It became hard to separate the illness from the depression that had already wrapped itself around me. They fed each other, one dragging me down physically, the other mentally, until the difference between tired and defeated blurred completely.
MAKING AN UNORDINARY ACCOUNTANT
Chapter 8 – Back from the Brink
Bankruptcy doesn’t arrive with a bang, not the way movies like to show it. For me it arrived as a kind of quiet implosion, where everything I’d built folded inward and left me standing in the middle of the wreckage not quite sure whether to laugh, cry, or swear at the universe for its timing. People say “it’s only money,” but only people who’ve never had to start again from nothing say that. When the trustee is telling you what you can and can’t own, when the future suddenly has fewer doors available than you thought, you don’t see money, you see identity slipping through your fingers.
And just when I thought the floor couldn’t give way any further, my body decided to have its own vote on the matter. Glandular fever hit me like a late notification from life saying, By the way, you haven’t suffered enough yet. One day I was exhausted; the next I was flattened. It was a heaviness that didn’t just sit in the muscles, it settled right into the bones, as if gravity had quietly doubled overnight. I’d wake up in the caravan feeling like I’d barely survived the sleep. Even lifting my head from the pillow felt like an accusation: You did this to yourself.
It became hard to separate the illness from the depression that had already wrapped itself around me. They fed each other, one dragging me down physically, the other mentally, until the difference between tired and defeated blurred completely. There were moments I’d stare at the ceiling of that caravan unable to move, wondering if this was the final indignity, bankrupt, alone, and too weak to even stand under the weight of it all.
But somehow I kept pushing. Crawling some days, limping others, surviving more out of stubbornness than strength. And maybe that stubbornness was the only thing that kept the whole structure, body, mind, and whatever was left of my pride, from collapsing altogether.
And the truth is, I didn’t stop to let my body heal. I didn’t know how. Rest felt like surrender. Pausing felt like confirming that life had beaten me. So even with the fever sitting behind my eyes, even with the weight of glandular fog turning simple movements into uphill climbs, I kept driving.
First, it was Sackville to Blacktown where Lawrie Rose had offered me an office free of charge to ensure that his taxes were looked after. There was a family here, a group that I knew after the first day he walked into my office at Potts Point. A day I will never forget as an entrepreneur walked in having spent a normal Christmas, and walking back into a plethora of cash flow issues stemming from his internal accountant having moved some money outside of the business.
Lawrie was a good friend, good enough to give me a caravan on the river, good enough to kick me in the backside when he thought I was letting the black dog take over and pushed me out into the real world rather than the protected world that he had created.
Then, it was Sackville to Bankstown, Bankstown back to Sackville. Because driving was the only way I’d ever known to get anywhere, literally and metaphorically. Wednesday meant an extra drive from Bankstown to Meadowbank to Cubs. The wheels kept turning because I needed them to. A man who’s lost everything doesn’t trust stillness; he trusts motion. If I stopped, even for a moment, I was terrified I’d never start again.
And yet, through all that, some stubborn bit of me refused to go out. A small pilot light kept flickering away, whispering, you’re not done. Maybe it was pride. Maybe it was FOMO, the same restless force that had pushed me into ventures and risks long before common sense arrived. Maybe it was the belief that if I didn’t keep moving, I’d miss whatever chance the world still had left for me. Whatever it was, it pushed me onto the Hawkesbury River and into a caravan that became home long before I was ready to call it that.
Living at Sackville was a study in contrasts. The river could be peaceful, the kind of calm that made you forget for a moment how broken everything felt. Or it could be wild and brown and angry, as if to remind you that nothing in life is truly stable. The caravan, God, it was small. I could stand in the centre and reach half my possessions without moving my feet. Winter crept in without permission. Summer tried to cook me alive. But in that tin box, where everything I owned fit inside a few square metres, life simplified itself. I had space to think. I had time to feel things I’d been outrunning for years.
There were nights lying in that bed, listening to the rustle of possums and the river slapping lazily at the bank, when I wondered how many wrong turns it took to land me there. I wondered whether this was permanent. And I wondered whether my boys, when they were older, would understand the man I was in that moment or whether this version of me would be something I’d forever try to hide from them.
But every morning I got up. I had no choice. They were still out there needing a father, even if that father felt like he was only held together by a handful of stubborn thoughts and whatever strength a man can borrow from desperation.
