December 29, 2025 (Brisbane, Australia) and December 28, 2025 (Berkeley, USA)
Index to the full interview series.
The following transcript has been cleaned up slightly and filler removed (errors may remain).
Michael Nielsen: All right, day two of recording. There was something you said after I hit close yesterday that was really interesting. I wonder if you could tell the story for anybody who's watching this. It was about something you overheard your dad say to the principal.
Howard Robert Nielsen: Yeah, yeah. It was actually Sharon's story. Sharon told me this a few years ago. She was at school, after school one day, waiting for Dad who had had a meeting with the principal. That's as far as we knew. And she overheard Dad telling George Milne that the way he was treating the indigenous kids at the school was not appropriate and he should stop doing that.
Michael: That's really remarkable.
Howard: Yeah. I'm sure Dad was probably on the P&C or something like that. It wouldn't have been his normal form to create a controversial situation, but apparently that's what happened. Sharon couldn't report on what George said or anything like that because they were in a different room, but she did hear that bit.
Michael: Your dad always seemed very public spirited, mostly in a very amiable way. He'd use humor most of the time to make a point. But he must've felt pretty strongly about it if he was going to be that direct.
Howard: Yeah, I'd describe him as somebody who picks his points of argument. Sometimes you'll be in conversation with people and there's things you don't necessarily agree with all that much, but they're neither here nor there. Whereas he would pick his fight, basically, if there was one to be had with people who were, in his mind, not behaving well.
Michael: My impression growing up, several decades after that, was that [European] Australia still had a difficult relationship with its indigenous people and often not a particularly positive one. People were often pretty racist. It just seems like a very interesting and admirable fight to be picking on his part.
Howard: Well, I think the other thing is that he would be more likely, if he had a disagreement with somebody, to have that disagreement in private. So he would be disinclined to do that in a large group where people get defensive. He's more likely to get a positive response where there was no doubt about what the comment was and no doubt about who it was directed to and therefore no doubt about who should respond. But nobody was going to witness it, nobody felt that they should get put into a corner. Because sometimes people do stupid things when they're berated or criticized. No, Dad was very good with all that.
I went to quite a few community meetings and tennis meetings with him over the time. And I can't recall there being any—he did debate different things about what people should do, yeah, and I think his social consciousness was pretty high. And as you say, it wasn't fashionable in that day. Probably that would have been 60 years ago, more than 60 years ago. It wouldn't have been fashionable to be making that argument, even though obviously social justice was probably not talked about much at the school, but it was implied that people should be treated well, indigenous or not. Obviously in this case either Dad had observed something or had been told something by somebody else and he was acting on their behalf. I don't know which it might have been.
Michael: That's pretty remarkable. Also really interesting that Sharon reported it to you and that you remembered.
Howard: Yeah, I think I must have been chatting to her about the little book that I was writing and looking for stories about things that happened that were of some note. And I guess that was one of them.
Michael: Yesterday we got up to the end of your primary school career. It seems to have involved throwing of dirt, a certain amount of winning of races, quite a bit of tennis, and apparently a lost Dux opportunity at the end. So after that, you went to Glossop High School, is that right?
Howard: Yeah, Glossop High School. It was a few kilometers away. In those days, when you got to year seven, on Friday afternoons we got to do woodwork over at the Glossop High School. Those of us boys would do woodwork and the girls would do domestic science. So we rode our bikes over and back. That was good fun. So we already had some experience with the high school.
The high school—you had to do a test to see what year level you're going to be in. It was all streamed. We didn't know that, of course. We had no idea what all that was about. So you did a test, and then you got into 1A or 1B or 1C or 1D or 1E. The system must have been fairly flawed because I got into 1A.
Michael: Ha!
Howard: So I was the only one from my primary school that got into 1A. The downside to that, of which there were plenty, was that I had to do Latin, and that didn't really excite many people but certainly didn't excite me. So after a couple of years of having a go at Latin, I changed over to modern history, which was a choice for those who went in 1B. But I stayed in 1A as a class group with English and maths and science. But for the Latin component, I ended up, after some conversation with Miss Moore, who was the Latin teacher and my English teacher as well—and I think partly because I was a bit of a favorite of hers for whatever reason—she allowed me to stay in her class but do the history separately.
