Making an Unordinary Accountant Chapter 5 - The HSC Debacle

MAKING OF AN UNORDINARY ACCOUNTANT

CHAPTER 5 – The HSC Debacle

Secondary school was supposed to be the clean slate.

That’s what everyone said, anyway. A new uniform, a bigger playground, harder subjects, older kids, and, somehow, the promise that the two missing marks from primary school wouldn’t matter anymore. The slate of expectation was wiped clean, replaced by the kind of optimism adults insist you’re meant to feel at eleven or twelve, even if it never quite reaches your chest.

I walked in thinking success would simply… continue. As if academic momentum obeyed the same laws as gravity, once rolling, always rolling.

But then the mumps stepped in.

Not in a dramatic, life-altering way. More a slow, petty ambush in the first term of Year 7, costing me four weeks in the end, knocking me sideways and just far enough behind that catching up felt like watching a departing train and deciding you didn’t actually need to be on it in the first place. It’s funny how small things at that age wedge themselves into permanent detours. I got sick, I fell behind, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t have the inclination to claw my way back.

Partly because secondary school wasn’t the straightforward, steady-beat rhythm of primary school. No more rote learning. No more just-remember-the-facts-and-pass. Suddenly they wanted thinking, analysis, creativity, inference. They wanted thoughts that weren’t fed to you. They wanted interpretation.

And I wasn’t ready for that.

I’d grown up in a world where success came from repetition, from turning up, from doing. Not from sitting still and thinking deeply about themes, subtext, and the symbolic weight of a bloody metaphor. I knew how to work hard. I didn’t know how to sit still long enough for “critical thinking” to seep in. And, if I’m honest, I didn’t really want to.

Secondary school began teaching skills that didn’t match my world, not yet, anyway. And the first real indicator of that came courtesy of Richard Jones.

A man who, in retrospect, probably should have been teaching at a university or writing books about existentialism, not corralling a bunch of early teenagers with raging hormones, louder voices, and zero respect for authority. He didn’t walk in like other teachers. He didn’t bark orders. He didn’t glare until the room fell silent.

He walked in, dropped his books onto the desk, surveyed the chaos with the resignation of a man who’d long ago realised he’d never win the war of noise, and simply said: “Alright, let’s keep it to a dull roar.”

That was the moment my illusions about education began to crack.

If primary school was a structured paddock with well-marked fences, secondary school was open range, and Jones was the stockman who knew better than to chase every stray calf. It was the first time I understood that adults didn’t actually have control. Not really. Some just pretended better than others.

Jones didn’t pretend. And from that single sentence, a sentence both humorous and completely disheartening, my expectations of secondary schooling started sliding. If he wasn’t going to fight for our attention, why should I fight for my grades?

This was the first nudge away from academic idealism. The first moment where the plan, the unspoken promise that I’d thrive, met Steinbeck’s truth: the best laid plans of mice and men often do go awry.

Because in those weeks of falling behind, in those classes where thinking mattered more than raw knowledge, and under teachers like Jones who shrugged at the chaos rather than command it, something shifted in me.

A tiny whisper at first: Maybe this isn’t my track. Maybe the path I thought I was on wasn’t really mine at all. And into that widening gap stepped the things that did make sense: the discipline of a rifle, the quiet companionship of Gazer, the escape of the paddock, the simplicity of working out a problem with your hands instead of your head.

Secondary school would keep pushing me away from the idea of academic excellence with a series of these tiny, accumulative moments, little cuts, really, each one chipping at the belief that education was the ladder I was supposed to climb.

Jones was just the first.

Secondary school should have been textbooks, timetables, and tidy progression through year after year.

But then there was cricket. Cricket wasn’t a distraction, it was an entire alternative universe. One I walked into earlier than I probably should have. Representing the First XI from Year 7 wasn’t normal; it’s just that no one told me that at the time. I thought it was just another thing you did if you were good enough. Another mark to tick off. Another way to stay busy.

Looking back, it was another way not to sit still.

I found myself playing in the inaugural East–West Cup, surrounded by boys who were older, louder, more worldly in that country-town sense of the word. We won it. And being part of that winning team felt like slipping into a life that had momentum without requiring me to manufacture it. Sport gave me an identity schoolwork couldn’t touch. Nine different sporting representations over my years at Boorowa Central, cricket, athletics, football, tennis, debating, you name it, I probably trialled for it.

It all helped form a pattern I didn’t yet recognise: if there was an option to run, I took it.

If there was an option to hit, throw, chase, or compete, I took it. Anything but sit.

And if cricket was the escape hatch, the social world of Boorowa Central was its own separate education altogether.

We weren’t the insiders. We were the bus kids.

