Making an Unordinary Accountant Chapter 6 - The Party That Never Ended

MAKING AN UNORDINARY ACCOUNTANT

 

CHAPTER 6 – The Party That Never Ended

 

If you’d asked me in early February 1976 what the next month of my life would look like, I’d have told you it would be more of the same: dust, heat, cricket scores on the radio, schoolbooks that never quite held my attention, and the endless churn of chores that came with living on the land. Weeks were predictable in the way only rural time can be, measured in feed runs, fence checks, and the sound of my father’s mood coming up the gravel driveway before he even walked through the door.

 

What I didn’t know, and couldn’t possibly have known, was that one phone call from my cousin Phil was about to wipe the board clean.

 

Phil wasn’t just a cousin. He was my unofficial third brother. He was the one person who made the farm feel like something other than a ticking emotional time bomb. Every shearing season, when he and his father rolled into our world, it was as if someone had thrown open the windows. We shifted from survival mode to childhood. Fortresses in wool bales, imaginary worlds built in the granite outcrops behind the paddocks, riding not because we had to muster but because we wanted to. He was the one who pulled imagination out of the cracks where I’d tried to stuff it, the one who gave me permission to be a kid in a world that preferred its children useful.

 

So when he invited me to Sydney for a weekend, just a weekend, for a party, I said yes in the casual way you do when you’re seventeen and think the world is fixed in place. I packed a bag as if I’d return Sunday afternoon. I even left my “good” shirt hanging on the back of the bedroom door, reasoning that I’d need it for it on Monday.

 

It’s funny the things you remember.

 

I remember the train to Sydney felt like crossing into a different dimension. I remember the shock of traffic, of houses stacked on houses, of people everywhere with somewhere to be. I remember thinking that the air itself felt different, like it had been warmed by electricity rather than sun.

 

And I remember the party. Or more accurately: I remember the moment the party ended my life as I knew it.

 

Not dramatically. Not in the Hollywood sense. But in the way a hinge quietly changes the direction of a door.

 

Then the Saturday Morning that changed everything

 

My aunt woke me the next morning by thumping a folded Sydney Morning Herald onto my chest and saying, with a grin: “Time to find yourself a job, love.”

 

It was a joke. Just a bit of city humour  (at least I thought it was) at the expense of the wide-eyed country kid who’d arrived the day before with a haircut that looked like it had been done by a sheep with attitude and clothes that still smelt faintly of lanolin.

 

But jokes have a way of becoming truth when they land on fertile ground.

 

I sat up, rubbed sleep out of my eyes, and started flicking through the classifieds out of sheer novelty. I’d never held a city paper before. The thing was enormous, like an atlas. The job ads alone could have been used to wall-paper a modest house.

 

I had no plan. No clue what I was even looking for. But in the space of a few minutes, four job listings leapt out at me. I can’t tell you why. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe desperation disguised as curiosity. Maybe it was that restless thing inside me that always whispered: Don’t miss the chance, you never know where it leads.

 

What I do remember was the ridiculousness of what happened next.

 

I picked up the phone, on a Saturday, with the sort of naïve optimism that only someone who’s never lived in a city could possibly have. Who on earth answers work calls on a Saturday? Apparently, one man did.

 

An accountant. George Evans, senior partner at Ruwald and Evans, Chartered Accountants

 

I didn’t know what an accountant was. I didn’t care. He answered the phone, and to seventeen-year-old me, that was qualification enough.

 

I mumbled my way through something that in hindsight resembled a job application only in the sense that I was asking a stranger to give me employment. He didn’t laugh. He didn’t hang up. He simply said: “Come in Monday morning. We’ll have a chat.”

 

A chat. Just like that.

 

I hung up the phone and felt something shift inside me. I didn’t know it then, but that single call had changed the trajectory of my entire life.

 

I had fallen sideways into accounting

 

By Monday morning, I was sitting in an office I’d never imagined existed, wearing clothes my aunt had ironed within an inch of their lives, answering questions about things I didn’t understand in a language I barely spoke. He wasnt so much wondering about my knowledge of debtors, creditors, ledgers, reconciliation, of course these weren’t just foreign words, they were like stumbling into a different planet.

