Index to the full interview series.

The following transcript has been cleaned up slightly and filler removed (errors may remain).

Part 1 - Howard Nielsen Interview

Michael Nielsen: So it's Saturday December 27th in the United States and I think December 28th in Australia. And I'm going to interview my father, Howard Nielsen, about his ne'er-do-well life and crimes. I don't know, Dad, let's see. I have a long list of questions here, which I'll try not to refer to. We might as well start with—actually, I realized I'm not sure I know where you were born. I know you grew up in Monash, but were you actually born in Monash or Barmera or one of those places?

Howard Nielsen: Yeah, born in Barmera, which is a few kilometers away from Monash, and Barmera is on the shores of Lake Bonney. So that's what Barmera is most known for, quite a big lake off the Murray River.

Michael: So is Barmera bigger than Monash then? I mean it's large enough to have a hospital or—I mean were you born in a hospital actually?

Howard: Yeah, yeah, it's got a hospital and a school. Football teams, the sort of trappings of a country town. I don't know how many people there would be. Monash had about 300. I'd imagine Barmera would probably be 1,200 or 1,500 or something like that.

Michael: Okay, so Barmera is probably sort of comparable in size to Samford in fact and Monash is quite a bit smaller. It's almost Croydon size.

Howard: Yeah, pretty much. I think Samford would be a bit bigger in terms of population than Barmera, I haven't kept track of it over the years. So I don't know what it was then. But the biggest other town close was Berri and Glossop and the high school was actually located in Glossop because it was sort of halfway between Barmera and Berri, I think.

Michael: So did you grow up in the same house all the time as a kid?

Howard: Yeah. Well, that's sort of yes or no. When I was a bub, Mum and Dad lived in a house that was probably only 100 square metres or something like that. And then when I was young, not so young, eight to ten I probably was, I can remember Dad and a colleague friend of his actually making concrete blocks that they then used to expand the size of the house. So I lived in the same house, but it was an expanded house. Like Besser Blocks really they were that they made. I can still remember them making those out of a mould and concrete. So that would have doubled maybe even, yeah at least doubled the size of the house.

Michael: Okay, so from 100 metres to 200 square metres, that's still pretty small, but you didn't have nine siblings, you just had a few. Wow. I'm guessing there probably wasn't a whole lot of insulation or whatnot.

Howard: I wouldn't know. But I don't remember insulation being used, but it could easily have been. Obviously, it was the sort of weather that nowadays you definitely have insulation for—the very hot summers and the very cold early morning winters.

Michael: Did it get cold in Monash? It probably did.

Howard: Oh yeah, quite often early morning we used to catch the bus at five past seven to go to the high school. And it was not unusual to be zero degrees or down to—I think the coldest I remember is minus seven or minus eight. And hoses frozen with water in them. But yeah, it was definitely jumper weather in winter. And then during, by the time 10 o'clock came around in the morning, it was full sunlight, hardly any rain during winter. Well that's the only time we did have rain was winter, but it was hardly any. It was, I think, because Monash was on the desert rainfall line. So desert rainfall was 10 inches was the guiding light there. So you can see that there was quite a bit of sunlight really, but not much rain.

And so the only reason we're able to have grapes and apricots and whatever was because of the irrigation from the Murray River which irrigated about another 25 inches which brought up the total amount of water that was usable by the block owners or fruit block owners to about 25 or 30, I can't remember.

Michael: Yeah, that makes sense. I always kind of wondered a little bit about that because it does seem—I have a vague memory of going to Monash, but I do remember thinking it was incredibly dry. Not quite desert, but sort of getting on towards that dry.

Howard: Well, it was a desert rainfall line. Yeah, I mean, it was actually right on that line. Yeah, you wanted to say one side of it was desert and the other side wasn't. When you look at Monash, the valley was set up beautifully for irrigation from the channel going around the rim and all the water gravitating down through the fruit blocks. But that caused a whole lot of salt to be brought to the surface in the basement of the valley, if you like, which is where the football fields and tennis courts and bowls club was.

Michael: So really the whole place basically works because of the Murray River. If the Murray wasn't there, there'd be nothing there.

Howard: That's right. So what they did was there were a couple of brothers, the Chaffey brothers, who were actually from either Canada or the United States, I can't remember which, and they were irrigation experts, and they were brought in to decide whether or not it was a viable place for irrigated stuff and decided it was. And so Monash was one of those locations where having pumped water out of the Murray to a tower in Berri which was where the pump was, then that water got gravity-fed through the channel system out to the other places. And of course there were different parts of the Murray River that were fed up in different ways. We just happened to be on the one where the Berri pumping station was the closest to us and most relevant for irrigation.

Michael: What did your dad do? I remember you telling me stories about apricots and apricot farming, but I don't actually know whether that was the main thing or whether that was just sort of a side.