Most days began with the Sackville ferry. It didn’t care about my emergencies or my schedule, it only worked on its own rhythm. Foggy mornings on that ferry felt like a kind of purgatory, halfway between who I’d been and who I might still become. I’d cross the river, then grind through the long drive to Bankstown Airport where I shared an office with my mate Ian. While my world had come apart, his was still in flight, sometimes literally. He was trading planes, talking to pilots, dreaming up airlines, filling the air with the smell of Avgas and possibility.
And Avgas is a strange thing. Once that smell gets up a pilot’s nose, it never really leaves. It settles somewhere deep in the brain, taps into something primal, and whispers, Go on… one more hour. One more flight. One more patch of sky you haven’t touched yet. I watched those blokes wander around the hangars with that unmistakable mix of impatience and longing, as if every grounded minute was a minute wasted. They’d talk for hours about fuel ratios, climb rates, tailwinds, yet underneath it all, what they were really chasing was the feeling of lifting off. The moment the wheels left the tarmac and the world dropped away, leaving only direction and freedom.
Kerosene and freedom are a potent mix. For pilots, they seem to fuse into something that sits permanently behind the eyes. They can be exhausted, broke, hungover, mid–divorce, none of it matters. If someone offers them stick time, they’ll run for the cockpit like schoolboys being handed the keys to a stolen car. They don’t fly because it’s practical. They fly because the sky gives them something the ground never will: the illusion, however brief, of being in control.
And sitting in that office, watching them come and go, I realised I wasn’t so different. I didn’t have wings or a joystick, but I had that same restless pull inside me. That same refusal to sit still when life was trying its hardest to pin me to the floor. My version of Avgas was the grind, the movement, the next attempt to climb out of the hole I was in.
Just being near those pilots, near their obsession with altitude and escape, helped me remember that forward motion is its own kind of salvation. They needed sky; I just needed somewhere better than where I was. Even if I didn’t know the destination, the instinct was the same: keep moving, keep climbing, keep believing that the next turn, the next opportunity, the next metre of gained altitude might bring clarity.
I sat there in Ian’s slipstream, not quite part of their world but close enough to feel the heat of ambition again. Close enough to be reminded that stagnation is poison, and that sometimes being near people who still believe in lift, even when your own life feels permanently grounded, is enough to stop you from sinking altogether.
Just being near movement helps when you’re stuck. And in those days, surrounded by machines designed to rise, and men addicted to the feeling of rising, I started to remember what rising felt like, too.
That drive between Sackville and Bankstown became my thinking time. Not that I always liked the thoughts I found there. Plenty of them started with What the hell happened? and ended with What do I do now? But even in the darkest frame of mind, forward motion creates its own kind of hope. Small, maybe. Fragile. But real.
And then there were the moments that punched through all the business noise and hit where I lived, my boys. The first time Julian had a bad injury, the kind that makes every father feel suddenly made of glass, I felt a level of panic that not even bankruptcy had triggered. But nothing compares to the night his fever hit 104 degrees. That number is carved into my memory forever.
I remember scooping him up, feeling the heat radiating off him, whispering to him even though I didn’t know what to say. I drove like a man on a mission, trying to time the arrival at the ferry perfectly. The river that night was pitch black, the kind of dark that swallows headlights. The ferry captain didn’t know he was part of a small life-and-death drama, and to him it was another run across the river. But for me, it was the longest crossing of my life. Every minute felt stolen. Every breath was a negotiation with the universe: Not him. Take my pride. Take my money. Take anything. Just not him.
He came through it. Kids are resilient in ways adults forget. But I didn’t bounce back as easily. That night left a scar. It taught me that even broken, unanchored, living out of a caravan, I was still the only person my boys had to run to in their moments of fear. And that meant I had to find a way to stand up again.
Before the caravan there had been couches. Spare rooms. Mates with open doors and open hearts, at first. People show up in the crisis phase; it makes them feel helpful. But recovery is messy and takes too long, and most of them drifted away once the “event” was over. I don’t carry bitterness about that now, but back then it felt like being quietly erased. Everyone except Lawrie Rose. Lawrie stayed close, stayed present, didn’t flinch from the ugliness of it. He was a constant when everything else wobbled.
And in the middle of all this rebuilding, I kept circling back to my boys. I needed more time with them. I needed purpose that wasn’t just about clawing my way out of financial ruin. So I threw myself into anything that connected me to their world, Cubs, the school council, eventually the presidency of that council, and acting District Leader for the Cub Scouts. People thought it was community-minded or ambitious. But really, it was a man fighting for relevance in the lives of his children.
