OUT OF VOICE REACH

A life spent trying to belong

Chapter 6 – No Time to Be Local

There is a particular kind of childhood that belongs to children who live in town. It is not necessarily better, though as a boy I probably thought it was, because from the outside it looked as though everything important happened within walking distance of their front gates. They could drift from one house to another, knock about after school, ride bikes until dark, and know who was doing what before anyone had to explain it. They belonged to the small daily traffic of the place, the casual movement of children in and out of each other’s lives.

I did not have that sort of childhood. Mine had more miles in it, more waiting, more planning, and more time looking through windows at roads unrolling in front of me. Seven miles from town was not the end of the earth, but it was far enough for spontaneity to become a luxury and for ordinary friendship to require organisation. You did not just wander down the street to see who was about, because there was no street to wander down and no cluster of houses close enough for a shouted invitation.

That was the first price, though I did not have the language for it then. The second price came later, when the very things that gave me a way into the world also took me away from the simple business of being local. Academic ability, sport, riding, representative teams, training, travel, and the constant push to be better all gave me purpose, and often gave me recognition. They also made sure I was forever on the move, forever arriving somewhere, forever leaving somewhere else before I had properly settled into it.

People tend to look at childhood achievement as though it sits neatly in a scrapbook. There is the ribbon, the certificate, the team photograph, the story told later with a bit of family pride attached to it. What is harder to see is the cost wrapped around it, especially for a child already living at a distance from the centre of things. Each success opened a door, but nearly every door seemed to lead to another road, another trip, another test, another reminder that belonging was still conditional.

I suppose that sounds ungrateful, and that is one of the traps in writing about it. I was not ungrateful for the chances I had, nor for the abilities that helped me make use of them. There was pride in doing well, and there was relief in discovering that I could compete beyond the boundaries of the little world I came from. But pride and relief do not cancel out loneliness, and achievement does not always make a boy feel known.

Sport, in particular, gave me a language I understood before I understood much else about people. In a small school, being useful mattered. If you could run, catch, bowl, tackle, ride, or simply put your body where it was needed, there was a place for you, even if that place only lasted for the length of a game. It was not the warmest form of belonging, but it was clear, and there was comfort in clarity.

At school, brains could be a problem. Doing well academically gave me a kind of standing, but it also marked me out in ways that were not always helpful. There is no quicker way for a country boy to attract suspicion than to look as though lessons come too easily, particularly when he is already not quite from town and not quite part of the settled order of the playground. Being good at schoolwork was useful, but it was not always socially useful.

Sport was different because it looked less like showing off and more like service. You could be forgiven for being good if the team benefited from it. A goal, a run, a wicket, a tackle, or a ribbon had a practical value that other children could understand, even if they still kept you at arm’s length afterwards. It meant that for a while I could belong without having to explain myself.

The trouble was that belonging through excellence is a hungry arrangement. It never lets you rest for long, because the minute you are accepted for being good, you begin to suspect you will only remain accepted if you keep being good. That is not something a child sits down and works out like a sum, but it seeps into you all the same. You learn that effort is not just about improving, but about staying permitted.

Once representative sport entered the picture, the distance stretched again. Cricket in the Southern Tablelands, rugby league in Western Division, riding connected to the life of a grazing property, and all the other bits and pieces that came with being handy enough at enough things were not just activities. They were departures. They meant travelling away from the place I was trying to belong to in order to earn honours that made me even less local when I returned.

There is a strange irony in wearing a representative jumper. It is supposed to say that you belong to something bigger, and in one sense it does. You stand among boys from other towns and schools, and for a short time the old labels are replaced by the new one stitched or printed on your back. Yet when you come home, that same jumper can make you more separate than before, because now you have been seen to step outside the circle.

I do not want to make that sound grander than it was. We were not professional athletes with managers and programs and media attention, just boys being carted about to play games and prove ourselves against other boys. Still, in a small world, little distinctions can cast long shadows. To be chosen was to be noticed, and to be noticed was not always the same as being liked.

Training was part of it, of course. Training is an admirable word when adults use it, because it suggests discipline, improvement, and character. To a child, it also means time taken from other things, ordinary things, the unrecorded things that make up a childhood no one writes articles about. It means afternoons that might have been spent knocking about becoming afternoons shaped by drills, practice, travel, and expectation.

There were always bags to pack, gear to find, boots to clean, animals to consider, distances to cover, and adults trying to fit children’s ambitions into the already crowded life of a farm. Nothing happened without effort from someone. A town child might have walked to a ground or been dropped around the corner, but for us there was usually a journey attached, and a journey in the country is never just the time it takes on a clock.

The road itself became part of the training. Long before I was old enough to understand what it was doing to me, I was learning to sit with anticipation and silence. I watched paddocks slide past, fences straighten and disappear, gates flash by, and the same stretches of country become familiar in the way only repeated travel can make them familiar. The distances were not dramatic to the adults, because adults in the bush accept miles as part of life, but to a child they quietly add up.

