OUT OF VOICE REACH

A life spent trying to belong

Chapter 3 — Better

There is a strange thing that happens when something comes easily to a child. Adults tend to call it a gift, as though it arrives wrapped and labelled, but children are much more likely to experience it as another way of being separated from the mob.

I do not remember deciding to be good at school. I do not remember making some noble commitment to study, apply myself, keep my head down and become the sort of child whose report cards were carried home with a mixture of pride and dread. It seemed to happen before I had any say in it, like being born on a property seven miles from the nearest settlement and out of voice reach of the nearest neighbour. You did not choose the distance, you simply learned to live inside it.

In those early school years, the work itself rarely frightened me. Reading, sums, spelling, remembering facts and putting them back in the right order seemed to suit the shape of my mind. I could sit with a task and make sense of it, and there was comfort in that because a page was less complicated than a schoolyard. A page did not decide whether you were one of them, did not whisper because you had come in from an outlying place, and did not change the rules just when you thought you had worked them out.

The trouble was that doing well did not make me less different. In some ways, it printed the difference more clearly, as though every good mark was another sign hung around my neck saying that I was not quite like the rest. I have often thought since that children are not cruel because they understand difference too deeply, but because they sense it before they can name it. They may not know why someone makes them uncomfortable, but they know how to test the edges of it.

At home, school results were not greeted with the sort of celebration that would have made a child feel safely wonderful. There was pride, certainly, but there was also expectation, and expectation has a way of swallowing praise before it gets to the child who needs it. The line that stayed with me was not a cheer or a slap on the back, but the question that followed something close to perfection: where are the other two marks? It was probably not meant to wound, and I doubt it was delivered with any grand cruelty. Still, children do not always remember what adults meant; they remember where the words landed.

That question became part of the machinery inside me. It taught me that doing well was not quite enough, because there was always some smaller failure hiding inside the success. Ninety-eight was not ninety-eight. It was the two that got away, the two that had to be explained, recovered, made up for next time. That is a hard lesson for a child because it looks like encouragement from the outside, but it feels like a debt from the inside.

I sometimes wonder whether that was where “better” first became dangerous for me. Better was not simply about improvement, and it was certainly not about joy. Better became a sort of ladder you climbed because standing still felt unsafe. It was a way of proving you deserved the place you were occupying, even if nobody had openly told you that your place was under review.

At primary school, I learned that being clever could get you noticed, but being noticed was not the same as being known. There is a great difference between a teacher seeing what you can do and a group of children accepting who you are. One sort of attention can lift you up in the classroom and leave you exposed in the playground. You could answer the question, finish the work, get the mark and still walk outside into a world where none of that bought you a seat in the circle.

The bus ride had already taught me something about circles. You came from somewhere else, even if that somewhere else was only a few miles further down the road. Routes changed, pick-up points shifted, and the geography of belonging seemed to shift with them. I could sit among children who were related to one another, connected by cousins, farms, fences, marriages, shared weekends and stories that had started before I arrived. I could know their names and still feel as though I had joined a conversation halfway through and missed the part that mattered.

School work was clean by comparison. There was a beginning, a middle and an answer, and even when the answer was wrong, at least the wrongness could be corrected. Belonging was not like that. Belonging had no answer sheet, no margin note, no teacher leaning over to say, “Nearly there, just carry the one.” You could try harder and still not know whether you were getting closer.

That is where sport entered the story, not as some glorious boyhood salvation, but as a partial refuge. Sport gave me something schoolwork could not, because in sport usefulness was visible. You could run faster, tackle harder, bat longer, ride better, throw straighter, and for a while the question of whether you belonged became less abstract. A team did not always love you, but it could need you, and for a boy standing slightly outside the circle, being needed could feel close enough.

I do not want to overstate it. Sport was not a magic gate that opened and welcomed me into a world of easy mateship and lifelong certainty. It was more like a gap in the fence where, for a while, I could squeeze through. On the field or the pitch or in the saddle, the old questions quietened because there was something immediate to do. You did not have to explain where you came from while the ball was in play. You did not have to justify the long road to school when a run had to be made, a tackle had to be completed or a horse had to be handled.

There was relief in the physicality of it. The body could answer questions the mouth could not. A good innings, a strong run, a clean tackle or the simple ability to stay on and keep going seemed to speak in a language that boys understood more easily than feelings. I was not necessarily one of them, but I could be useful to them, and in the currency of childhood that mattered. It was not love, but it was something you could spend for a while.

The difficulty was that sport also carried the same trap as school. If belonging came through being good, then you had to keep being good to keep the belonging. You were not accepted once and for all; you were accepted on performance, and performance has a terrible habit of resetting the next morning. Yesterday’s runs did not guarantee tomorrow’s place. Yesterday’s representative honour did not stop someone deciding you were getting above yourself.

That phrase, or the feeling behind it, hovered around much of childhood. Getting above yourself was one of the great rural warnings, a social brake applied whenever someone looked as though they might be moving beyond their allotted space. It was rarely said with the elegance of a formal accusation. It came through a look, a joke, a sideways remark, the small cut of being reminded that success did not make you special. The strange thing was that I did not feel special. Most of the time I felt the opposite, but achievement had a way of making that harder to explain.

