The Long Way Home - Chapter 17 - Gladstone Day 15

There’s fitting in and there is fitting in. 

I struggle to “fit in”. There has always been compromise from the “me”. 

There is no chance to see the “me”. Life takes you into arenas where compromise is the norm not the exception. While my niche at school was the closest, but even then with my perceived prowess with the brain and the horse, I was different to everyone else.

Country kids, true country kids, those on farms seeing contact with the outside world only from time to time are a different bunch. Many are packed off to boarding school. Some, like us, have contact only in the form of the 9,00am to 3.00pm school day and the bus (and other) daily trip to get there.

That doesn’t make us special – just different to the ones who walk to school along with the mates they hang out with day after day, having peers to interact with 24/7.

There is a solitude to us. We need to formulate our own reality, our own sense of purpose. Many of us, like myself and my mate Tony, learned to wander with either a pack of dogs or a  a high powered rifle strapped to our shoulders in search of vermin to eradicate, with a fox pelt worth upwards of $30 the winter wandering is at least profitable – well a bit more than self sustaining.

The “idyllic” times of childhood then turn to those times when survival through the seeking of our own way, comes to the fore. My mate Tony left high school in year 10 and decided the family farm was the way forward. For me the potential association with my father was not a possibility.

His temper borne out of years of fighting the land and his father were too much for me and as such I needed to find “my own way”. His education, to year 6 in terms of formal schooling, was more than enough for his chosen vocation. 

He was not dumb by any statndards, his natural deductive ability and common sense approach were more than enough for his chosen vocation. That plus the pressure on him to replace other family members “lost” to wars and the like, let alone the travel difficulties involved curtailed any chance of a secondary education. My father and his siblings travelled to school by horse and buggy, across the hill to Pudman Creek School. That school did not exist by the time I was shuffled off with cousin Daryl, living with us at the time, to get us out from under mum’s feet late in the school year.

Even though we started late in term 3 as it was then, I spent only that term in kindergarten progressing into year 1 in the next year having only experienced 3 months in school the previous one. Rote learning rituals made it easy to progress through primary school. Starting with eight in Kindergarten, if it wasn’t for the addition of a new headmasters son in year 5, I would have been the only one to progress to high school for Rye Park Public.

Physical prowess, which allowed me to associate and compete with the older kids in inter school visits and perform well at district athletics carnivals, saw a certain status bestowed.

At high school, the stigma of being a satellite school student, saw me and my closer mates outcast from the “cool” crowd. It didn’t help that the collective academic prowess of the four of us probably outstripped the entire remaining male cohort of our year. The splitting of the year between 1X and 1Y and packing most of the “country” kids in 1Y did not assist in the integration.

At work in the shearing sheds, there was the hazing right of passage. Here though as long as you performed adequately you were treated like an equal. Normally a rouse handles four to six shearers, keeping the wool away from the shearer’s way, penning up and generally keeping the “board” clean. My first shed there was supposed to be two of us, but the other guy did not turn up leaving me to a board of eight shearers. 

At the end of the two weeks at Brooklands, not only had I earned the respect of the other members of the team, we moved on to Red Hill, a similar shed, owned by the same family as Brooklands, not seeking to replace the missing rouse about. The shearers “looked after” me, keeping output at a level happy for the “cockie” (the owner) but still not killing me on the board.

There was the afternoon a silly table hand thought he would be funny and called “more wool”. This is effectively a slur on the shearers output. What happened in the next hour of the 2 hour shift had to be seen to be believed.

Like I said, to that point the sheares had been looking after the lone rouse about. This meant each shearer was rated for about 100 – 150 sheep per day and at this level life was fast but manageable. Spurred on by the slur the rate effectively doubled. There was wool everywhere.

Where normally the table team would be no more than five minutes behind the shearers to the dinner table. This day we finally got to a cold dinner about an hour after the bell. 

We threw the offending slurrer into the dam on our way to dinner.

The shearers at the end of the shed all bought me a beer to congratulate me on the effort in keeping up.

But shearing was not for me and at 17 I found myself in Sydney in an accounting firm. The only person I really knew had just left for Goulburn Teachers College. Work was easy, you simply turned up and did what you were told and most nights were taken up with TAFE.