 

And yet, somehow, miraculously, because I was a country kid and by definition had “ the right stuff” I walked out with a job.

 

What hooked me wasn’t the work. Hell, at that point I still didn’t know what the work even was. What hooked me was the absurdity of it all. The cartoon above the tea area summed it up better than anything else could:

 

“Six Munce ago I couldn’t even spell Akkountant. Now I are one.”

 

That became my internal monologue for months. My private joke. My armour.

 

Because the truth was, I was out of my depth. But for once in my life, being out of my depth didn’t terrify me. It exhilarated me. It felt like the beginning of something. A ladder out of a world I hadn’t chosen but had been born into.

 

Of course, it wasn’t just my world that shifted. I’d suddenly landed myself inside the daily life of a family of Salvation Army Officers. A household of routine, ritual, and purpose. Their son had just gone to Goulburn Teachers College, leaving a quiet vacancy in the house.

 

And into that vacancy walked me. A gangly, uncertain, suddenly-city-bound farm kid who still felt the ghost of the shearing shed in his clothes.

 

I had gone from being part of a fracturing family on a farm to being enveloped overnight into a structured, orderly world with boundaries I didn’t understand and expectations I’d never encountered. And once again, I found myself “alone,” but alone in the way I always seemed to be: surrounded by people but emotionally orbiting at a distance.

 

And so the party never ended

 

The truth is, I never went home. Not properly. Not in the way everyone assumed I would. That party, that weekend, that phone call, those were the final stitches that tethered me to a new life.

 

It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t strategic. There was no five-year vision. No careful weighing of options.

 

It was FOMO in its purest form.

 

A door was open, so I walked through it. The future was unknown, so I ran toward it. Opportunity wasn’t something you waited for, it was something you seized before someone else did.

 

And that’s how I fell, sideways, backwards, maybe upside-down, into the world of accounting. Not because I wanted to be an accountant. But because the party never ended.

 

And neither did the momentum.

 

George and his partner, Bruce Houston, gave me something I didn’t know I needed at the time: structure. Not rules in the authoritarian sense, I’d had enough of those, but structure in the way a craftsman teaches a trade. Quietly. Firmly. Expectantly. With no room for shortcuts.

 

They didn’t preach professionalism; they lived it. They didn’t explain ethics; they demonstrated it. They didn’t tell me to care about detail; they demanded it by making me redo anything that didn’t live up to the standard.

 

Looking back, those two men gave me the first rock-solid footing I’d ever known outside the unpredictable mood swings of life on the farm. And funnily enough, it wasn’t the mathematics of accounting that hooked me, it was the certainty. The clarity. The idea that numbers, unlike people, behaved if you treated them properly.

 

I had missed the university enrolment deadline for the year, though truthfully, even if I hadn’t, I doubt I would have scraped together marks that meant anything. So I did the next thing: I enrolled in a TAFE accounting course, figuring it would “tide me over.”

 

It did far more than that.

 

Within weeks, it became obvious that TAFE was grounding me in the basics better than any three-year theory-heavy degree could have. Debits, credits, double-entry, trial balance, there was a rhythm to it. I could feel it. It made sense. More sense than most parts of my life to that point.

 

George and Bruce saw it too. Before long, they were sending me to night classes with specific instructions: “Learn this. Bring it back. We’ll show you how it works in the real world.”

 

It was the first time in my life I felt like someone was investing in me. And that was the real springboard, that grounding. That insistence on “doing it right.” That stubborn belief that if you understood the nuts and bolts, the rest would come.

 

Everything after that, every job, every jump, every risk, extrapolated from those early months with them.

 

And then, into that mix, walked a bloke who would shape the next chapter of my life without either of us realising it at the time: Colin Waller.

 

To this day I couldn’t tell you the exact moment he arrived in my orbit. It wasn’t dramatic, he just worked at Ruwlad and Evans and so did I. There were no fireworks or cinematic camera pans. He was just there one day, another senior in the office, sleeves rolled up, eyes sharp, mind sharper.

 

Colin was everything I wasn’t.