That alone put us on the outer fringe of the social map. We arrived together, in a burst of cold air and diesel fumes, wearing the dust of whatever stretch of back road we lived on. To the town kids, the “inlyers”, we were the ones who didn’t know the latest rumour, didn’t live close enough to roam the streets after school, didn’t spend weekends hanging out in each other’s loungerooms or meeting behind the shops.

We were… different.

And in the unwritten social hierarchy of adolescence, different is dangerous unless you can translate it into something useful. Academic ability should have been that ticket. Should have made us valuable. Should have opened doors.

Instead, it made us targets.

No one wanted to sit with the kid who always had the right answer, until they needed you to finish their homework, or decode an assignment, or ghost-write a paragraph they couldn’t make sense of. I learned early that academic ability wasn’t respected, it was mined. Quietly. Privately. In side conversations and after-school whispers.

I wasn’t being admired. I was being utilised.

It never bothered me at the time; I treated it the same way I treated mustering sheep or hitting sixes, just another form of output. Another form of work. Another thing I could do well enough that people came to me for it.

But it bred a slow, subtle resentment underneath. A sense that the things I was good at didn’t actually belong to me. They were borrowed, requested, sometimes demanded.

Maybe that’s why I slowly shifted from caring about academic excellence to caring about the things I could control: sport, shooting, riding, loading ammunition, perfecting a shot,  understanding machinery, and piecing together the parts of life that required precision rather than opinion.

Then came the great HSC trials economics scam, and I say that proudly.

The economics teacher, in a stroke of either genius or laziness, allowed his class access to the trial exam paper. As if teenagers wouldn’t exploit an advantage handed to them on a silver plate. Word spread. Not to the staff room, of course. But to me.

I started writing essays for them. Real essays, proper essays, the sort of things they could memorise or parrot back with slight alterations. And I got paid for it. Cash. Not pocket money, earned money. The best kind.

It didn’t matter that I hadn’t taken the class. Economics made sense to me. It was rules. It was logic. It was systems. It was numbers pretending to be narratives. It was maths dressed up in words, and I could speak both languages.

After marking the papers, the teacher, half amused, half baffled, pulled me aside after recognising my writing rather than the penmanship of the student who actually sat the exam..

“You really should sit Economics in the HSC,” he said. “There’s something there. A natural grasp. First-level work.”

But I wanted to fly. I had my sights set on the big three: Mathematics. Physics. Chemistry. The holy trinity of boys who wanted to be something. Engineers. Astronauts. Scientists. Men with futures that sparkled.

It never occurred to me that picking the hardest path because it was the hardest path was probably the dumbest strategy imaginable. But that was the thing, success at that age felt like something you chased uphill. Something you proved by surviving, not thriving.

And that choice, those subjects, planted the seeds for what became the crescendo of failure that was my HSC. Not because I wasn’t smart enough. Not because I didn’t know the content. Not because I didn’t have the ability.

But by then, everything about the system and me had grown completely incompatible. School wanted me to care about ionic bonding and redox equations; I was thinking about rifle loads, swing paths, cricket field placements, and the feel of a Tikka bolt sliding home.

And yet, none of that was the real break. The break came in Sydney.

The Officer Cadet intake had been the one thread of purpose I’d been holding onto. The pathway that made sense. A direction. A future you could point to and say, “That’s where I’m going.” It wasn’t just ambition; it was identity. I’d always been a doer, not a talker, someone who thrived under structure, who performed when rules were clear and expectations sharper than a freshly honed blade.

The trip down felt monumental. Big city. Big opportunity. A chance to prove that all the discipline of the paddocks, the shooting range, the cricket pitch had shaped someone worth investing in.

The physical was nothing. Easy. The psychological? Well. That was something else.

They weeded us out gradually, no drama, no shouting, just quiet nods, polite dismissals, and doors opening and closing like the world’s most clinical game of musical chairs. And I survived each cut. Right up until the last one.

I remember the room. The fluorescent lights. The clipboard. The way the officer shifted slightly in his seat before delivering the decision.

I was the last one shown the door. Not because of fitness. Not because of aptitude. But because the psychological screening said “no”.

And just like that, purpose evaporated.

I don’t know if people understand how quickly a seventeen-year-old can come undone when the one path they’d pinned hope on turns out to be a dead end. It wasn’t a tantrum or a meltdown. It wasn’t even anger. It was emptiness. A quiet, steady draining away of direction.

I went home disheartened in a way that swallowed everything else.

And once that purpose was gone, school didn’t stand a chance. Maths, physics, chemistry, those had been choices made under the assumption that I was building toward something. Without that “something”, they were meaningless weights.

So I did the only thing that made sense: I went shearing.