The weekends were, outside of the expectations around a family of Salvation Army Officers, tough until my boss suggested they were short in the local cricket team and I could join them. Day 1 was a day of our bowlers being dispatched to all parts of the ground. Bruce, boss and captain of the team was unwilling to utilise my bowling, probably because I was unregistered. I took a couple of catches in the slips and waited for my chance to bat the next week.

Being in the eleven batting was seen as a must and not going to be as much a deal as bowling. I talked Bruce into letting me bat number four, the place I liked to bat for Rye Park. When the first innings was finished I was not out 13 and the total wasnt many more. Sent back in and facing a young quick bowler hellbent on having his team secure a premiership, I set about denying them. Again “carrying the bat” from my point of entry I managed 35 before I ran out of partners.

There would be no issue with me participating in that team next year. Other than Bruce most of the players were in their early twenties, but still several years older than me. So I had some “friends” but not for another six months until cricket started again.

In that period I remained the junior at work. Phil would come home from Goulburn now and again. There were his mates I would meet, and one Tarras became quite a friend. Back then you could take a rifle on the train from Toongabbie to the city and then on the bus to Dee Why without question, as he did to join me on a trip to Mt Buffalo for a shooting weekend.

As I started as a junior at the start of a year so every year the firm took on more staff. In time my seniority was endured. At Primary School there was a comprehension regime called SRA and as you progressed to the harder versions the last question always stated “Implied by not stated…”. In the world of accounting it is always implied but not stated young accountants aspire to having their own practice. Whether that means “buying in” to the firm at which they are or heading out on their own to hang up their own shingle, it is more than an expectation of the progression. If not, a firm stint with a chartered firm is often seen as a must be course of action for those looking for commercial management appointments.

At Ruwald & Evans no person in my period of employment was ever raised or offered partnership as far as I am aware. Some went on to open their own practices, others moved into the commercial sector. The firm was never strict on educational status. 

Normally chartered firms only ever employed degree educated staff or those looking to achieve it but this firm was apparently different.  I was certainly not the first one to go the TAFE route. 

One of the “senior” staff was Colin Waller, a man who could talk “the leg off a chair”. Born in South Hurstville it was rumored he walked along the main street of South Hurstville, returning with every business as clients. With no completed formal accounting education behind him, the experience gained at Ruwald & Evans had given him enough ammunition to talk the talk. His client base was significant and full of celebrities. 

A Manly supporter in the Rugby League, many of the players, Graham Eadie, Terry Randall and the like would pass through the doors. Colin liked to use me as his support staff and I liked to listen to how he dealt with clients. Obviously stemming from the ideals of the partners, his attention to what was right as opposed to what might be termed correct impressed those around him. There were at times the odd argument/debate with the partners over claims made in returns, but invariably with my assistance any angst raised by the Australian Taxation Office was thwarted by a well worded objection.

Still a “brash” junior after some three years with the frim, my prowess with the written word saw me not only record an almost perfect score in the final taxation module exam which in turn got me my tax agents certificate, but offers to contribute to the firm’s annual conference and later place an article in the Taxation Institute of Australia publication, I was looked at as second class accountant without a degree.

Senior partner George Evans, on the board of admissions for the Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICA) at the time tried to “break the mold” of admissions to the ICA Professional Year, to open it to applicants like me without joy. I was sent to junior ICA conferences, one in particular where, grouped with other attendees, swamped a competition which ran for the entire conference.

I leant very quickly about the misnomer of the establishment, their tenuous grip on reality and in Colin;s words, in great need of a good dose of a degree in gutter technology. Certainly able to hold my own in supposedly higher company, I just went about it.

After the TAFE course finished I was encouraged along the degree plan. Not wanting to maintain the loss of my nights which had curtailed any chance of playing football or pursuing grade cricket, I took on a degree by correspondence. 

But I did not need the degree. The tax agent’s certificate is all you need to open the doors and do the work of the accountant. I finalised the obtaining of the degree but it was a struggle.

One day Colin came to me and told me of his decision to leave Ruwald & Evans, but unlike me he did not have a tax agent’s certificate, meaning he could not legally charge a fee for preparation of tax returns. His plan was to pay someone like me to review the returns and sign as the tax agent. I had something he wanted and needed.

Much like the cricket team, it wasn’t me, it was what I had, either talent or a piece of paper, that made me of more interest. There was an expectation that my involvement was all but expected. Whilst certainly able to say no, for someone so much wanting to fit in, it was an avenue.

Much of what was to happen next centred around my inability to say no.