 

Where I was still rough around the edges, he was polished. He was instinctive and impatient, a failed academic in terms of accounting but with a gift of the gab, with the same grounding of the rules, only for a longer time. He was tolerated by the partners because he continually brought new clients to the fold.

 

Colin was a lot like me, although i was learning from the partners, where he would leap first and worry about the landing after, together, we measured the height, the distance, the wind direction, and whether the ladder was stable.

 

But somehow, we worked. Opposites don’t just attract, they balance.

 

It started as a quiet camaraderie. Shared tea breaks. Rolling eyes at the same client quirks. Laughing at George’s legendary ability to spot an error from twenty paces. Swapping notes from TAFE, turning academia into real world outcomes or as he would put it the degree in gutter technology. Swapping stories from childhood. Realising that we both had that restless thing inside us, the urge to be better, sharper, faster, smarter.

 

He was competitive, but not in a cutthroat way. Competitive in the sense that he wanted to lift himself, and everyone around him. He was a tournament A Grade tennis player. And in that environment, under George and Bruce’s no-nonsense supervision, the two of us found a rhythm.

 

We learned the trade together. We made mistakes together. We corrected each other. We pushed each other.

 

And somewhere between all the debits and credits, somewhere between the long hours and the night classes, somewhere between the quiet ambitions neither of us admitted out loud, we became friends.

 

Real friends. Not schoolyard friends. Not party friends. Not the casual acquaintances you drift away from once circumstances change.

 

The kind of friend who sees your potential before you do. The kind who pushes you toward the next step before you think you’re ready. The kind who challenges you, annoys you, supports you, and forces you to grow.

 

Neither of us said it at the time, but the path was already forming. George and Bruce were the foundation. TAFE was the scaffolding. But it was the partnership between two young blokes, one wild instinct, one steady learned logic, that quietly became the engine.

 

The shared jokes. The shared clients. The shared late nights fixing something neither of us should have stuffed up in the first place.

 

The shared vision that, though blurry, was unmistakably bigger than the four walls of that office.

 

I didn’t know it then, but the scaffolding of my professional life was being assembled piece by piece: the grounding from George and Bruce, the practical skills from TAFE, and Colin, the colleague who became a mate, then a mentor, then eventually a partner.

 

FOMO played its part too. I didn’t want to miss a chance. Didn’t want to fall behind. Didn’t want to be the one who stayed small when possibility was right there, breathing at the edges of every new lesson.

 

But it wasn’t fear alone that drove me.

 

For the first time, I had people around me who didn’t just expect something from me—they trusted me to rise to it.

 

And that changes a young man. It gives him direction, even when he thinks he’s still stumbling.

 

Colin left Ruwald & Evans first. Not dramatically, just the next logical move for someone who’d outgrown the confines of a small city practice but hadn’t yet worked out where he belonged. The trouble was, without the academic pedigree, he couldn’t secure a tax agent’s certificate. And in those days, that mattered. Not for prestige, but for practicality. You could do all the accounting in the world, balance all the books, charm all the clients, but if you didn’t have a registered tax agent to sign off on the returns, your practice was a boat without a motor.

 

I understood that instinctively. And as soon as I’d scraped together the necessary ticks on my transcript, some through sweat, some through pure stubbornness, I coated myself in that qualification like armour. I was young, but I wasn’t stupid. I knew how valuable that agent’s number was.

 

So in those early days, it was simple. Almost embarrassingly simple. Colin prepared the work. I lodged the returns under my tax agent number. He paid me for the privilege. Two young men, dancing around the rules without breaking them, building something neither of us could yet name.

 

I can still see the scene that came next as clearly as if it were on a film reel.

 

It was late afternoon in the office. The sun was cutting sideways through the blinds, lighting up the dust in the way only late-afternoon office dust knows how. Bruce and I were having one of those quiet, almost fatherly conversations he saved for the end of the day when the phones weren’t ringing and the world felt slower.

 

We were talking about the future, my future. About opportunity. About the logical next step.

And though he didn’t say it outright, the subtext was clear enough: Partnership.

 

But he also knew my glaring problem. The academic one. The letters I didn’t have after my name. The invisible barrier that said you could do the job, but you weren’t allowed in the club.