Howard: The main thing was dried sultanas. So grew sultanas and then they were picked and like the dried sultanas you get now in packages at supermarkets. But there was also some wine grapes. So there were two sorts of wine grapes, but they were probably only made up 15% of the grape harvest. And then what else was there? Apricots were the other ones. So it would have made up only 10% probably of what was irrigated. And I don't know, it might have been an acre or something like that. But overall, the fruit block—Dad had two fruit blocks, one close to where their house was, and then another one which I think they must have bought a few years later, about three k's away, so it was sort of the second block. And it was sultanas and some wine grapes as well, but no apricots.

Michael: How did your parents come to be in Monash?

Howard: I'll go back far enough. My grandfather, Rudolf Nielsen, he was from Denmark, so he was born in Denmark, and he was sent out from Denmark to join the merchant navy because he was a bit promiscuous with one of the household maids and got her pregnant definitely. So he's not alive now to say that's not true. So he joined the Navy, parents told him to shoo. And then he jumped ship in Adelaide when they got to Adelaide and he met my grandmother to be Rachel Clarissa Frick. So she was of German and English origin and she lived in Mannum which is just not that far out of Adelaide but still out of Adelaide at the time by quite a bit in terms of horse travel and all that sort of stuff. And they met and I don't know how they met, but they got married. She was only 16 and he would have been 22 or something like that. So that's, as I understand it, that's how the Nielsens began.

Michael: Can I just ask, so he jumped ship, meaning he would have been missed and in trouble? Is that kind of the implication there? Wow, okay. So he ran away from the Navy.

Howard: Yeah. Well, merchant Navy is different to the real Navy, I guess. So I don't know. Certainly he wasn't the only person who did that. A lot of people who were on those ships came out and just stayed. I don't know what category he was in.

Michael: This would have been about what? The 1890s or something? About that time?

Howard: Yeah I should know that actually. I've got some details on that. I've got a scrapbook sort of thing here somewhere so I could go back to that. So what happened was that when he went away to war as a soldier, when he came back the country gave returned soldiers something in return so he got the fruit block. So a whole lot of these settlements were actually soldier settlements. So there was like an RSL equivalent in central Monash, a memorial hall, quite a big hall. So he got that block and a little house. That was the house that we ended up living in. No, was it that one? Yeah, I think it was. But anyway, so when he came back from war, he was in Mannum prior to that. They shifted to Monash because that's where the blocks were. And so, yeah, I don't know exactly how long he worked the block for.

Yeah, there was quite a bit of—so they had 10 kids. Rachel and Rudolph had 10 kids. And I think you probably know two of them died. One of them died from pneumonia when she was about 30 or something like that. And the other one was killed. I don't know whether I've told you that story or not.

Michael: I've been to her grave. So she would have been your aunt.

Howard: That's right, Auntie Mary. Well, and of course, I didn't get to know her. Obviously, she died when she was 13, and my dad would have been like 14 or 15 when she was killed. So she was raped and murdered basically within earshot of the house that Grandma lived in.

Yeah, we're still not totally sure what happened with grandfather, with Rudolph. Because he went to war—he went towards the end of the war, I think in 1917, to England and to France. And he was in, I think, artillery. But I don't think he saw an awful lot of action, but he certainly saw—he was part of the crew that sort of had to disassemble stuff from France back into hospitals and so horses and human beings and what have you. So he obviously suffered mentally from his experience. And so he was actually in a mental institution at the time that young Mary was killed. So you can imagine that Rachel was—that's a whole lot of burden on her for all sorts of reasons, but also probably on all the kids at some level. So Dad was, I think, third or fourth oldest. I think he had two brothers, Frank and Darcy, and Frank was older than Dad, and Dad was older than Darcy. And then Auntie Agnes was the oldest auntie and I only ever saw her a few times because she actually lived in Melbourne.

Michael: Actually, I met Uncle Darcy when we were in—I remember, in fact, we went and played tennis at the—I don't remember, it might have been Berri, I think, where we were playing tennis, and then we had lunch afterwards, or maybe it was before. He was a very—I don't know what the right term is, garrulous or something. He seemed very amiable and full of interesting stories and just great company. Basically, he was a great host.

Howard: Yeah, well he was—oh yeah, no, his whole hail fellow well met sort of thing, definitely Darcy. I got on really well with Darcy because he had a good sense of humour and always treated you like a real human being and all that sort of stuff. And liked his sport. I remember playing him once in tennis because he was probably in his late 30s at that point and I was only 13, I was playing A-grade tennis and I ended up playing—I was top of the Monash team at that age which was a bit unusual and it came to the point where I had to play Darcy one week.

Michael: Inter-family rivalry or intra-family rivalry.

