Making an Unordinary Accountant Chapter 4 - Gazer & Me Versus the World

MAKING AN UNORDINARY ACCOUNTANT

CHAPTER 4 – Gazer & Me versus the World

When I think back on that stretch of my life, the guns were the clean, clinical friends, the practical tools that gave me a sense of control in a world that didn’t offer much of it. But the horse… the horse was different. The horse was heart. A mirror. A companion. A witness. And Gazer, of all the horses that came before or after, was the centrepiece of all of it.

People who didn’t grow up on the land never quite understand it. They see the horse as a hobby. A sport. A phase kids go through before they discover cars, or girls, or excuses. They picture neat pony clubs and polished boots and kids giggling as they plod around an arena.

But when you’re young, emotionally feral, and living on a farm where tempers simmered like a drought about to break, the horse becomes something else entirely. Not a pastime, an anchor. A pressure valve. A way out.

We never had bikes. Not because bikes were expensive, but because they were pointless. A pushbike was useless on acreage where the gravel would sling you sideways and potholes could swallow a front wheel whole. Even if you tried, you wouldn’t make it from shed to gate without stacking it and leaving half your skin behind.

So while other kids rode around cul-de-sacs on Malverns and Repco Hotfoots, we rode horses. Not for fun, because that’s simply how you got around the 2,000-acre farm.

If Dad said, “Check the back paddock,” you didn’t hop on a bike; you grabbed a bridle and whistled. If Mum needed someone to move the sheep or fetch something from the far yards, you swung a leg over a horse because that was the only way to do it before the job, or the mood, turned sour.

A horse wasn’t recreation. It was transportation. It was utility. It was survival. And somewhere in the middle of all that practicality, it became emotional armour.

When the atmosphere inside a farmhouse turns heavy, it doesn’t matter who caused it. You feel it. It sinks into the boards, the walls, even the crockery. The animals know. The kids definitely know. You learn to read tone over words. Footsteps over phrases. The slam of a screen door becomes its own language: stay clear.

Living in that kind of weather shapes you. Makes you hyper-aware. Sharp. Quick to gauge danger. Quick to bolt.

Emotionally feral isn’t an insult, it’s accuracy.

You grow up without the luxury of processing things softly. Everything comes at you too fast, too loud, too close. You develop instincts instead of feelings, reflexes instead of conversations. And because you can’t fix the storms brewing in the adults around you, you find other places to put all that tension.

For me, that place was the horse. Out there, the air changed. The silence wasn’t threatening, it was relief. The paddocks didn’t judge. They didn’t push back. They didn’t flare up without warning.

And the horse… the horse absorbed all of it without a word.

You don’t just ride a horse in those circumstances. You merge with it. You become part of its breathing, its rhythm, its calm, its vigilance.

Its steadiness becomes your steadiness. Its quiet becomes your quiet. For the first time all day, you’re not dodging someone’s mood or waiting for the next flare of temper.

With Gazer, that feeling was amplified. He didn’t just carry me; he understood me in the way only animals on working farms ever do, instinctively, without conditions, without fear. He could feel my pulse before I felt it, sense the tension in my legs before I’d even admitted something was wrong.

In a world where the adults couldn’t control their own tempers, the horse helped me learn to control mine. Or at least, to direct it. Channel it. Ride through it instead of being swallowed by it.

Because in that wide space between home and the back boundary, something finally made sense. The breath. The silence. The certainty. And the unspoken agreement between a boy trying to outrun the storms inside his house and the horse that carried him to wherever the peace was hiding that day.

With Gazer, solitude wasn’t lonely. It was sanctuary. Man and animal moving across paddocks that had seen more arguments, droughts and disappointments than triumphs. Out there, away from the sharp edges of the homestead, the world softened. I could feel the tension fall away in the rhythm of his stride. The wind. The smell of grass crushed under hoof. Even the creak of leather felt like permission to breathe.

He taught me something I didn’t learn from any adult: trust comes quietly, and only when earned.

My first champion ribbon came long before I realised that the world even measured people by those things. Canberra Lakes Pony Club Gymkhana. I was a kid with more determination than finesse, but once Gazer and I clicked, that was it. We weren’t the prettiest pair there, but we were the most committed. I still remember the judge’s eyebrow lifting when our number kept being called again and again. 

