop of obsession.

Shoot. Skin. Stretch. Salt. Dry. Sell. Reload. Improve. Shoot again.

A perfect little ecosystem of cause and effect.

But the real thrill wasn’t the kill. Not even the money. It was the pursuit. The refinement. The discipline. That unspoken contest I had going in my own head, to be as good as I could possibly be, to make every shot an extension of thought, not chance.

The rifle became the first place in my life where perfection felt possible. Where the variables could be controlled. Where everything made sense. A place where work led to results, where discipline led to outcomes, where mastery was visible in holes punched through paper or pelts pegged neatly in rows.

It wasn’t just shooting. It wasn’t just hunting. It was the first true glimpse of the entrepreneurial wiring inside me.

Because entrepreneurship is exactly the same: experiment, refine, obsess, improve, perfect, not because anyone’s asking you to, but because something in you demands it.

And out there in the hills, with a reloaded .222 in my hands and the world finally responding to something I could control, I learned the most dangerous lesson a kid can learn:

If you try hard enough, plan thoroughly enough, and push relentlessly enough, you can create outcomes that other people call luck. The chaos at home had no rules. But my rifle did. And for a while, that was enough.

I also bought myself an automatic shotgun. To this day I can still feel the recoil in my shoulder if I think about it long enough, nothing like the old double barrelled version my father once had, but certainly something memorable. That thing cleared paddocks in minutes. Not elegant, not subtle, but brutally effective. It had its own purpose.

And that was the truth of it, the shotgun was never about finesse. It was the opposite of everything the Tikka represented. Where the .222 demanded calm, the shotgun demanded decisiveness. Where the Tikka rewarded patience and micro-adjustments, the shotgun rewarded instinct and movement. You didn’t place a shot with a shotgun; you pushed out a wide, angry cloud of pellets in the general direction of something that didn’t belong there.

If the .222 was surgery, the shotgun was demolition.

And the funny thing was, I was never extraordinary with it. Not terrible, not dangerous, just… average. My ability with the scatter gun was nowhere near the sharp, almost mathematical precision I reached with the Tikka. With the rifle, I could read the wind, predict the drop, feel the trigger break before it happened. With the shotgun, it was more about timing and momentum and trusting your arms rather than your mind.

A different muscle. A different mindset. But it served its purpose all the same.

The shotgun was the tool you reached for when subtlety wasn’t an option, when a mob of rabbits bolted unexpectedly, or a hawk swooped too close to the chooks, or you needed to make your presence felt in a hurry. You didn’t overthink a shotgun. You didn’t spend hours tuning loads or polishing triggers. You loaded it, held on, and let it speak in its own blunt, uncompromising language.

In some ways, it reflected everything I wasn’t built for. I admired it, but I didn’t excel with it.

There was no elegance in it for me. No quiet satisfaction of a distant target falling exactly where I intended. No data to analyse, no conditions to adjust for, no perfection to chase. It was messy. Loud. Immediate. You either hit something or you didn’t, and if you did, the pattern of pellets meant you rarely knew whether it was because of skill or probability.

Probability never interested me. Precision did.

But here’s the thing, while the shotgun didn’t scratch that itch for perfection, it taught me something else entirely. It taught me that not every problem required finesse. Some tasks were brute-force tasks. Some situations didn’t need a surgeon; they needed a wrecking ball. And part of growing up, part of surviving, was knowing which tool the moment demanded.

The Tikka was for me. The shotgun was for the farm.

The rifle fed my obsession with control and mastery. The shotgun fed the fox fur trade.

One gave me the comfort of exact outcomes. The other gave me results when I needed them quickly, efficiently, and without ceremony.

I didn’t love the shotgun the way I loved the Tikka. But I respected it.

It was the imperfect counterweight to my perfectionism, an unpolished reminder that sometimes precision is a luxury, and sometimes life requires you to throw everything you’ve got at the target and hope the pattern does the rest.

And maybe, without knowing it, that became another early entrepreneurial lesson: perfection is a goal, not a requirement.

Sometimes good enough is good enough.

Sometimes the shotgun gets the job done so the rifle can do its work later.

Together, those weapons became something like companions. Strange to say, but true. Where other kids had diaries, I had rifles. Where other kids processed their teenage messiness by talking or sulking or slamming doors, I did it through the quiet discipline of lining up a shot and making it count.

And the more I learned, the more I pushed myself. I started to realise the difference between factory-loaded ammunition and personally loaded rounds. Factory loads were fine, but reloads? That was where the real precision lived. I could tune a round to my rifle, to my shooting style, to the kind of day it was. Suddenly I had control not just of the shot, but of everything before the shot. Every variable became part of the sport. Part of the craft. And part of me.

It’s only now that I can see what I was really doing. I wasn’t just shooting vermin. I wasn’t just learning a skill. I was shaping myself around the need for agency. Around the need to take chaos and turn it into something predictable. To take fear and turn it into focus. To take helplessness and turn it into mastery.

That mindset, danger contained inside discipline, was the earliest seed of entrepreneurialism in me.

Because entrepreneurship, if you’re brutally honest about it, is the same game. You’re trying to hit something far off in the distance with conditions you can’t fully control. You study the wind. You adjust the scope. You take your shot. You miss. You adjust again. Every failure becomes more information. Every success becomes confidence that maybe, just maybe, you can survive outside the chaos you grew up in.

I didn’t know it then, walking through the hills with a rifle over my shoulder and the sun beating down on the back of my neck, but those long days of tracking rabbits and foxes were shaping the way I’d see the world forever.

Control what you can. Perfect what you can reach. Respect the danger. Understand the rules. Bend them when you need to. And always, always, aim for something further away than anyone thinks you can hit.

That’s how the guns taught me to survive.

And eventually, they taught me how to believe I could build a life of my own.