Howard: That's right. Because Dad was basically, my Dad was essentially a better tennis player than Darcy, but Darcy was a very good player. And they won the upper Murray doubles titles a dozen times over the years. So Dad and Darcy sort of got along really well at one level. Then there was one sort of event that was not good.

Basically, during the Second World War, the general rule of thumb was that if you had property and producing goods and what have you, then you're expected to look after the farm. And so not everybody could go off to war. Somebody had to stay home and look after the farm, basically. And because Rachel was by herself at that point, particularly was just a female, that wasn't seen to be appropriate. So one of the boys had to stay home and should have been Darcy, because he was the youngest. That's the way it was supposed to work. But unknown to everybody else, Darcy decided to join up secretly. So he went and joined before Dad could join. They were about to do it at Moris at the same time. So of course, at the time, Dad was very angry with that because he felt that he should have gone and done his thing. Years afterwards, in talking to Dad, of course, he said war is a stupid thing and it's no good for anybody, probably with him, his personality was such that he was probably more likely to have been negatively affected by war than Darcy, who was a bit more flippant about those things. But Darcy actually joined the Air Force. And I don't know whether he was a pilot or whether he was part of the crew. And my uncle Frank, who was older than Dad, he joined the army.

Michael: And so your dad stayed in Monash through that time, right?

Howard: Yeah, and what happened was, part of what happened during wartime was that of course women were enlisted in the land army to actually help with food production and what have you, where men previously done it. So my mum joined the land army from Bundaberg and then she was sent down to the Riverland to pick grapes. So that's how they met.

Michael: Oh well. Okay. Wow. And if your dad had gotten his way and gone off to war, he wouldn't have met—well presumably not anyway. We wouldn't be having this conversation.

Howard: And we wouldn't be chatting. So yeah, so that's sort of the back story. That they got married—no, but I've got it here somewhere. I think it's 1944 or something like that.

Michael: Yeah, or when they met, actually.

Howard: I might have been after the war, can't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure if it was during wartime it was towards the end of the wartime, so 1944-45. Yeah, maybe even later than that come to think of it. But I do have that information all in one lot here somewhere so we can fix that one later.

Michael: Okay, so your grandfather, Rudolph, you said that he had some significant problems after the war. So what ended up happening to him and what happened to Rachel? How did things kind of pan out there?

Howard: Well, it's a bit—people are a bit unsure. There've been a couple of my cousins have taken it upon themselves to try to piece together what happened and why it happened and what have you. But if I was to put a story to it now, it would be that when he came back from the war, he wasn't the same self somehow or another. And he wasn't—he didn't act appropriately at home, whatever that means. I'm not sure what that means, whether he was angry or cranky or whatever else with kids and or Rachel or whatever, but to the point where obviously they felt that he was better off in basically an asylum is the way it was called then. So a couple of the cousins have tried to find out what he was in for and we've been told that a whole lot of records were burnt or no longer available or whatever else. But that wasn't something that was uncommon that people get told that because people don't want to tell them what's actually happened.

So he died while he was in that place in—would have been five years younger, before I was born. So 1946, I think. Well, either that or he was 46 years old. One of the two. But anyway, again, that's all in the same block of information that I can send.

Michael: Yeah, so, I mean that's a very sad story and it sounds like he was in the asylum for quite a long time, which must have been hard for him and hard for Rachel.

Howard: It sounds like it, yeah. So I remember I was one of the few cousins that was in Monash by the time I got to sort of teenagehood or whatever else, all the others, the brothers had all gone off to get their blocks, all the sisters had married and had moved out of Monash. It was only really my mum and dad still in Monash. Darcy was in Loxton, which was probably 25, 30 k's away. So we were the only ones in Monash and Dad was designated to be the, end up being the owner of the block. So he worked for more or less nothing really. Just his board and lodging and some dollars to keep the block going on the basis that when Grandma died he would get the block. Unfortunately what happened was that when she did die a couple of Dad's brothers and sisters put in a claim on some of the value of the block and so that caused a bit of consternation amongst the family. So I never really got to the full bottom of that, but I know it was something that Dad felt very sad about. I don't know which of the cousins were responsible for that. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't Darcy and it wasn't Frank. I think they were okay with it all. Of course, they were already earning their keep. Mum was a hairdresser by trade. She had her own hairdressing salon in Berri and Monash and then at home. In fact my bedroom was next door to the—it was the next room in the house to the little hairdressing salon she ran.

Michael: So hang on, how did she arrange that then? She's running three hairdressing salons, which is a lot. I was gonna ask what was she doing? Was she alternating days or how did it work out?

Howard: No, no, they were separate times. Only one at a time. She, I think she started off with one in Berri, full stop. And then she decided to close that one and just run one in Monash, in the central little village. And then she decided that she didn't want to do it full time anyway, so she set up a little thing at home in the room next door to where I lived. And I don't know about this because it could just be pure not right but a lot of the chemicals that were used in hairdressing in the day were not good for you. People didn't really know that at the time. So women having their hair permed and what have you.

