A.A.S.A, A.C.I.S, A.A.I.M
PUBLIC ACCOUNTANT
Remember the Australian Tax Office's simple "S" form for wage and salary earners? Or the equally simple forms for trusts, businesses, and companies? Simple two-page forms: half an hour to fill in the blanks, and you were done for the year!
Things have become so much more complicated since then. No wonder that even the smallest town has a resident accountant even before it gets a Domino's Pizza, McDonald's, or - Heaven forbid! - Dan Murphy's. Every time I see one of those small-town accountants displaying their trade, I keep thinking to myself, "There but for the grace of God ..."
There was a time when I would've thought it the pinnacle of my career to run my own accounting practice, but the fickle finger of fate pointed me in a different direction which saved me from sitting behind the same desk and looking out the same window for the next thirty-odd years.
Instead, I sat at hundreds of different desks and looked out of hundreds of different windows, often not even long enough to use the toilet in the days before liquid lunches worked like a diuretic on my bladder.
The above signage hung over one of those small-town accounting offices. It belonged to a friend from my Bougainville days who, after having left New Guinea and travelling down the east coast of Australia, came to this little coastal town and said, "This reminds me so much of Bougainville", and settled down to open his own accounting practice.
His wife opened a shoe shop, which was just as well because his own office, squeezed in between a delicatessen and a laundromat, catered mainly to cow cockies who needed his help with the filling-in of their unemployment forms, which alone would never have fed his family. Years later, having barely recovered the cost of the signage above the door, he left his office and his family and bummed around Australia.
When I last heard from him several years ago, he'd just moved from a bedsitter in Cairns to another one in Port Douglas, and already thought of moving on again. I guess he was trying to make up for all that time lost while he had filled in unemployment forms for those cow cockies.
"There but for the grace of God ..."