Michael: That's really interesting. I have to say, it does seem like modern history is probably more useful in many regards than Latin, unless you were going to run a Latin mass or something.
Howard: That's right, yes. We were supposed to have done it of course because it would help us understand the English language.
Michael: Speaking of Latin masses, did religion play any role at all as a kid?
Howard: Yeah, actually interesting question. I was thinking of it yesterday when I was talking about school. As kids, we went down to the local Church of England on Sunday morning to do Sunday school. We had Mrs. Hallam as our Sunday school teacher. She was probably only about 55, but we thought of her as about 85. She was a nice lady.
During that time, I actually read the whole Bible. It was like slightly larger than a pack of cards. Small print. Ask me to recite too many things from it and I'd be struggling, but I found it quite interesting and I'm glad I did it. It's an educational experience, even though the language was older English, so it was a bit of a thing to wade through.
Sharon would have done that as well, and Vicki probably would have done it. I don't know how many years we did Sunday school. It wasn't on every week of the year—I think they spared us from that—but it felt like about half the year, maybe three years, when we were 10 and 11 or something like that.
Michael: It was probably a King James Bible or something like that. It must have been a very small one.
Howard: I don't know what it was to be honest. My understanding is that the King James Bible came out later and was a bit more accessible language-wise. But then there are different versions of all that.
Anyway, Mum was originally from Bundaberg and from a German background. They were Apostolic. But there was no Apostolic church in Monash, but there was a Church of England church which was Protestant, so it sort of belonged, apparently.
And we used to say grace at the table every night. "For what we are about to receive, make us truly thankful. Amen."
And then, funnily enough, you'll find this of interest—Mum taught us a little prayer to say at night. And I still say a prayer every night.
Michael: I didn't know that. What's the prayer? What was the prayer you said as a kid and what's the prayer you say now?
Howard: I can't remember the one from childhood, that's going back a bit too far. The current one is just a private thing really. It's more about being positive and thankful and being good to people, essentially. It wasn't like a prayer that Mum taught us that was striking fear into you out of fear from God or whatever. It was quite not that. But the Protestant church was fairly right wing if you're going to choose a reference to it.
So that's about the sum total, I think, of my religious experience. But when it comes down to it, it's a daily presence of some sort.
Michael: Did this gradually evolve over the years or did you decide at some point?
Howard: Yeah, no, it's about version 10 or something like that now. It changes. But it's more about looking after people that are dear to me. You guys all feature in it, the family. The word God doesn't actually appear in it. So it's probably where I got to the point where I don't actually and never did ever actually believe in God as such. But my quirky bit of humor about it is that God is just, in typical Australian fashion, a shortened version of "good."
So I've stuck to that. Whenever anybody asks me—I know Cooper's asked me that, and I think Bowen has asked me—"Do you believe in God?" I say, well, I believe in good, which is just a different version of God. Because the idea of there being an actual being doesn't sort of… I couldn't quite accept that one. But I could sense that things are about being positive.
Michael: Was your dad religious at all?
Howard: Not really. Not church religious anyway. The interesting thing is, and I've thought about this a few times, in terms of the way he acted he was probably more Christ-like than most other people that I know. I'm not prepared to say he was another Christ or anything, but it's sort of like… is it in what you say or is it in what you do?
Michael: A lot of service to community and other people.
Howard: Yeah, and just being fair to other people. One thing I remember—an event that was not about religion really, about his attitude and his ability to help people. One day, he and I were out on one of the fruit blocks picking grapes or doing whatever we were doing. This car screeched up in the road alongside us about 100 meters away and a guy raced out and was yelling out to Dad about helping, could Dad help him with something. The guy was originally from Yugoslavia, so he had broken English and I couldn't really understand what he was talking about.
It turns out the guy thought he was being tracked by the Stasi, which is like the Gestapo or somebody from military, and that he was going to be sent from Australia because he was obviously a migrant.