So I'm not sure whether some of that maybe has had an effect on my health. It's a reasonable chance. Because actually there was a sliding door between me and the salon and I could smell the stuff easily.

Michael: Really? Yeah.

Howard: Anyway, be it. Whatever the hell that is or not.

Michael: Wow. So where did you go to primary school? Actually, did you go to kindergarten or anything?

Howard: I went to—there was no kindergartens then. I went to Monash Primary School. Monash Primary from year one. There were about 90 kids there.

Michael: So fair size. So must have been getting a fair number of kids from sort of the surrounding countryside as well.

Howard: Yeah, that's right, it's from the district really. So the nearest other primary school was Glossop Primary School, which is probably about seven or eight kilometres away. And then there was Barmera, which was a lot bigger, and Berri, which is a lot bigger again, and then Renmark, which was bigger and further away. So the towns that were closest to us in terms of associating with them were Berri, Barmera, Glossop, and a place called Winkie, Cobdogla and Lyrup. They were places that were as small as Monash, if not smaller.

Michael: Cobdogla? It's such an Australian name.

Howard: Cobdogla, yeah. And so we played a bit of sport. Well, the good thing about, from my point of view, the good thing about Monash Primary School was that because there are fewer kids there than most of the big primary schools, you got to play everything. So you even got to play netball. So the boys used to play the girls at netball, which was ahead of its time really.

Michael: At probably about what age—11 or 12—the girls probably won pretty handily because they would have grown earlier.

Howard: Yeah, possibly. I think we were told we were a bit too rough. To ease it up a bit. I mean, you only played like a few games over a few years. It wasn't like there was a full complement or anything like that. And yeah, I still remember a lot of the kids. Actually, there's a photo that was taken in 1956 of year one, two and three class at Monash Primary School and during the centenary year or whatever it was they blew it up to be full size of a wall in the room. The wall was about five metres long and two or three metres high. And actually it was when we went down to Adelaide for Stuart's footy that I went to the school and met the woman at the front desk who was a woman called Lorraine Opest, which I remembered. And she didn't have a clue who I was, of course, we had just walked in the front door. But she said, after we got chatting, she said, you might be able to help out. We've got this photo on the wall and we don't know some of the kids.

And anyway, it's amazing what your brain must do because I went in there and all the kids that were in my grade, I knew. And they said, we didn't remember that was Robert Gillies or whatever it was. And the others, years one and two or one, two and three, I can't remember. Sharon was in that photo as well. So she had her friends there. So I pretty well, I think—

Michael: So you would have, in '56, you would have been what year? Year one, right?

Howard: I was just year one, yeah. So because I was January, I would have been the youngest kid in the class.

Michael: That's right, January kid. So, and did that—were they doing that thing where if you're born in, whatever it is, I know in Queensland, if you were born in January or February, you kind of started sort of a year earlier or? No, okay, they didn't do that.

Howard: No, it was just, whatever you were, if you were on the 1st of January, if you were 5, you were supposed to go to school. I think, as it turns out, you were able to not go to school if you didn't want to, but they must have figured I was pretty ready for it. But my first actual day at school—I say actual day, it's not quite right. They were advanced enough in their thinking to say every year at the end of the year, like just before Christmas, kids who were going to start school the next year, they came to school for a day just to test it out and just to familiarize themselves with the school and blah blah blah. Of course, I knew a bit about it because Sharon was already at school for two years. But anyway, I had a bit of an induction into school life that was not very pleasant. So as a four year old as I was then, I was in the playground at lunchtime and running around having a good time and then all of a sudden I got knocked unconscious. There were four grade six kids who were on a big swing, one of those big steel and timber swings that—like a board swing—that went backwards and clunk, hit me just beside the temple. People who know me well say, now we know what happened to you.

Michael: Ha!

Howard: But I still remember—I don't remember getting hit, but I must have been knocked out for half a minute or something like that. And blood everywhere, blah, blah, blah. So that was my first actual day at school, even though it wasn't a formal school day.And that happened probably a few weeks—so school finished at Christmas time as it was then, 16 week, fourth, third term.

And so I was at home then waiting to go to school for the following year and in between time, just about drowned. So that was not at school, but I was still only four, just turning five when I was down with Dad and Sharon at the windmill. Dad was fixing the windmill up which pumped water up to the house. And I was sitting—I don't know whether I've told you this story, but I was sitting on the edge of the underground tank which was probably four meters square but about three meters deep with yabbies in it and all sorts of things, and I was pushing ants in to see whether they could swim or not. It turns out that they could swim, but yeah, I fell in. And so they say that if you go down three times, that's the end of it. You'll stay down. I went down twice and had just come up after my second absolute sort of rubbing with water and by that time Dad had jumped off the windmill and jumped in and saved me.