But here’s the truth I didn’t understand until much later: the ribbons weren’t my pride. They were my parents’.

People imagine kids hoarding their ribbons like treasure, hanging them across their bedroom walls as proof of talent or effort or identity. And yes, that very first blue ribbon felt like something meaningful to me, a sign that something had finally gone right, that I wasn’t the walking mistake the household tensions sometimes made me feel like.

But after that? The ribbons stopped belonging to me. They became inventory.

My parents treated them like currency, markers of achievement, ammunition in whatever unspoken contest existed among the families who lived in our orbit. Winning wasn’t about self-esteem; it was about household authority. Reputation. Status. Something to hold up against the neighbour’s gossip or the struggles we didn’t talk about.

Ribbons piled up with a kind of inevitability. Week after week. Show after show. Gazer and I would go out there, run the barrels, run the flags, take the bends tighter, hit the straights harder. He knew the job. I knew the job. We brought the results home, and the results went into the empire.

Mum had a system.

During the season, the ribbons filled coat hangers fixed to the picture rail on the wall, whatever flat surface wasn’t occupied by real work. They were stacked, sorted, smoothed out, and admired, not for their colour but for what they represented: proof that the Banks family didn’t just turn up, they dominated.

At the end of each season, there was the transfer, the ceremonial migration of hundreds of ribbons into a giant plastic bag that rustled like a feed sack. It wasn’t sentimental. It was practical. A harvesting of trophies.

And then, later, much later, I confiscated them and they were woven into blankets.

Not just one, but several of them.

One blanket made entirely of place ribbons. The other, still folded away, still strangely heavy with memory, made of champion ribbons.

Most of those champions were won with Gazer.

The weight of that blanket isn’t physical. It’s historical. Every strip is a moment. Every colour is a day loaded into the float before dawn, the smell of dust and horses, the hiss of Mum’s temper at Dad or vice versa, the silent expectation that I would win because that’s what I did, that’s what was required, that was the role I played in the ecosystem of our household.

Those blankets aren’t sentimental keepsakes. They’re artefacts. They represent a life where achievement wasn’t celebrated, it was tallied.

A ledger of childhood performance.

And in a strange way, Gazer is woven into every centimetre of them. Not as decoration, but as the quiet partner who did more emotional heavy lifting than any human ever realised.

Because for every ribbon that went into those bags, for every champion tag stitched into that blanket, it was Gazer who carried me through the gates, past the pressure, into the arena where finally, just for a minute or two, it was only him and me.

No temper. No storm. No tension. Just running. Just breath. Just us.

Then came the barrels.

Barrel racing is its own religion. Fast. Dirty. Unforgiving. It doesn’t care how well you sit in a dressage saddle or how pretty your hands are. It only cares about split-second decisions, trust in your horse, and the courage to hit a full gallop straight at a 44-gallon drum and believe, absolutely believe, that the two of you can bend time around it.

Gazer loved the barrels. Or maybe he loved winning. Or maybe he just loved that I finally stopped trying to control everything and simply let him run. Whatever it was, we became known. Not always in that friendly country-show sense, either.

It got to the point where the phone would ring and the voice on the other end would be polite, too polite. “Which show are you heading to this weekend?”  Translation: We’d like to pick the other one.

We weren’t unbeatable, but we were inconvenient. And for a boy who had always felt like he was trying to outrun circumstances, being someone others avoided for the sake of their own winning chances… well, that was a strange kind of respect.

Other kids earned pocket money by doing chores. Feeding chooks. Cleaning sheds. Helping in the yards. That wasn’t my world. We didn’t get pocket money in the “here’s five dollars” sense. We earned it the way everything else in our family seemed to be earned, through performance.

If I wanted money, I had to win it.

Prize money wasn’t a bonus, it was a necessity. The farm didn’t deal in allowances, it dealt in results. And so every ribbon, every victory, every small envelope of cash handed over at the secretary’s office was more than just earnings. It was proof of capability. Proof I wasn’t useless. Proof I had value beyond the noise of home.

That pressure could have crushed me. Instead, somehow, Gazer carried it.

He carried me.

Dalton Show in 1976 was the pinnacle. One of those days when everything went right, not just for me, but for the whole family. We were a force that year. Between us we earned more than 25% of the total prize money on offer for the entire show.

Twenty-five percent.