Anyway, Dad got to the bottom of it. What the bottom of it was that during the war, which was only like 10 or 15 years prior to that, the ASIO spy network in Australia was trailing a whole lot of people that they thought might be Russian spies. And this guy had been at a dance in Mackay, Queensland, and danced with a woman who they knew was a spy. So they had a photo of him dancing with her. They're just checking him out, basically.
And of course, because of his background coming from a country where police weren't the way we see them in Australia—the police and army folks in Yugoslavia or Europe often were seen as extremely negative and aggressive and just as likely to shoot you as ask you a question—so he was worried that might happen to him.
So Dad helped him. I don't know how exactly, but the guy became less fragile and did stay in Australia and did keep working and was happy. That's where people did go to Dad to get help even though that's not what his job was.
Michael: Maybe we'll keep going chronologically. You were at Glossop, not enjoying Latin.
Howard: Well, I played a bit of cricket at the school and it was interesting that the way play times were set up before school and at lunchtime, everybody—every guy anyway—was out on the field, say cricket time, with about six cricket balls going from one end to the other. And batsmen were in, no pads, no nothing. So there was continuous cricket basically.
I remember in my first or second day of schooling, I was out there with all these big 17 year old kids and I'm the 11 year old. Anyway, the ball came to me and I caught it, which apparently was unusual for a first year to actually catch a ball. So I was in batting. I'm there facing up to the ball from some year 11 kid, and all the kids were surrounding me—like about 20 slips thinking that I would crash.
I thought, okay, this doesn't look too good. But I thought I'll have a slash at the first ball that comes to me. Fortunately, they put the ball right out on the right side for a square cut. So I square cut it and hit three kids on the way through and the ball went to the boundary.
The big thing out of all this was that on the second ball that was bowled to me, the circle around me expanded out by about five meters. Nobody wanted to get hit. So that was my induction into the Hall of Fame of first year cricketers who made it past the first thing.
We played lot of inter-school sport and athletic days. And I didn't win age cups until you got to 15, 16 and open. But I won a few races along the way. Enjoyed all that. And in the meantime I was playing tennis.
There was a big tennis tournament in the school every year and there were some really good tennis players there. Of course, first years weren't supposed to get past the first round, but I managed to get to the semi-final. I played a guy called Phil Trelaw, who was about six foot six, and I was about five foot six at the time. Ended up beating him in a quarterfinal and then got beaten in a semi-final by the guy who eventually won. The game was played on an open court, so a whole lot of people were watching.
And then I was playing in the open football team against the Mount Gambier High School. That was where I did get surprised that I got picked in that team because I was only 14 and not all that big really. I was reasonably tall but I was probably quick enough. And I kicked a couple of goals in that match from a half forward flank, so I was very happy with that.
That was my last year at Glossop High School, because the next year I went down to Adelaide Boys High School to play tennis, more or less.
Michael: I was aware of the transfer and roughly of when it occurred, but I'm not sure I could have said how old you were when you made the switch. I knew it was like the last two or three years.
Howard: I was 15. I made the switch at the end of the year that I was 14 and the beginning of the year of 15 is when I actually rolled up at Adelaide High.
Michael: Something I noticed yesterday as well—even as a kid, you were pretty darn competitive about sports. You still remember a lot of detail about who you played, even roughly what the score was. I guess that it mattered quite a bit to you.
Howard: Yeah, well, sport was big in the Riverland and in our family. That's sort of what happened. But it wasn't all beer and skittles. I do remember winning the 14-year-old sprint race and beating the previous record which was a really good record from a guy called Robin Greenwood.
And in my second year, instead of playing tennis in the inter-school match against Renmark High, I decided to opt to try and play in the cricket team which was played at the same time. Anyway, turns out as we were going out to the field with the 12 of us, I was going to be selected as the 12th man, thanks very much. Which surprised me because I thought I might have made the team. Anyway, I was a bit disappointed, but onward and upward.