And it wasn’t enough just to show up. Anyone can stand on the sidelines and tick the box marked “involved.” I wanted to be more than that. I wanted to be the father they saw leading from the front, not apologising from behind. So I didn’t just join Cubs, I trained, studied, learned how to run programs, how to manage kids, how to coordinate adults who didn’t always want to be coordinated. I didn’t just sit on the school council, worked my way into the presidency, not because I craved a title, but because the higher I stood in that structure, the more influence I had in shaping their school environment, the more excuses I had to be present, to be seen, to matter.
When life gives you restricted access to your children, you learn to make the most of every narrow window. You become strategic about it. You learn how to turn scraps of time into meaningful moments. And if that meant becoming the best Cub leader I could be, or the most diligent council president they’d ever had, then that’s what I was going to do. Not because community service was noble, though it was, but because being excellent at something in their world felt like the only place I still had control. The courtroom had rules. The custody orders had rules. But in Cubs and school committees, I could build something, lead something, contribute something that couldn’t be taken away or limited to alternate weekends.
It was never about badges or agendas or minutes of meetings. It was about two boys who needed to know their father wasn’t fading into the background, no matter how small life had become elsewhere. I couldn’t give them a mansion or holidays or a life without complications, but I could give them a father who showed up fully, right inside the boundaries I’d been handed, and then worked like hell to excel within them.
But even that came with obstacles. Their mother made sure everything was just difficult enough to remind me of my place. Christmases were shifted. Phone calls were “missed.” Pickups were arranged in places that required hours of driving, as if love needed fuel receipts to be proved genuine. I made the drives. I jumped through every hoop. I learned that fatherhood after separation isn’t a right, it’s a battle fought in kilometres and patience.
Some nights, lying in that caravan after another skirmish with life, I wondered if the small flame inside me was hope or just delusion. The pessimist in me was convinced the light at the end of the tunnel was a freight train. The optimist, stupidly loyal, eternally persistent, kept insisting it wasn’t.
And slowly, step by step, I realised the way back wasn’t dramatic or clean. It was small things. A healthy boy after a terrifying fever. A mate who didn’t vanish. A ferry that arrived exactly when I needed it. A day at school where one of the boys grabbed my hand without thinking twice. A meeting where somebody looked at me and saw potential again instead of failure.
Those were the stepping stones. They didn’t look like much, in fact, half the time they didn’t look like anything at all. A ferry turning up when it said it would. Ian having a spare desk. The boys bouncing back from fevers and accidents. A Cub uniform that meant I had a legitimate reason to stand beside them. None of it seemed remarkable in the moment, but somehow each one held my weight long enough to stop me sliding backwards.
And while all that was happening, there was this whole other thing running underneath everything, joint custody. The court said we had it, as if two signatures on a set of parenting orders magically created a level playing field. On paper, it all made sense. Equal this, equal that. Shared responsibility. Shared decisions. Shared time.
But anyone who has ever lived it knows the difference between what the court imagines and what actually happens when one parent decides to quietly sandbag the process. It wasn’t loud or dramatic. No big scenes. Just the little stuff, the phone calls that never seemed to be picked up when they were supposed to be, the Christmas pickups arranged hours away for reasons that never quite made sense, the “Oh, the boys aren’t here right now” messages that always arrived exactly when the orders said they should be. One thing on its own? Harmless. All of them together? You feel it. Deep.
The court’s version of joint custody was a neat paragraph in a legal document. My version was waiting in empty carparks and driving through the night because that was the only way to stay in the story.
So I adapted. I drove the distance. I showed up early. I waited longer than any reasonable person probably should’ve. I called again. And again. Not because I enjoyed the fight, but because that was the cost of being in their lives. It wasn’t justice, it was persistence.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that, the ferry runs, the glandular fever, the exhaustion, the Council meetings, the Cub nights, the pilots chasing altitude, the boys running into my arms on the good days, something shifted. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just a tiny internal click, like the difference between sinking and floating.
I didn’t even notice it at first. You rarely do. You just suddenly realise that the noise inside your head isn’t panic anymore, it’s space. And that maybe, just maybe, you’re not living hour to hour trying not to fall apart. Maybe you’re… planning again. Thinking about next week instead of surviving the next ten minutes.
It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t polished. But it was new.
I wasn’t whole, not even close. My life still felt like it had been taped together with borrowed goodwill and cheap determination. But I wasn’t drowning either. And sometimes that really is the moment everything turns, the breath where your head pops above the surface and you realise you can actually stay there.
That was the beginning of the incline. Not a miracle recovery, nothing anyone else would’ve noticed. Just the sense that I could move forward, even if it was slow, even if it was messy, even if I hadn’t the faintest idea where the path actually led.
But I was moving. And after everything that had happened, that was enough to feel like hope.
Author