I didn’t understand the magnitude at the time. I just remember the feeling of walking back to the float with pockets full of envelopes, Gazer snorting like he’d done nothing out of the ordinary. But Dad understood. Mum understood. The committee certainly understood.

And then came the moment that still sits with me, the decision to donate it all to the Cyclone Tracy Appeal.

All of it. At an age when most kids hoarded every cent they could, our family made the call to hand it back. Not because we were wealthy, not even close, but because there were people out there who had lost everything. And even then, I understood the symbolism: winning meant something, but giving meant more.

There’s a story behind that day, and I’ll add it when the time is right. But even now I can feel the warmth of it, the pride, the sense that for once our little family did something unambiguously good.

And standing right at the centre of it all was Gazer.

My horse. My ally. The one creature who never raised a hand or a voice, never judged, never flinched, never expected me to be anything more than who I was in that moment.

It’s funny how one animal can shape a life. Guns gave me precision; Gazer gave me purpose. He was the quiet counterweight to everything else happening around me. In a house where emotions ran hot and tempers snapped like brittle twigs, he was the one place I found steadiness.

The ribbons might have fuelled my parents’ pride, but the wins were built from the partnership between a boy trying to outrun the chaos inside him and a horse who asked for nothing except trust.

When we got home from Dalton Show that day, dust in our hair, boots scuffed, Gazer fed and brushed and rugged, we all knew we’d done something big. A quarter of the total prizemoney for the entire show. That wasn’t normal. That wasn’t expected. That was unheard of.

And we were just kids, the oldest of us barely sixteen.

We cleaned up, put the gear away, swept out the float, and did all the post-show chores that happen almost automatically when you grow up living out of horse trailers and showgrounds. Then we piled into the lounge room, the way kids do when they know something important is happening but don’t quite understand the weight of it.

Dad made the call. All $500, every cent we’d earned through grit, sweat, and the sheer stubborn speed of Gazer and the other horses, was going to the Cyclone Tracy Appeal.

A cyclone named after my sister.

Even at that age, that felt significant. Symbolic in a way kids don’t have words for yet. Tracy, the storm, had levelled Darwin. Tracy, my sister, sat next to me as Dad dialled the number. There was something almost poetic in it, even if none of us said so.

Dad didn’t ask our permission. He didn’t need to. We just nodded. Because that’s what you did, you played your role. And this time, it felt like the right one.

We sat cross-legged on the carpet, waiting for our “five seconds of fame.” A telethon. Four kids who had worked like adults all day, waiting to hear the announcer say: “And thank you to the Banks kids from Dalton Show for their donation of five hundred dollars.”

Five. Hundred. Dollars.

In those days, that amount of money might as well have been ten thousand. Especially coming from children.

The moment came on the screen. The donation tally rolled up. And then the announcer said, dismissively, almost flippantly: “Must have been five dollars.”

Five dollars.

Just like that, he wiped it clean. Dismissed it. Erased us.

The room erupted, not in pride, but in disbelief, then anger. Mother’s outrage was predictable. Ours was instinctive. But Dad? Dad was volcanic.

It was the only time in my entire childhood that I saw him stand up for his children in front of us. He didn’t swallow it. He didn’t brush it off. He didn’t grumble and walk away.

He acted. He was on the phone before the announcer finished the sentence. And it wasn’t a polite correction. It wasn’t measured. It wasn’t diplomatic. It was raw, unfiltered fury, anger that had a direction for once, aimed not at us, but for us.

We couldn’t hear everything he said, but we heard enough. The tone. The expletives. The demand for acknowledgement. The refusal to let someone belittle the effort his kids had put in.

It was a moment of clarity. A breach in the usual weather pattern. The rare sight of Dad seeing us, not as obligations or extensions of himself, but as children who had done something extraordinary.

There was no recounting later. He never sat us down to justify it, or explain it, or soften it. He never even mentioned the announcer or the mistake again.

But we knew. We knew what we had done mattered. We knew the donation mattered. We knew the announcer had been wrong. And we knew, in a way that didn’t need words, that our father had been proud.

Not of the ribbons. Not of the empire of blankets. Not even of the prizemoney.

Proud of us.

And behind every step that led to that moment, behind every ribbon sewn into every blanket, behind every win that built that day, stood Gazer.

The horse who carried me through all of it.

If the guns helped shape my discipline, Gazer shaped my heart, and what happened next would define the direction of it all