And then just to top it off, I must have been having a really interesting time then because on Christmas Eve of that same year, I'd been having stomach pains. It turns out I had appendicitis and I had it pretty badly and it was so bad that on Christmas Eve of 1955 or whatever it was, I got my appendix out in Berri Hospital on Christmas Eve and then was in hospital for five days. But evidently the doctor said, that's bad. Should have been here before then, but with Christmas everybody was busy doing other things.

Anyway, so I must have—obviously at the time you don't think about it when you're just a kid, but you had three life-threatening events happen within about six weeks.

Michael: A month? Yeah. "What did you do over your Christmas holidays?" What a great answer.

Howard: Here's my medical history.

Michael: Okay, and do you remember sort of your actual first day at school or was it sort of such an anticlimax after that?

Howard: Yeah, I do remember that we had Mrs. Stratton. Mrs. Stratton was our teacher. She was a good teacher, but I knew Mrs. Stratton already because she got her hair done by Mum. So I'd met her before. In fact, that was one of the advantages of Mum doing the hairdressing, is that I got to meet all the teachers at some point, even those that didn't actually teach me. But yeah, so where were we?

Oh yeah, first day of school. Yeah, I do remember coming home and saying to Mum that we didn't really learn how to read that day. Well, I'd already sort of known how to read anyway, but I do remember "A for Apple", that I got the primer—I don't know, they used to call it the primer at the time, when you think about it, it's actually a primer to other learning. So the grade one primer had "A for Apple" on the front page, and I remember seeing that.

I also remember in year one—I don't think it was the first day of school, but it was pretty soon after—Mrs. Stratton became a bit of a legend because in the classroom one day there was a spider, quite a big one, that was just running across desktops and stuff. And Mrs. Stratton just said, just leave it alone, I'll fix it. She goes to the spider and puts her hand underneath the spider and the spider jumps onto her hand and she takes it outside. So that was quite heroic from our point of view.

Michael: That'll impress a bunch of kids a lot.

Howard: Yeah, so I mean obviously we're country kids so it's not like the first time we'd seen a spider but you did stay away from them. In fact I do remember there being a trapdoor spider at the school and they were to be feared. They were properly poisonous, this other one wasn't. It was just a tarantula lookalike sort of thing. Probably give you a bit of a bite but nothing much else.

Michael: Did you enjoy grade one and whatnot? Was it good?

Howard: Oh yeah, fine. Well, I was pretty good at my school work. Things deteriorated later, of course. But yeah, it was—we had small classes that would have been 10 or 12 kids in year one probably. And we would have had a year one, two class. So yeah, I enjoyed school really. But I mean, to be honest with you, what I remember most about school was playtime and playing footy and cricket and tennis and chucking clods of dirt at each other and all sorts of stuff that we weren't supposed to do. That's how come I got to be such a good arm throw. I think it literally was.

Michael: What were you doing? Throwing clods of dirt at what? That's not a game I remember from school.

Howard: Oh, you go in the playground and then there's—there was a football field that was mainly dirt. And then there was a bush area that was probably—it's hard to say now because you're older and it's probably not as big as you thought—but probably about 40 or 50 meters by about 30 meters of bushland in the corner. People used to play in there, but we used to chuck stuff. And then, more famously—not that I was a goody goody, but I didn't usually get in trouble when I was at school. I just did stuff. But one day I was throwing—Barry Buckskin, who was my mate at school, he was a local indigenous kid actually, Barry. And their family lived there on and off over the years. And he was probably my best friend at school. And we decided we liked to throw rocks, clods of dirt at each other. So we were doing that out the back where we thought we weren't going to get seen. But unfortunately, I got seen. So I got six cuts of the cane from George Milne boom boom and Barry Buckskin thought it was hilarious. Said, good, need Howard Nielsen getting the cuts, it's about time too, blah blah blah. It was all done in good fun.

Michael: It doesn't sound like it was probably much fun for you. I mean, maybe the throwing of rocks at each other maybe was, but getting the cuts couldn't have been too good. Was that your principal who did that?

Howard: Yeah, George Milne. George was—his wife Letty Milne taught years three and four or something. He taught years five, six and seven. And he wasn't a teacher at all, was hopeless basically. If you sort of knew what you were doing, you wound your way through school classes and did all right. But yeah, George—

Michael: Well, at least he had enough sense to decide that throwing rocks at one another wasn't on the allowed list of activities.

Howard: No, well, and it wasn't really because I mean, it could have killed you. It could have actually killed the other person, I guess. Worst case scenario. Yeah, George was—well, he was an alcoholic actually. So after school, he'd go down to the local social club, which was like the local community club that my dad ran actually. Because in the day the drinking hours were finished at six o'clock, so he'd drink from half past three till six basically and then go home to the principal. Anyway, nobody thought much of it really. It sort of a private life. Not that he was there every afternoon doing that, but very frequently.