 

So he made a quip, lighthearted but pointed: “Well, Jeff, you’ve got your tax agent’s license. If the academic side’s slowing you down, you should at least be making money from the thing. Lodge some returns for someone like Colin.”

 

He laughed. I didn’t.

 

Because I didn’t need to imagine it. I said, very simply, “I already am.”

 

And he stopped. Really stopped. Not offended, not angry, just recalibrating.

 

It had been a throwaway line on my part, tossed into the conversation without malice or agenda. But it landed like a stone dropped into still water. The ripples spread quickly, silently, and with implications that neither of us fully grasped in that moment.

 

Because that one line said everything: I was already outgrowing the walls he thought I still belonged inside.

 

A few months later, I resigned. And I joined Colin.

 

It wasn’t a reckless leap. It wasn’t romanticised rebellion. It wasn’t even particularly brave.

 

It was simply logical.

 

Before I walked out the door, I had already achieved things many Chartered Accountants considered “normal” professional milestones, despite not being eligible to put ICA after my name.

 

I had spoken at the firm’s annual conference, delivering papers on payroll tax grouping provisions, writing articles for the Taxation Institute, a client of the firm, dense material that most young accountants avoided unless tied to a chair. I had stood alongside Ruwald & Evans, lending credibility to their name, which in turn lent credibility to mine.

 

And then there was the Professional Year team.

 

A group of young hopefuls, all chasing the Chartered title, whom I had been asked, at George’s insistence, to lead at a national conference. It was meant to be a developmental exercise, but in truth it was an endorsement. I’d become the unofficial captain of people who were technically “ahead” of me.

 

I remember the guest speaker vividly: the Hon. Nick Jones, radio identity, raconteur, and professional stirrer of pots. He delivered a tongue-in-cheek lecture on the idiosyncrasies of Chartered Accountants, including a story about a late-night dare, a lecturer, and a freezing swimming pool, all wrapped into a metaphor about assessing economic conditions. It was ridiculous. It was brilliant. And it was a feather in George Evans’ cap. By extension, it was a feather in mine.

 

I was doing the work. I was standing in the right rooms. I was rising through the firm. But I wasn’t, on paper, one of “them.”

 

And here’s the truth I eventually learned: You didn’t need the letters. You didn’t need the ceremony. You didn’t need the institution. You needed one thing and one thing only if you wanted to open an accounting practice in Australia: A tax agent’s certificate.

 

And I had one.

 

Stepping into Colin’s world was like walking onto a stage midway through a performance where the script had been written by someone else and everyone assumed you already knew your lines.

 

His clients were established, business owners, professional sportsmen, tradesmen, small manufacturers, and a couple of comfortably well-heeled types who had money because their fathers had money. They all had one thing in common: They were older than me. Every single one of them. And because Colin was ten years older, every one of them naturally assumed I was too.

 

It didn’t occur to them that someone barely twenty-five could walk into a room and talk about payroll tax grouping, depreciation schedules, superannuation contributions, or trading stock valuations with a straight face. Twenty-five was the age of apprentices, not advisers.

 

So I lied. Not maliciously, not with some grand plan, just in the way a young bloke does when he knows the truth will make people look at him sideways. They thought I was mid-thirties. I didn’t correct them. If anything, I leaned into it.

 

And the strange thing was: the work fit me better than the age ever did.

 

I remember the first time I realised the lie was becoming part of the uniform. A client, a builder with a handshake like a hydraulic press, looked me dead in the eye during a directional discussion and said: “You young blokes these days, eh? I tell you what, Jeff, when we were your age…”

 

We. Meaning mid-thirties. Mortgage. Kids. Life experience. All the things I didn’t have.

 

I nodded, made a noncommittal noise, and kept going.

 

Credibility is a strange thing at that age. You don’t earn it. You project it. And if you project it well enough, eventually you grow into it.

 

That became my survival strategy.

 

What I lacked in age, I made up for in grounding.

 

George and Bruce had burnt the fundamentals into me so deeply that I could operate on instinct. Debits and credits were second nature. Problem-solving was a reflex. And that quiet expectation of standards had become part of my DNA.