The match was played and I did get to field a bit a couple of times, but then when it was our turn to bat—they hit 80 or something—this fast bowler from Renmark was running through our team. I think we were eight for 12 at some point and he'd taken a hat-trick and should have had two more hat-tricks probably.
So the teacher who was running the thing said you might have a bat seeing as we're not doing so good. Anyway, I went out to bat and I knew I was going to get clunked, but the first ball he bowled he put it in the right place for a cover drive, so I cover drove it for four. Lot of applause from our team because that was the first runs we scored more than one.
But the wicket keeper says to me, "Nobody does that to Jono and gets away with it."
Sure enough, the next ball I clean missed—just missed the stumps by probably a few centimeters. Then the next ball was more or less in the same spot and I clunked that for four. And I said, "How did you know my name was Nobody?"
But it was short lived because the next ball I was bowled, so I was out for eight. The wicket keeper thought it was pretty funny. The bowler was very unhappy about getting hit for two fours in one over. That didn't happen. I think he was in the State School Boys primary school team a year before or something.
So just to say that not all my interactions were triumphs. But apart from putting the bat on the ball, I suppose that's somewhat triumphant given the nature of our team at the time.
Michael: What was it like moving away from home? You must have boarded.
Howard: I did miss my family. Fortunately I was going to stay with a family that I knew so it was quite a positive experience from that point of view. But that was just for one year and then after that it was a bit of a mixed bag.
I know my mother and the family missed me. And Robyn probably in particular missed me because she was young and she and I used to play with her and entertain her. She's said years gone by she really missed me when I left because she was nine or something like that. From the time I was 10 or 12 and she was just a little bub like two or three.
Michael: It's a nice thing for a 12 year old boy—usually pretty oriented towards boy things and going off with boy gangs—to be oriented that way toward a little kid.
Howard: Yeah. The thing is, unfortunately, when you go away from home like that, you're going into a new environment where you don't have any time really to stop and worry about stuff. You're so busy doing what it is that you have agreed to do and wanted to do. Probably if I hadn't had that, you'd have had more time to reflect and miss people.
Vicki and I got along well as well and so did Sharon and I. They were harassed by me wanting to play football and cricket in the backyard a lot, but they were quite athletic themselves anyway. And of course we didn't do it all the time.
Michael: Did your parents have a car?
Howard: Yeah, we had cars. The first car I remember is an old Essex, like the police car in "The Untouchables". Eventually we had Holdens and Falcons. Falcon station wagon.
Michael: So was your mum driving you around or were you catching the bus?
Howard: Well, there was no bus, only a school bus. There was no other public transport. So Mum used to drive us, or we used to ride our bikes. We actually lived on Nielsen Road, which was named after our family. That was about one and a half kilometers to school or to Scouts. I was part of the Cubs and Scouts. Did that sort of stuff as well, riding in the dark from nighttime Scouts.
Michael: I was interested in you talking about these friends of yours who are all spread out. It made me think about how did you get around if you're going to do stuff with your friends.
Howard: Yeah, we didn't really see each other. Most kids didn't have a license until they were 17 or 16, and the buses were just school buses. I don't remember ever actually staying at any one of a mate's places like that. We were just school friends really, and sports friends.
But we had a little reunion of sorts in Adelaide. Sharon and I went down to watch the Gather Round where all the AFL matches were played in Adelaide in one weekend. And I had a reunion with those four friends I was talking about and John Dolman's brother as well. We had some good times catching up.
And about 15 years ago at the hundredth anniversary of Adelaide High, I caught up with people who were in the football team and tennis team. About a dozen of us met up in the local pub before the formal reunion and had chats about a whole lot of things. That was good fun.
Howard: It's interesting you talk about friends. I hadn't really thought about the fact that we didn't spend much time together other than if we were playing sport. And the sports we played were different from each other. Probably the only one in common was football.
While I was at Glossop High School, Mum used to drive me down to Adelaide for tennis coaching. It was only once a fortnight, so I used to play football on the other fortnight for Obama and Monash Junior Colts, under 14s. We used to get beaten most times, but I ended up winning the Best and Fairest that year and we had some good matches against some top teams.