There is a loneliness in being praised for something that is also used against you. Teachers could value the schoolwork, selectors could value the performance, and adults could nod with approval at the result. Yet among children, the same things could become evidence for the prosecution. You were the brain, the show-off, the try-hard, the one who thought he was better. It did not matter that inside you may have been trying to feel equal. Outside, the scoreboard told a different story.

I think that is why the word “better” has always carried two meanings for me. On one hand, it meant improvement, effort, discipline and the satisfaction of doing something properly. On the other hand, it meant danger, because being better at something could make you easier to resent. It could lift you just high enough for others to see you clearly, but not close enough for them to understand what they were looking at.

Children from towns sometimes carry their own forms of insecurity, and I know enough now not to romanticise anyone else’s childhood. Still, there was a particular feeling attached to coming in from outside, from a grazing property where distance was part of the family furniture. The town children seemed to know the map in ways I did not. They knew who belonged to whom, who could say what, whose family had history, whose cousins mattered, whose jokes were safe to laugh at and whose were not. I was learning all of that while also trying not to look as though I was learning it.

The related children were perhaps the most confusing part. You would think bloodlines and family connections might soften the edge, but they did not automatically make me one of them. Kinship can be a door, but it can also be a window. You can see through it, know what is inside, recognise the faces and still not quite be invited to sit down. I was near enough to understand what I was missing, which may have made the missing sharper.

Academic ease gave me a way to survive that uncertainty. When you are not sure where you stand with people, it is tempting to stand where you are strongest. I could not control the schoolyard, but I could control the work. I could not make a group of children decide I was one of them, but I could make sure the page in front of me was right. That sort of control is comforting at first, then quietly addictive.

The problem with being competent early is that people begin to treat competence as your natural state. They forget that a child who appears capable may still be frightened, lonely or unsure. They see the marks and assume the confidence follows. They see the performance and assume the boy underneath must be enjoying the ride. In truth, competence can be one of the better disguises. It allows a child to look sorted while learning to hide the parts of himself that are not.

I became very good at looking as though I knew what I was doing. That is not the same thing as knowing where I fitted. The two can be easily confused by adults because adults like evidence, and marks and ribbons and selections are evidence they can understand. Loneliness, on the other hand, leaves very poor records. It does not appear on report cards unless it has already turned into behaviour somebody wants to correct.

I was not a miserable child in the simple sense. That would be too neat, and my life has never suited neatness. There were good days, funny moments, small triumphs, and the ordinary pleasures of childhood that came and went without needing a grand emotional explanation. I could laugh, compete, enjoy the bush, love the animals, get filthy, chase a ball and feel the thrill of doing something well. The ache was not always loud. It was more like a low wind under the door, present enough to be felt, easy enough for others to miss.

Looking back, I can see how early I learned to split myself. There was the boy who did well, the boy who could be relied upon, the boy who could compete and produce and answer the question. Then there was the boy who wondered why none of it quite turned into ease. The first boy was useful. The second boy was inconvenient, so I kept him mostly to myself.

That split followed me further than I realised. It is one thing to say that as an adult, sitting near retirement and looking back with the benefit of age, but it is another to admit how much of life was built from those early materials. Achievement became not merely something I enjoyed, but something I reached for whenever belonging felt uncertain. Work, business, community roles, family obligations, problem solving, fixing things, carrying things for others, so much of it can be traced back to that child who discovered that being useful was the closest available substitute for being embraced.

Sport offered a cleaner version of usefulness because it happened in public and had an ending. A game finished, a result was known, and for a little while the judgment had shape. You could be disappointed, but at least you knew what had happened. Life outside the boundary was more complicated. There, the game kept going after the whistle, and the rules were often written by people who did not know they were writing them.

The representative honours that came later were built from this same strange foundation. Cricket in one district, rugby league in another, horse riding carrying its own rural currency, and the slow gathering of achievements that should have made a boy feel solid. They did not fail entirely. I would be lying if I said there was no pride in them. There is pleasure in being chosen, in pulling on a jumper, in knowing that for once the road from the farm has delivered you somewhere others recognise. But pride and comfort are not the same thing.

Being selected can be another way of being separated. It marks you out, lifts you into view and quietly asks what you will do next. The honour that should settle something often unsettles it instead, because now there is a new level where you must prove yourself again. Area, state, district, town, school, team, each word sounds like arrival until you discover it is also a doorway to another room where you are once more the outsider. You do not get to keep belonging as a possession. You have to keep earning it, and even then it may only be on loan.

That is why I resist writing those years as a success story. The facts might tempt the reader in that direction, and I understand why. A boy from a grazing property, long bus rides, good marks, sporting ability, representative honours, the rough shape of a rural coming-of-age tale. It would be easy to sand the edges and make it all sound character-building, as though distance and exclusion were simply the price of later resilience. I am wary of that sort of writing because it makes pain behave too well.