 

So while the clients thought I was older, what they were really responding to wasn’t the lie, it was the competence. They didn’t care how many candles were on my birthday cake.

They cared that: I returned calls when I said I would. I explained things without condescension. I fixed their messes without theatrics. I never pretended to know something I didn’t.

 

And when I didn’t know something, I found out, fast.

 

In a strange way, the lie about my age freed me from having to explain myself. It bought me the time I needed to build the substance beneath the surface. And that substance was already solidifying.

 

The First Months: Fear, Adrenaline, and Quiet Triumph

 

Colin and I had very different styles, so different, in fact, that anyone watching from a distance might’ve wondered how the hell we worked at all. But that difference was the whole point. It was why it did work.

 

He was the face. The steady hand. The measured voice clients trusted the moment he walked into a room.

 

Calm. Deliberate. Collected. He had the presence, the age, the bearing.

 

And me? I was the rock, for now at least

 

The engine room. The one who knew the legislation backwards, who could unravel a mess in minutes, who could feel a set of numbers the way a shearer feels a fleece, knowing instinctively where the good wool lies.

 

I was fast. Instinctive. Analytical without needing to announce it.

 

While Colin set the tone, I held the structure. While he spoke to the relationship, I spoke to the solution.

 

He’d open the conversation with ease and authority, and I’d quietly deliver the detail that made the room believe both of us had been born doing this.

 

Where he planned, I navigated. Where he presented, I resolved. Where he provided the face, I provided the backbone.

 

Clients thought it was intentional. A perfect pairing.A professional choreography.

 

But truthfully? It was two blokes hanging on to the same rope, pulling in the same direction because that’s all we knew to do, and hoping, between us, the rope didn’t fray.

 

The partnership worked not because we sat down and designed it, but because we couldn’t have done it alone. Together, our mismatched strengths clicked in a way that made us better than either one of us was separately.

 

And as those first months rolled on, I realised something else, something that crept up quietly, not in a moment of triumph but in the stillness between jobs: I was good at this.

 

Not in the loud way. Not in the chest-thumping, look-at-me way. But in the way that mattered: Technically. Emotionally. Interpersonally.

 

I could read people, not as well as Colin but I was learning very quickly. I could hear what they weren’t saying. I could anticipate a problem before it existed. I could see the business beneath the books. I could sit across from a client and hold the room, even if part of me still felt like the 17-year-old who’d stumbled into accounting by answering the wrong classified ad.

 

Credibility, I learned, wasn’t about age or degrees or letters after your name. It was a habit.

 

Carry yourself like you belong, long enough, and eventually the world agrees with you.

 

By the time our first year as partners was winding down, I didn’t need to lie about my age anymore. I didn’t need to hide it, either. The lie simply dissolved, its usefulness spent.

 

When someone asked, “How old are you now, Jeff?” I’d sidestep it, talk about the matter at hand, redirect the conversation toward their numbers, their dilemmas, their future. And eventually, the question stopped coming altogether.

 

People don’t ask a pianist how long they’ve played once they’ve heard them perform. They just listen. It was the same with us.

 

Clients didn’t leave our office thinking about my age. They left thinking about the decisions they could now make with clarity. They walked away with results, not doubts.

 

But beneath the surface, beneath the steady projection of competence and the quiet truth of capability, lay something deeper: FOMO.

 

Pure, unfiltered FOMO.

 

I didn’t want to be the one left behind. Left out. Overlooked. Dismissed.

 

I didn’t want to slip back into the volatility of the farm, where emotion dictated the weather as much as the clouds did. I didn’t want to be the boy who was useful only when someone else needed labour.

 

I didn’t want a life where decisions were made around me, not by me. So I pushed. Harder. Faster. Further.

 

I learned at a pace that only fear and ambition combined can generate. I worked in a way that made sleep negotiable. I built the scaffolding of a career long before I understood the weight it would eventually carry.

 

And all of it, all of it, grew from a moment that began at a party I never intended to stay for.

 

In the end, what mattered most wasn’t age, or qualifications, or the lies we told to get through the door.

 

What mattered was momentum. Keep moving. Keep climbing. Keep proving. Keep becoming.

 

Because once the momentum starts, you don’t question the direction. You just run.