It's interesting because one of the guys I used to play a lot against was a young kid from Cobdogla—that name I've given you. Steve McFarlane was his name. He was a very good sports person, particularly good at cricket, also very good at tennis and football. We used to play against each other a lot.
He never ended up beating me in tennis, although he should have done once. He had a sitter of a shot on the net in a tournament in Tintra. His eyes must have lit up and he hit it too far—hit it out by about 20 centimeters. And he ended up losing to me.
But as a footballer, he won Best and Fairest for the whole comp. And that's in the same year that I was actually runner up in that whole comp to him. But I think he would have gotten 30 votes, which would have averaged about second best on the ground every match.
Steve was a good guy, really quiet sort of guy. A very good sports person as in he knew how to take a win and a loss quite well. Unfortunately something happened to him later in life. He must have been in his early 30s—he drowned in the river. His friends were out fishing and somewhere he fell in and got his feet tangled up in a root system. I don't think they ever found his body actually. I didn't hear about it for about five years. I would have gone to a funeral. I was in Brisbane at the time.
So yeah, Steve. Sad because he was such a good guy. He and I were probably as competitive as anybody else in terms of being in competition with each other without being overly competitive. It wasn't a do or die effort.
Michael: You're talking about winning and losing well. What does that mean? And where did it come from? Was it from your dad or from your mum or something else?
Howard: That's probably more likely from my dad. There's another thing that sat alongside of that—my grandma wrote in my autograph book. We had autograph books that we got comments from people about. And she wrote in mine: "Good, better, best, never let it rest, till your good is better and your better best."
Which basically interprets as just try hard and do your best. The end bit—"never let it rest till your good is better and your better best"—I kind of changed that up a bit because if you're doing as well as you possibly could, you weren't necessarily going to be the best. You weren't going to win every match. So the more important thing was to try hard and do your best, which is different from being the best.
I don't know, it's probably a bit more of a natural thing. It probably came from Dad. Sometimes these things come from places where you don't remember them afterwards, but they have a strong impact on you at the time.
For me, one of the most important things, whether at school or playing tennis, was a challenge to play in such a way that nobody knew whether I was winning or losing while I was playing.
Michael: I see what you mean, yeah.
Howard: Apparently it was quite funny because I got some good feedback on that one day. I was playing seniors tennis down at the Gold Coast and I'd just come off from beating a guy 6-4, 6-2 or whatever. We were chatting afterwards with a group of people and one of the guys said, "The problem with you is we want to know what your score is but we can't tell by looking at you." So we have to ask.
And I thought, that's good. Because I feel like a lot about intimidating opponents and doing stuff—what's the point of that, really? So that was a bit of positive feedback. It took about 50 years to come because nobody had ever said that to me before.
Michael: I saw Andy Murray interviewed recently. He was saying that he quite admired the fact that all of his great rivals—particularly Federer and Nadal and a little bit less Djokovic—they were just very good at being unflappable. They'd be down and they'd just keep going.
He said after his retirement, he'd gone to see his daughter place 19th out of 300 in the cross country. And he was over the moon—she had done so awesome. And then he was reflecting later, he said he would be so down if he lost a Grand Slam final. And he realized that he had just been beating up on himself really for his whole career.
He said he really regrets that he never learned how to just enjoy playing. He had to be winning, and being the second best in the world was dreadful. I thought it was really interesting that if he could change one thing about his career, that's what he would change—he'd learn to just enjoy the process a little bit more and have a bit more perspective on the fact that coming runner-up at two Grand Slams in a year isn't actually a sign that you're a terrible person.
Howard: Yeah, be a bit more mature. How many people never got to a Grand Slam? Well, millions actually.
Michael: So you must have been pretty darn serious about tennis if you were going off to Adelaide High and leaving home partially because of that.
Howard: Yeah, I guess I was. I remember having a chat with Mum and Dad about it the year before I went. They were saying, "You're 14 coming on 15 now. If you want to play tennis seriously, you'd need to go to Adelaide to get proper coaching and continuous play." And we agreed that was a good idea.