Travel also changes the way time feels. When so much of your life is measured by getting to and from things, the event itself can become only the middle of a much larger experience. A game might last an hour, but the day belonged to the road, the waiting, the early start, the late return, and the tiredness that settled in afterwards. The achievement, if it came, was only one small part of the price paid for being there.

I think about my siblings in this part of the story, because no childhood happens alone even when loneliness is one of its main features. Brothers and sisters can share a house, a farm, parents, paddocks, chores, meals, and long roads, yet still grow up carrying different versions of the same place. My striving was not only mine in its consequences. It affected the rhythm around me, the family arrangements, and the way attention and inconvenience moved through the household.

That is not an easy thing to admit, because as children we are not always generous historians of each other. Each of us sees the family from our own small position, noticing what we miss out on and often failing to see what others carry. If one child’s sport, school, travel, or training takes up time and energy, the others feel it, whether anyone says so or not. If one child is praised for achievement, the one child is praised for achievement, the others have to find their own space beside it.

I do not pretend I understood that then. As a boy, I was too busy trying to keep my place to properly consider what my efforts cost anyone else. I was trying to be good enough, and that can make a person narrow without meaning to be selfish. The child who is afraid of being outside the circle can become very focused on whatever seems to offer entry.

There is also the quieter comparison that happens among siblings when one is forever being sent here or there, chosen for this or that, or spoken about in terms of promise. It may look like privilege from one angle, and perhaps it was. From another angle, it was pressure dressed up as opportunity, and I suspect every child in the household would have had their own opinion about which side of that equation mattered most. Families rarely experience fairness as a clean thing.

The truth is that excellence can be as disruptive as failure. Failure draws attention because something has gone wrong, but excellence draws attention because something must now be supported, extended, or proven again. A child who is good at things does not necessarily become easier to raise. Sometimes he becomes a timetable, a petrol cost, a conversation, a comparison, and a reason everyone else has to adjust.

I missed a lot of ordinary childhood by being busy trying to earn a more impressive one. That is the sentence I return to, though it still sits awkwardly because it sounds too neat for something that was never neat at the time. Ordinary childhood is not something you value when you are in it, especially if you are the sort of child who thinks ordinary means invisible. Only later do you understand that the ordinary is where belonging often lives.

The ordinary things were small enough to be overlooked. Hanging about after school without needing to catch a bus or meet a ride. Being part of the easy gossip of a town, knowing who had fallen out with whom, who was going where, and what was happening on Saturday without having to be formally told. Having friends close enough that plans could happen by accident. These were not grand privileges, but they were the daily stitches that sew people into a place.

I was often present but not available in that way. Even when I was among other children, there was a sense that I had come from somewhere else and would soon be going somewhere else again. That is a difficult feeling to explain, because it is not the same as being rejected outright. It is more like standing near a fire but never quite getting warm, close enough to see the light on other faces but not close enough to feel it reach yours.

The more I achieved, the more I seemed to live between places. The farm was home, but it was not a place where the social life of childhood could unfold easily. The town was where the school and people were, but I did not quite belong to it. The representative teams gave me a wider identity, but they were temporary by nature, assembled for a purpose and then scattered back to wherever each boy had come from.

Perhaps that is why I learned to value usefulness so highly. Usefulness gave me a passport where belonging would not. If I could contribute, if I could perform, if I could be relied upon, then I had a reason to be there. It did not matter whether I was fully included as long as I could point to a result and say, in effect, that I had earned my patch of ground.

That pattern has followed me further than I care to admit. In work, in business, in community roles, and even in family life, I have often found it easier to be useful than to be at ease. Usefulness is safer because it gives you a task and a measure. Belonging asks for something harder, because it requires you to believe you can remain even when you are not producing, fixing, carrying, earning, arranging, solving, or proving.

As a child, I did not know that was what I was practising. I only knew that being good at things changed how people looked at me, at least for a while. It gave me a way to stand straighter in places where I might otherwise have folded into myself. It gave me pride, and pride mattered, because pride can be a kind of temporary shelter when you are not sure where else to stand.

But pride is not rest. Pride requires maintenance, and a boy who depends on it learns to keep moving. There is always another match, another trial, another mark, another chance to be measured, and another possibility of being found wanting. The child who succeeds can become just as frightened of failure as the child who never wins, because success gives him more to lose.

I sometimes wonder what sort of boy I would have been if I had been allowed, or had allowed myself, to be more ordinary. Perhaps I would have been happier, though that is too easy a claim to make from the safety of later years. Perhaps I would simply have found another way to feel separate, because distance had already taught me its habits. Still, there is a small grief in imagining the childhood that might have contained more wasting of time.

Wasting time is underrated when you are young. Adults often treat it as idleness, but for children it is where friendships loosen their belts and become comfortable. It is where you learn the small language of a group, the jokes that do not need explaining, the silences that do not feel awkward, the unplanned afternoons that turn acquaintances into mates. I had pieces of that, certainly, but never enough to feel fully fluent.