Michael: You probably know one of my high school principals, he was also an alcoholic—Chas Walker.

Howard: No. Okay. I can sort of see that.

Michael: Okay, so tell me more about Barry Buckskin and other shenanigans that you got up to. I guess you only had sisters, so you sort of didn't have a brother to—

Howard: Well that was probably the end of the shenanigans really. I was always hassling Sharon and Vicki in particular to kick the football around in the backyard at home and all that sort of stuff. Of course they played tennis. So we'd play tennis. The tennis courts were only probably 200 metres away from the school so we'd go down there and have a hit after school. My dad was the volunteer tennis coach so two days a week there was tennis coaching free for all the kids that wanted to go and I was one of them anyway, so that was all cool. Barry was quite a good athlete actually—not like sports person—really funny guy, humorous and big smile and all that sort of stuff. More or less the same age as me, I think he was maybe, could have been a year older, I'm not sure. And we just used to play and muck around, once only throwing clods at each other, until after that. But yeah, I don't know, we just hung out, playing, kicking the footie around all the time. I was a bit of a target for—when Athletics Day came around, I was a pretty fast runner, I suppose. And so at practice for school athletics day and for inter-school athletics, I was given a handicap. So I'd start as a back marker and then I had to catch all the other kids before we got to the 60 metre or something. So I quite enjoyed that because otherwise I'd probably win the race by eight or 10 metres otherwise.

But then I had to catch Barry Buckskin, who was probably the fastest other kid. So we had a bit of shy-acking about all that. He had a sister, [???] Buckskin. She was quite a nice girl, but she had a few angry buttons that used to get pushed. And then there was another younger sister, can't remember her name, might have been Pauline actually.

So that was the indigenous family. The Rigneys were there as well. Roger Rigney was another kid who was a bit younger. He was probably two years younger than me. He was one of the other indigenous families, but they weren't always there in Monash. I think they also lived, had a house in Berri or they joined families or whatever and domiciled together quite a bit.

He was quite a handy tennis player. I did try to catch up with him a few years ago actually, just searched around. Barry Buckskin, I heard that he had been at a particular school as a sort of indigenous teacher aide. But when I rang the school he had left there, they didn't know where he was. So he might have retired by then anyway. I think his daughter, from what I can gather, was a PhD student at Wollongong University, Peace and Justice stuff. So I haven't heard of her since then.

Barry and I were probably the two better footballers in the school. So when it came to footy matches, we had good fun.

Michael: So football obviously meant Australian rules in South Australia, right?

Howard: Yeah, AFL stuff—well, Aussie rules, everybody called it Aussie rules then. I remember one match, I might have told you about this because it was a bit extraordinary really. We played Glossop Primary School, which was the equivalent size to us and the closest one. So it was a battle of the little towns. And we won by two points. We kicked one goal 18 to their three goals two. One goal, 18. I still remember it because—

Michael: God. Right. So you were good at the running bit, not the aiming bit.

Howard: Yeah, well, I was both the winner and the loser and all that. I actually kicked one goal seven. So I sort of did my bit in terms of kicking that number of points. I outstripped everybody else with point kicking. And I still remember kicking the goal because it was such an extraordinary match. We didn't kick the goal until probably halfway through the last quarter or something. So we were probably still behind at that point, where we would have been actually. Oh dear.

Michael: Sounds like the test match [in Melbourne, 2025] that just got finished. Wow. Are there any other notable incidents from your primary school career?

Howard: What we're doing, any other memorable events while at school or at—

Michael: Yeah, sort of especially memorable events or, yeah, in primary school or at home or sort of that time period.

Howard: Oh yeah, there's probably quite a few of those. What I might do is I'll send you stuff that I've written so far and then you can pick your way through that as well. And you might want to ask more questions about those things. So that can do that. But I think the things that I remember were mainly sport related, which is not unusual, I suppose. But while I was at primary school, I was 11 in my final year of primary school. And at that time, I was playing senior tennis in the Riverland and I got to finals of singles tennis. So that was a bit of news in the Riverland community. But I also, Monash was pretty good with athletics and what have you. Sharon's quite a fast runner until she dislocated a knee playing netball, unfortunately. Vicki was pretty quick too. So we used to win more than our fair share of events at sports day, the inter-school sports day. But I can still remember in the final year of the inter-school sports day they had your year group, so I was in the 11 year olds in which I won fairly easily against other schools. And then because I was still the oldest kid at our school, they had like an all championship thing. So you ran against kids of all other ages, so up to 14. Anyway, and there were some pretty fast kids from—Berri, I remember, guy called Ken Tate. Anyway.