I didn't feel pressured to do it. It was more or less a conversation that was had. And then it was, "So where would you go and how would that be organized?" So Mum would organize.
Actually, I lived with the family of one of the tennis players, John James, and his Mum and Dad. Then the following year, Sharon came down to Adelaide because she was going to Teachers College. So she and I stayed with Miss Houston, who was a nice enough lady, but it probably wasn't a very exciting place to be in. But she was nice. And then in the third year, we stayed with Mrs. Clyde. She was a bit more engaging.
But in terms of choosing which school, of course it was going to cost money. I was either approached or was approached by King's College to give me a sports scholarship to play tennis and whatever else. King's College was a school where the boys all wear these boater hats that look pretty crappy, basically. Same hats as Brisbane Boys College have.
I said, I'm not going to that school. I'm not going to wear that hat.
Michael: Sartorial sins get the better of you!
Howard: Yeah, "you can cough up some more money." It was going to cost money to go there anyway, so there were no hat risks at Adelaide High.
Football became something that I realized, probably halfway through my time there, that I didn't really see myself playing tennis for the next 10 or 15 years of my life. It was going to cost money going to all sorts of places, probably couldn't manage that.
I did very well with my football. I was probably the best player in the high school football team in South Australia. We played in the highest grade schools comp and I was the centre half forward in that team. Got most votes and players stuff. So I probably would have played top level football in South Australia, probably with North Adelaide who asked me to train with them as a 16 year old. Once off, "have a look at him" sort of thing.
When I left school, I was thinking I would trial with them again, which was what they wanted to do. But I didn't do that because we came up to Queensland. I could have opted to stay down there, but I felt—I think my Mum and Dad—it turned out I didn't go home to Bundaberg, I went to college anyway.
I discovered I had some strengths in football that were a bit different, so that was good. I felt good about having that. But in the end, sport became not number one. When I went to college, I realized that I had a calling for teaching, educating, developing other people. Playing football and tennis was good, keep doing that, but not as a vocation. I got back to play football for Mayne, but it was semi-professional really.
Michael: Just to go back a little bit, it sounds like it was your Mum and Dad who pointed out to you that if you wanted to take tennis seriously, you needed to go to Adelaide. Just checking if I got that right.
Howard: Yeah.
Michael: It's an interesting thing for them to have done. I can only imagine they were probably very sad to send you off. It's a very supportive thing to have done.
Howard: Well, I agree with that. At the time, I don't think I really appreciated that as much as I should have as a teenager. It wasn't like they were telling me to go. They were inviting me to think about going. I guess they were just checking that I would be serious about that.
In the end, I probably felt a bit guilty about pursuing my tennis career because they'd sacrificed time and energy and money in going to school. But that was never ever mentioned.
Michael: It's not like you're signing up for a life sentence at that point. It's more, does this opportunity fit me?
Howard: Well that's right, so you have to know by going to more tournaments and so on. Which I did when I went to the state titles in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide as well as national titles, the Australian Open. Juniors and Intermediates and Men's Open titles. I was probably in the top 20 in Australia for Juniors. And there were others probably not in that top 20 that ended up making a bit of a fist of professional tennis, mainly playing doubles.
So it was possible, but in the end I was probably saying there's more to life than tennis and I'll go and do those things without knowing exactly what they were going to be.
It's interesting because Bowen had a similar thing—he decided after a year or two he didn't want to play competitively.
Michael: He said something like that to me when I was back last. Which I thought was very similar to what you just said.
Howard: Yeah.
Michael: David Foster Wallace, who became a famous author, was actually a very serious tennis player as a teenager before, essentially, coming to the same realization. He wrote some essays as an adult about top players—about Tracy Austin, about Roger Federer and a few others.
One of the interesting things in his essay about Tracy Austin: he eventually realized after watching a lot of her interviews that she just wasn't a very interesting person. And that's part of why she was such a good tennis player. She just really, really wanted to win. And there were no complicating outside factors. That's part of why she was a fantastically good tennis player.
It was an interesting way of looking at it. Quite similar to your teenage conclusion.