Instead, I learned the language of preparation. I learned to be ready, to watch the clock, to understand that distance had to be allowed for and that opportunities could not be treated casually. I learned that to be chosen meant obligations followed quickly behind. There was not much romance in it, despite the way sporting stories are sometimes told later with the rough edges rubbed smooth.

The missed ordinary childhood was not all sadness. There were moments of joy, excitement, competition, laughter, and the peculiar happiness of doing something well with your body before age teaches you how temporary that gift is. There were grounds, tracks, paddocks, teams, and journeys that I can still feel in the bones of memory. It would be dishonest to pretend it was only loss.

Yet it would be just as dishonest to pretend it was only opportunity. Childhood excellence is often praised by adults who have forgotten how heavy adult expectation can feel when carried by small shoulders. They see talent and want it developed, which is understandable. They see a child doing well and assume he must therefore be all right, which is more dangerous.

Being good at things can hide a great deal. It can hide loneliness because people mistake performance for confidence. It can hide fear because effort looks like ambition. It can hide confusion because results provide a simple story everyone else can understand. A boy who is winning, passing, being selected, or being praised is not always asked whether he is happy.

I do not remember anyone being cruel about it in any organised way. That is important, because the story is not one of villains lining the road, preventing me from belonging. It was more ordinary than that, and perhaps more common because of it. People simply formed their circles, as people do, and I was often close enough to see them but not quite part of the easy centre.

There were related children around me at primary school, and later there were teams and classmates and people who knew my name. On paper, that should have been enough. But relationship by blood, proximity, school, or sport does not automatically become belonging. You can be connected to people and still feel as though you are standing at the edge of the photograph, visible but not central.

The representative honours complicated that feeling rather than solving it. They proved I could measure up elsewhere, but they did not necessarily make me more settled at home. In some ways they made the gap more obvious, because I could travel away and be valued for what I did, then return to the same quiet uncertainty about where I fitted. The applause, if there was any, did not travel home with me in a form I could live on.

I think that is one of the great misunderstandings about achievement. People assume recognition feeds the same hunger as belonging, but it does not. Recognition says, “We see what you can do.” Belonging says, “You can stay when there is nothing left to prove.” I had plenty of practice at the first and not enough confidence in the second.

The phrase “no time to be local” carries more truth than I first realised. It is not only about being physically absent, though there was plenty of that. It is about missing the slow accumulation by which a child becomes part of the background of a place. Localness is not declared; it is absorbed through repetition, through being there for things that do not matter until, later, you discover they mattered very much.

I was often away chasing the things that seemed to matter. Selection mattered, marks mattered, training mattered, improvement mattered, and being seen to make use of whatever ability I had mattered. Somewhere in that pursuit, the smaller forms of belonging slipped past me. No one stole them, and no one set out to deny them to me. They were simply difficult to reach from where I stood, and I was usually too busy striving to notice what was being traded.

That trade has become clearer on the edge of retirement. When the noise of work and obligation starts to thin, you begin to hear older echoes more plainly. The boy on the road to school, the boy travelling to play, the boy trying to be good enough, and the man still trying to be useful are not separate people. They are versions of the same question, asked in different paddocks and offices and seasons of life.

The question is not whether excellence was worth it. Life does not give us clean ledgers like that, despite all my years spent working with figures. The achievements brought confidence, memories, opportunities, and a sense that I could push beyond the boundaries of where I began. They also brought pressure, separation, and a habit of measuring my right to belong by what I could deliver.

I can see now that the ordinary childhood I missed was not empty of value simply because it did not come with ribbons or representative jumpers. It may have been the very thing I needed most, though I doubt I would have recognised it at the time. I wanted proof that I was worth noticing, and the world kept offering me ways to prove it. What I needed, perhaps, was a place where proof was not required.

That is not a complaint so much as a reckoning. We all come from somewhere, and we all carry the logic of that place with us until we finally stop long enough to question it. I came from distance, from roads, from effort, from the belief that being better might help me cross the gap. It did help, in some ways, but it also taught me to keep reaching long after my arms were tired.

The missed ordinary childhood cannot be recovered, and there is no sense pretending otherwise. You do not get to go back and waste afternoons properly, or stand in the casual centre of a town that has already moved on, or become the sort of boy who belonged because he was simply always there. But you can look back without turning everything into either triumph or grievance. You can admit that the same road that carried you towards opportunity also carried you away from something quieter.

Perhaps that is where this chapter lands, not in regret exactly, but in recognition. I was a boy with ability, distance, siblings, family rhythms, sport, school, and a restless need to be worthy of a place. I had no time to be local because I was too busy trying to be good enough to belong somewhere larger. Only now do I wonder whether the belonging I was chasing might have been hidden in the ordinary life I kept leaving behind.