I don't know whether I won that race or not, but Mum swears—my mum swears that I did. That I was done. Well, I remember running as fast as I could and that there were a lot of kids more or less in line. So some poor soul had to pick a winner out of that. Unfortunately, my mother wasn't on the selection panel. Otherwise, I would have won that.

Michael: Ha!

Howard: That was quite funny. But I think the thing that probably I was most proud of in a way—during my final year in primary school, they had a big football clinic in Berri where all the kids in all the Riverland schools got invited to go to this clinic which was run by the star Adelaide football players and coaches and the statewide newspaper, the Adelaide Advertiser, sponsored it. So it was a big deal. Anyway, we went and we got coached and did all sorts of things and then unbeknownst to me and certainly our school, they had a competition where they ran you through all your paces. Left foot, drop kick, left foot, spiral kick, right foot, this, that, the other. There were about 10 things you had to do. And they marked you on how well you did all those things. So I ended up winning the thing. And of course, a whole lot of kids were like who's this kid from Little Monash beating us big kids from Renmark and Berri and blah blah blah. But I won. The prize was a new pair of footy boots and a new ball for the school. So I felt quite proud of that. Particularly seeing we didn't know it was going to happen and one of the kids just pushed me forward when they asked for somebody from Monash.

So that was good fun, good clean fun. Otherwise, thing that I didn't realize—that I had a reasonable singing voice at the time anyway. So I sang with another kid called Chris Wright. We had like a duet singing Good King Wenceslas at the end of year concert, which everybody went to. And I must have been reasonably confident in my own voice to agree to do that because I could have easily not, I suppose. And then I was probably expected to be Dux of the school, but Chris Wright beat me for that, partly because I was mucking around, not really paying attention when I was supposed to be. Because Sharon, I think, was Dux of her class all the way through, and so was I until year seven. So that was memorable, but mind you, it wasn't a high aspiration of mine, so I didn't mind really. But I still do remember it.

Michael: Anything involving your siblings?

Howard: It was just a thing that—I wasn't a very—I wasn't a kid that went out fighting apart from throwing rocks at my friend. That wasn't really fighting, that was just having fun. But there was a kid at school who was bullying one of the other kids. And the kid he was bullying was bullying because he was a bit overweight and he wore glasses, stereotypical bullying behaviour. And the kid who was doing the bullying was in year seven, I was in year five and I know one day it must have just got the better of me and while he was doing the bullying—it was physical bullying—I jumped up and grabbed him and tried to throw him to the ground and all that sort of stuff and to tell him to stop.

So that all took about 10 seconds and then at the same time somebody yells out, George is coming. So George Milne, so the fight broke up anyway. Yeah, so I do remember that. And the guy was a guy called Trevor Bulldog, whose father was the guy who helped Dad build our house. He was the concrete expert.

Michael: Robin's a lot younger, right?

Howard: No, no, she wasn't at school while I was at that primary school. Vicki would have been—she would only been there for a year or two while I was at the school. Sharon was two years ahead of me. So I do remember her playing netball. I wish to play sport against the girls. And she—I remember there's a nice photo of Sharon and I dressed in our athletic skier with a big bib on with an M on it for Monash. And Dad used to say we were, used to describe us as the South African racing pigeons. For no reason.

Michael: It's so much your dad's sense of humour. I mean, it doesn't even really make sense, but it's somehow funny.

Howard: Well, we weren't from South Africa. Yeah, that's right. So, yeah, Sharon was well liked around the place, we didn't cause too much of a scare. And we weren't in the same class ever at school, so even though we were multiple classes, she didn't—by the time I got to multiple class in my grade going down, 6th, 7th, I she would have been at high school then two years when I was in year 7.

I'll think of something, but—

Michael: Where'd you go? Did you ever take vacations as a family or anything like that? What did you do during the holidays?

Howard: Well, it was usually one of two things. Either we would go to Bundaberg to see Mum's family, her Mum—that would not happen very often. That would be, I think we probably did that three times in my memory while I was at primary or high school, because that was a long drive. So that's when I—because I hardly ever met my grandfather on my Mum's side. He ran the sugarcane farm in Bundy with Mum's brothers and what have you. So we did that two or three times, maybe four, I can't remember. But otherwise the stock standard sort of holiday was going to the beach at either Henley Beach or one of the beaches during Christmas or just after Christmas holidays, towards the end of January probably was more accurate. Because Dad played in the Country Carnival, so the Country Carnival for tennis was held during Christmas holidays. Even though a lot of fruit-picking went on there, that was a week of teams—the upper Murray had a team—and then there was an individual title. So while Dad was doing it and I was too young to play, we went to the beach. And we were at the beach for quite a few times.

And then when I got old enough to make the junior, the under-17 team, which I think I was 11 or something or 12, I played then. And then when I was, I think, 14, I played in the senior team. Dad played in and Uncle Darcy played in. So that was a holiday of sorts, we were playing holiday, so it was good fun.