Howard: Yeah, I can see that. It's got to be—and she would have been teenage, like she was only 14 or 15 when she was winning Grand Slams.
Michael: That's right. She's the youngest ever winner of the US Open. Or was for a long time anyway.
Michael: So you played the Australian Open and then you moved up to Brisbane at the same time as your Mum and Dad were moving to Bundaberg, is that right? Did you consider going to Bundaberg?
Howard: No, they'd been up there for a year.
Michael: Oh okay, so you moved up from Adelaide after a year.
Howard: Yeah. So I went straight to Teachers College in Brisbane. I got a scholarship in Adelaide to go there and then got a scholarship to go to Brisbane as well, so I went to Brisbane. And that's more or less the turnover point from tennis to football as well. I put my tennis racket down over that holiday break and picked up a footy and went to training with Mayne.
Michael: I think you've told me you played in the Australian Open around 1968 or 69 or something.
Howard: 68 I think it was. It was the last Australian Open that was held when only amateurs were able to play in it. Because there'd been the breakaway group 10 years earlier when Laver and Hoad and Rosewall and all those guys took off on their own professional tour. So the best of all those players left.
The 1968 Australian Open was probably the weakest field ever. And so they gave some up-and-coming juniors an opportunity to play in the men's. I played a guy who was, I think, number three in Australia as a junior. Billy Lloyd. I think it was 6-4, 7-5, 8-6 or something like that. So I had some chances there.
Michael: Pretty good.
Howard: Anyway, I'm careful to explain to people that I'm not claiming that I'm the standard of Australian Open men's at the time. We definitely wouldn't have been playing if it had the professionals around.
Michael: Was it exciting still to do it? Was it in Melbourne?
Howard: Yes, it was exciting. Melbourne, yeah. It was Flinders Park before it changed over to where it is now.
The week before was the Linton Cup, which was the Junior Interstate Competition that was very big at the time. So the week before we played against teams like Phil Dent and John Alexander and a few other juniors that played professionally afterwards. Jeff Masters.
Michael: Those are top guys really. Great tennis players.
Howard: Yeah. I played a couple of them. Played Jeff Masters in Sydney—he beat me 6-3, 6-3. Then I played Phil Dent. We were playing in Adelaide at Memorial Drive. One time I really got very annoyed because we were playing away and he was expected to beat me. I think he was number one in Australia as a junior at the time.
We were four all and then had a very close game for 5-4, which I lost, and then he won 6-4. But in between time, there'd been three times when he'd served and hit a let cord, and I called let and returned the ball by the way. And he thought he couldn't hear the let, so he accused me of cheating basically.
I said, well, I've heard this. I've actually returned the ball back into play anyway. It's not like you aced me. So I'm getting somebody else. I'm going to get an umpire. I said, be my guest, it'll raise the point. If there are some more lets, they'll be called.
Anyway, of course there were no more lets after that, so he beat me 6-4, 6-1. But I got really upset that he was accusing me of cheating. I said, I've never taken a point in my life that wasn't mine. I wasn't about to start.
So that was annoying. But it did sort of prove—him and Jeff Masters, 6-3, 6-3 is a pretty average score, but then again it was competitive.
Probably I didn't really have a good gauge on my own level of play. I think I probably didn't always go out feeling that I should win or could win. I didn't go out feeling that I should lose either, but probably not aggressive enough in terms of winning points that were winnable and important points.
I think that helped me realize that I wasn't really aggressive enough as a tennis player to play on the tour continuously because I would have other things on my mind. I kind of didn't feel like telling people at the time because it sounds—my thinking was there's more things to life than tennis and so I'll go and do those, without knowing exactly what they were going to be.
Michael: So your Mum and Dad moved up to Bundaberg. I've heard you mention this a number of times over the years without ever quite getting the full story. I think I actually heard your dad mention it once or twice, very indirectly. It seemed like it was probably still quite a touchy subject for him. So what actually happened at the local hotel or the club?
Howard: Yeah, the club. It was very upsetting for Mum and probably for Dad too.