Some of it did build character, I suppose, but character is not always built gently. Sometimes it is built like a fence in hard country, post by post, with blisters, bad language and the knowledge that the ground is not interested in your feelings. I learned discipline, endurance, observation and the value of doing things properly. I also learned to measure myself harshly, to distrust praise, to keep striving long after the sensible point had passed, and to suspect that any place offered to me could be withdrawn without notice.

The cost of being seen as different is not only that others treat you differently. It is that you begin to watch yourself through their eyes. You start editing before you speak, shrinking where you are strong, exaggerating where you think strength might be useful, and scanning every room for the invisible line between acceptance and rejection. In childhood, that line ran through classrooms, buses, playgrounds and sporting fields. Later it would run through boardrooms, client meetings, committees, clubs and family gatherings.

I do not think I understood any of this then. Children live forward, not backward, and most of the time I simply did what the day required. Get on the bus, go to school, do the work, play the game, come home, do what needed doing, try again tomorrow. There is dignity in that routine, even if there is also sadness. A child does not have to understand the pattern for the pattern to be forming.

What I did understand was that being better gave me moments of air. It gave me a way to breathe when the room felt crowded by people who already knew where they belonged. It gave me a reason to be included, even briefly, and at that age briefly can feel like a feast. A good mark, a good game, a good ride, a good performance, each one was a small bridge across a gap I could not name.

But bridges are tiring if you have to build them every day. That may be the part I feel most clearly now, looking back from the edge of full-time retirement. I spent so much of life building bridges through competence that I sometimes forgot to ask whether anyone was walking across from the other side. I became skilled at making myself useful, reliable, productive and necessary, and those are not bad qualities. They have fed families, built businesses, served communities and kept many dark days from collapsing entirely. Yet they can also become a cage if usefulness is the only language in which you believe you are allowed to be loved.

The child on the bus could not have known that. He only knew that school was easier than belonging, and sport was easier than explaining himself. He knew that being good at something could quiet the loneliness for a while, even if it did not cure it. He knew that being seen was better than being invisible, until being seen became another kind of exposure. He knew, in the way children know things without words, that the road from the farm to town was not only measured in miles.

Perhaps that is why “better” never quite satisfied me. Better always pointed beyond itself, toward the next mark, the next match, the next selection, the next obligation, the next proof. It did not say rest here. It said keep going. It said the other two marks are still missing. It said the circle might open next time if you bring enough evidence.

I wish I could say I eventually outgrew that bargain, but that would be too tidy and not entirely true. I carried it with me into adult life, dressed in better clothes and more respectable language. It became professionalism, responsibility, service, drive, work ethic and all the other fine words we use when striving, has learned to comb its hair. Beneath them, there was still a boy trying to make sure he could not be dismissed too easily.

There is no simple blame in that, and I am not interested in turning every childhood bruise into an accusation. The people around me were living their own lives, carrying their own histories, doing what they knew how to do. Country communities could be warm and hard in the same breath. Families could love you and still fail to see the particular shape of your loneliness. Schools could reward you and still leave you exposed. Sport could give you belonging and still demand that you earn it again next Saturday.

What remains, after all these years, is not bitterness so much as recognition. I can see the boy more kindly now than I could when I was him. I can see how hard he tried, how much he wanted to belong without having to ask, and how often he mistook achievement for a doorway that would finally stay open. I can also see the stubbornness that kept him moving, the humour that stopped him from becoming unbearable, and the quiet resilience that formed even when he did not know it was forming.

Being better was never the whole answer. It was a tool, a shield, a passport stamped only for temporary entry. It got me through school days, gave me moments of pride, and allowed me to stand in places I might otherwise never have reached. But it did not solve the deeper ache because the ache was not really about marks, runs, tackles, ribbons or selections. It was about wanting to be known without having to perform first.

That is a hard thing for any child to understand, and perhaps harder still for an adult who has built a life around performance. Retirement asks awkward questions of such a person. When the work slows, when the obligations thin, when the phone does not ring as often and nobody needs the answer quite so urgently, you begin to wonder who is left without the proof. The old schoolyard returns in unexpected ways, not with children and dust and lunch boxes, but with silence, usefulness fading at the edges, and the fear that without achievement you may once again be out of voice reach.

Still, I do not want to end this chapter in sorrow alone. That would betray the boy as much as pretending everything was fine. There was joy in being good at things, and there was pride in finding small places of refuge. Sport did give me something. School did give me something. The long road did give me something too, even if it took decades to understand the gift was mixed with the hurt.

Maybe the truth is that I was not simply trying to be better than others. I was trying to be better enough to be safe, better enough to be included, better enough to quiet the old distance for another day. That is not vanity, though it may have looked like it from the outside. It is a child’s logic, carried too far into a man’s life, but born from a very human hunger.

I began this chapter thinking about academic ease and sport as refuge, but what I keep returning to is the boy in between them. He is sitting at a desk, finishing work before others, not yet knowing that quickness can isolate as much as impress. He is standing on a field, grateful for the simple clarity of a ball coming toward him, a body to move, a task to complete. He is on the bus again, looking out across the country, carrying marks and games and small victories home along the same road that carried him away each morning.

He wanted to be better, yes. More than that, he wanted better to mean he belonged. It never quite did, but it kept him moving, and for a long time moving was the only answer he had.