 

For all the early success, all the balance we found in our mismatched strengths, the partnership between Colin and me was always built on an unspoken truth:

 

We were heading in different directions without ever acknowledging it.

 

When I first joined him, the financial split made sense. He had the age, the experience, the client base. I had the qualifications, the technical engine room, and most importantly, the tax agent’s license.

 

But time changes everything.

 

As the months rolled into years, I grew from the junior he’d brought in to the equal whose name carried weight in the decision-making. And when that transition happened, when I shifted from subordinate to partner, the numbers finally spoke in a way neither of us could ignore.

 

We couldn’t afford the lifestyle Colin had started to enjoy.

 

Not with the profit split. Not with the overheads. Not with the trajectory he was on and the one the business was capable of sustaining.

 

It wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t greed. It was simply math.

 

He was spending at one level, the practice was earning at another, and the gap between the two was not philosophical; it was visible on the balance sheet and worse in the ever increasing overdraft.

 

I remember the moment of clarity like a ledger line in black ink across a clean page: We can’t afford this. There was no argument. No blow-up. No dramatic walkout. Just the quiet, sobering realisation that our ambitions were no longer aligned.

 

He was chasing lifestyle. I was chasing capacity. He wanted comfort. I wanted capability. He wanted the trappings of success. I wanted the foundation of it.

 

You can run a partnership on mismatched strengths. You can’t run it on mismatched expectations.

 

So the partnership ended, not abruptly, not violently, but inevitably.

 

And while all of this was happening, the partnership straining under the weight of lifestyle mismatches and financial realities, I was doing something that, in hindsight, feels almost absurd: I was finishing my degree.

 

My real degree, the Bachelor of Business (Majoring in Accounting), the one with exams, assignments, lecturers, and all the academic trimmings.

 

But the education that truly shaped me wasn’t handed out in lecture halls. It was earned in the trenches. What IColin jokingly called my Gutter Technology Degree.

 

The 2am reconciliations. The cashflow disasters you had no right to fix but did anyway. The clients who cried in your office because you were the first adult who actually listened. The knot in your stomach when you knew the numbers were telling a truth someone didn’t want to face. The practical, real-world accounting that no textbook ever gets right because textbooks assume people behave rationally.

 

I learned more in that period than any formal qualification could have offered: how to read the silence between a client’s words, how to spot a problem before it landed on paper, how to handle conflict without lighting a match, how to keep a practice afloat on pure grit and technical competence, how to work beyond full-time without calling it overtime, and how to grow up faster than any twenty-something should have to.

 

By day, I was a partner in an accounting firm. By night, I was a university student grinding through coursework. By necessity, I was a young man building a career while trying not to drown in responsibility.

 

There is a very particular exhaustion that comes from running a business full-time, studying full-time, and still believing you haven’t done enough. An exhaustion that becomes a lifestyle. A rhythm. A momentum all its own.

 

Looking back, I don’t know how I kept the pace. But I do know why I kept it:

 

FOMO. And fear. And ambition. And the need to never, ever, return to the volatility I’d grown up with.

 

I didn’t want to be at the mercy of someone else’s temper. I didn’t want to be powerless in a life I hadn’t chosen. I didn’t want to be limited by what other people thought I should be.

 

So I ran. Hard. At everything. Lectures. Clients. Deadlines. Partnership meetings. Assignments. Tax lodgements. More clients. More nights. More weekends.

 

And beneath it all, that whisper: Keep going. Don’t fall behind. Don’t lose ground. Don’t stop, not now.

 

The degree gave me legitimacy. The gutters gave me mastery. The partnership gave me a platform. But the collapse of that partnership gave me something far more important: The realisation that if I was going to build a life that made sense, it had to be built on numbers. not assumptions, not lifestyle illusions, not someone else’s ambitions.

 

Mine. My ground. My pace. My responsibility.

 

The end of the partnership wasn’t a failure. It was a revelation. A clarifying moment that marked the end of one chapter and the sharpened beginning of another. The beginning of self-determination. The beginning of independence. The beginning of the next climb.

 

And, in many ways, the beginning of the accountant I was becoming, not by accident this time, but by intent.