George Johnson needed a casual. I needed a reason to get up in the morning. So I stepped into the shed, into the rhythm of wool and sweat and machinery, and the noise of the stands drowned out whatever expectations had once pressed on me.

The HSC exams arrived like an interruption to the real work of the day.

I left the shed covered in lanolin and dust, walked into an exam room still mentally counting sheep instead of equations, wrote whatever came, and walked straight back out again, to the shed, to the smell of wool and the honest ache of labour.

The exams weren’t a mountain. They weren’t even a hurdle. They were a blip. An inconvenience. Something that happened while life went on elsewhere. And when they were over, I simply went back to shearing full-time, as if the entire HSC had been a formality tacked onto the side of a life that had already started without me.

It wasn’t rebellion. It wasn’t laziness. It was simply that the world I lived in no longer aligned with the world the school believed I should care about.

The rifle. The saddle. The cricket pitch. The paddocks. The shed. The shearing stands humming like machinery built to keep you too busy to think. Those were the things that made sense.

School was asking me to look inward, reflect, analyse, decode meaning, plan a future. But everything in my life was pulling me outward, toward movement, toward noise, toward physicality, toward anything that didn’t require sitting still with thoughts I didn’t yet know how to process.

It’s no surprise how it ended. Paths don’t fail, they just quietly diverge, step by step, until you realise the one you were meant to be on is already miles behind you. Seventeen is too young to feel old, but somehow I did.

Not “old” in the sense of age, old in the sense of being worn thin by influences I didn’t yet have the language to name. By then, the ingredients of me had stopped being separate threads and started simmering together into something I could feel but not describe.

On one side was the land. Not the romanticised country that people in cities imagine, no sunsets, no rustic charm, no poetry. The real land. The stubborn, unforgiving, merciless land that raised my father and carved out of him a hardness he passed on without meaning to.

The land he worshipped was the same land I was learning to hate.

Not because it was bad, but because it was relentless. Because it demanded more than it gave. Because every generation before me had paid their dues with blood, sweat, and anger, anger that fell downward on anything and anyone within reach. Including us.

I didn’t want to become that. But the other side of the melting pot wasn’t exactly promising either.

There I was in a shearing shed, earning a wage the honest way, feet planted, arms aching, back burning, hands raw with lanolin and steel. Shearing pays in sweat first and money second. It’s a trade built on repetition, rhythm, and a tolerance for pain. There’s dignity in it, sure, but there’s also a trapdoor.

Stand in a shed long enough and you start to wonder if this is the rest of your life. If you don’t look up, you don’t look forward. If you don’t look forward, you slip into a loop.

And the loop starts sounding a lot like Sunday Too Far Away (1975 Roadshow Distributors), the story of men whose lives were measured not in milestones but in tally counts and pay packets, men drifting toward the bottom of a bottle and the long, slow slide of resignation.

I remember thinking: Is this it? Is this who I’m becoming? Not an officer. Not a scholar. Not a scientist or engineer. Not the kid predicted to excel. Not the kid with nine sporting representations and a mind built for numbers. Just another bloke with a downtrodden purpose, chasing the next mob of sheep and the next week’s wages, hoping Sunday hurries up but also knowing it never does.

The love I had for precision, for rifles tuned to a hair’s breadth, for reloading that bordered on meditation, for riding Gazer with the kind of instinct that made you one creature instead of two, none of it pointed toward a career. None of it told me what came next.

It only told me what didn’t fit anymore. School didn’t fit. The farm didn’t fit. The Armed Services didn’t want me. The land grated against me. Shearing was a stopgap, not a destiny.

And the adults around me seemed to have been swallowed whole by the very things I was trying to outrun.

I stood at the crossroads of seventeen with nothing but mismatched abilities and a growing fear that whatever spark I once had was being sanded down by forces I couldn’t control.

And yet, in that mess, guns, horses, shearing, sport, failed exams, rejected dreams, something was taking shape. A quieter instinct. A push from inside rather than outside.

A sense that if I was going to have a life, a real life, it wasn’t going to come from following anyone else’s path, not my father’s, not the farm’s, not the military’s, not the school’s predetermined ladder. My life would have to be built. Constructed. Designed.

Claimed.

I didn’t know it then, but the melting pot was brewing something entrepreneurial. Something restless. Something that refused to settle. Something that couldn’t work for someone else, couldn’t be boxed into a wage, couldn’t accept the idea that the best I could hope for was surviving until the next Sunday rolled around.

Seventeen didn’t give me answers. It didn’t offer clarity.But it did give me a question that would echo for decades: If not this… then what?

What next? Whatever it was, it would have to be mine. Because everything around me had proven one thing clearly: Following someone else’s script only ever led me to dead ends. The next chapter, whatever shape it eventually took, would have to be one I wrote myself.