Otherwise holiday wise I don't remember going anywhere else.

Michael: That's a long drive to Bundaberg from there.

Howard: Yeah. Well, we might have gone to Bundaberg actually during the year, not the Christmas holidays during the—what would have been September holidays or May holidays, because there were only three terms at that time. So we may have gone in September just before fruit ripened and all that sort of stuff and taken two weeks, I think it was two weeks holidays then, so it would have been at least probably two to three days driving there and two to three days driving back. So 10 days there. But we used to stop—Dad had a friend, Frank O'Culligan, lived at a place, it was probably 500 Ks up the road, so we would stop and see him and I think there was somewhere else, somebody else that we stopped at as well. Because we used to know people in Mildura—Mildura was across the border from Monash. And every year or every second year might have been, there was an inter-region match between Mildura and Upper Murray. And we used to play in that as well. I've forgotten when that was though. It wouldn't have been during Christmas holidays though, it would have been during maybe May or might have been Easter. I know Easter holidays was when we had the Tintra tournament which was at Renmark.

Michael: You haven't said, or I haven't asked really that much about your mum. So, okay, so she came down because of the war, met your dad. Actually, do you know exactly where they met? Do you know the circumstance?

Howard: No, somebody might. Robin's been doing a bit of—my sister Robin's been doing a bit of investigating about all that, so she may have some information on that. I'll ask her. She sent me a few things that, a few letters that came from Mum and Dad to each other, which work had been kept.

Michael: I guess it's a small enough region that it was inevitable that they were going to meet. Sort of once you're both in that spot, eventually everybody, I presume just knows everybody.

Howard: Yeah, and the thing is too, for people in their age group, there are a lot of dances, like the Saturday night dances would have been held in any one of two or three places—Berri, Barmera and Renmark, Loxton. Monash probably had a dance every couple of months, and all the others the same, more so, probably some would have had every week.

Michael: So what do you—

Howard: Mum and Dad, like Mum wasn't a tennis player, for example. So when she met Dad, she must have realised that she might take up tennis. It could be handy. And she's turned out to be quite a handy tennis player, actually. My Mum was a really hard worker, like running the hairdressing salon and doing all the cooking and domestic stuff at home. With all the fruit that we had, one of the things that I remember doing a whole lot of was cooking a whole lot of fruit—peaches, apricots—and so on, so we could use them during the year, so preserve them as such. So there were cupboards full of all those and jams. So we were never—I mean, really, Mum and Dad, there was a whole lot of stuff provided that wasn't bought, it was made from the farm basically, except for my—

So I was a big Weetbix eater. So Mum was at one point considering asking Sanitarium if they would mind sponsoring me. I used to eat a dozen Weetbix each morning and then probably half a dozen at night after I come home from school. I think my record was 24 one morning. I must have been particularly peckish.

Michael: 24 in the morning. That's a lot in the morning.

Howard: Yeah, so I mean obviously. That's right. And Dad was on the local—he was a local councillor for quite a few years and then deputy chairman of the council as well. So he did a lot of those sorts of things. And he was also a magistrate, like a part-time magistrate. So he would go in, I think, once a month and spend a day in the court dispensing justice to 19-year-old kids who were pinching bikes or doing something dramatic. So that would have been tough, because you're living in a place where you're just—you're not the policeman. You're not actually a formal judge, but you've got that role. So that was sort of an interesting thing. Mum, again, has said—she was pretty good with tennis. She became good at that. Mum and Dad played mixed doubles together. And Dad, I think, was chairman or president of the Upper Murray Lawn Tennis Association for about 10 years. So that would have been a fair amount of work. And locally as well.

Michael: Your dad did an incredible number of things.

Howard: Yeah, he did. And I think, as in a sporting light, was—he was right up there. He played a bit of football, but I don't remember him playing football because I was probably too young. I do remember being at football when he played, but I don't remember watching him play. Played for Monash, and then Barmera and Monash joined together as well. And I played for Barmera-Royals Junior Colts. While I was—during winter—at the same time as Mum used to drive me down to Adelaide, each Saturday morning for about probably half the year to be coached at tennis by the professional tennis coach down there. So that was a lot of time for her to spend, because it was like a four hour trip, so we used to leave at five o'clock in the morning. Coaching started at nine, finished at probably 12, straight back home again.

Michael: Wow, it's a full day for three hours of coaching.

Howard: Yeah, and that was with a guy called Clem Teague, who was the professional tennis coach sponsored by the Adelaide Advertiser. Nice guy.

Michael: So I actually have to take off shortly. So we might wrap this up for now.

Howard: Yeah. I'm probably getting a bit tired. I'll read back through some of the other stuff and resurrect that next time we chat. And I'm going to go out at some point too, so I'll probably go and see what's going on with that.

Michael: Okay. Anyway, this was fantastic from my point of view.