What happened was, it would have been during my second last year and last year at high school. Unbeknownst to me, Dad's job at the club was to be the manager. So he employed people to look after the place and to be the barman and all that sort of stuff.
Over a period of time, one of those people—a guy called Lehman—was pinching money out of the till at the club. That started off fairly low key and then upgraded. Dad wasn't sure initially who it was or what it was.
But the short story is that he realized there was money being taken ruthlessly. And so he actually replaced some of that lost money out of his own pocket. So instead of fronting up and sacking the guy, which he could have done—the way he ended up knowing who it was, was this guy Lehman went on holidays for two weeks and during that time there was no money disappearing.
But it caused a lot of tension at home because—Mum wanted to know why their money should be used to prop that up. So there were a few arguments at home about all that. Dad just wanted to give this guy another chance. But the guy had previously been in trouble with the law. He's a local guy—he'd pinched money from the last place he'd worked at.
So Dad's management committee at the club ended up sacking Dad for not taking appropriate managerial action. And that in itself was something that some people felt was just a bit over the top—let's sack this guy now anyway and then we'll start all over.
One of the downfalls of Dad being involved a bit in politics, because he was a Labour Party candidate, is that there were a goodly number of people from the local community who were not Labour Party supporters. And the word was that they used this as an excuse because of their crankiness at Dad being a Labour guy.
Having said that, he had people who were supporting him, but not enough to make a difference. So eventually he lost his job there, went back to still working on the block anyway. But I think they found it too stressful to be in a community where that had happened. And Dad probably felt guilty about it.
He did tell me that he regretted not doing what he should have done.
Michael: What did he think he should have done? Just sack the guy?
Howard: Yeah. After giving him a chance or two. And it's not appropriate for the family money to be spent on somebody else's indiscretions.
That was not good. He mentioned that to me—he sort of apologized at one point when we were up in Brisbane about the club and whatever. I said, we don't think, give a second thought to what your role was in that. You've said what you should have done but people should have been much better about it than that.
I'm pretty sure that if I'd known about it—I didn't know any of this was going on until after he got the sack—I certainly would have had my piece to say to some of the people on that management group who I know he helped for various things and who spoke against him.
Anyway, so that's the reason behind that. And of course, it was probably a bit convenient. I think Mum would have been more affected by it than Dad. And I think she was probably pushing to get a hotel in Bundaberg and be back in familiar territory there anyway. So it wasn't an unnatural thing to do, but it certainly wasn't something they would have done otherwise.
So I'm not sure how old I would have been. 15, 16—16 probably when that happened.
Michael: If your mum was feeling held out publicly to dry, did you feel that way at all? Or was it just water off a duck's back?
Howard: No, I didn't. That's what I said to Dad. I said, Dad, I don't see it as my problem or your problem. It's their problem. You've done very little wrong. And certainly punishment's worse than the crime.
I just said to him, no, absolutely no way that it's had any negative effect on our lives. The positive effect is that you're just a bit more wary about trusting people in those sort of situations and take early action rather than when it's too late. I didn't say that to Dad, but that's what my learning was out of it.
Not that that's ever really occurred in my life since then that I've had to worry about that, but it's still a lesson—that people aren't always good people. Obviously, what Dad did wasn't illegal. It wasn't like he was breaking the law. He was trying to support somebody else and doing it through his own means. It was mismanagement if you like, but it wasn't unlawful.
There was no talk about Dad taking the money or anything like that. That was all well known. He knew that was the guy, Lehman, who had been doing the trick. And one of the other barmen had thought that was the case as well. And he was worried because he thought he might be thought of—and there were only actually two barmen apart from Dad.
But yeah, Mum got quite obsessed by it really, to the point where I think it became quite difficult for Dad to handle Mum's obsession with what was wrong. But it was an injustice. I felt the same way. Injustice had been perpetrated and people should have done better. They had a chance to do something better than they did.
Michael: Did your parents go back much to Monash in later years?
Howard: We did go a couple of times. We went during that time when Stuart's football was on. Do you remember?
Michael: Yeah, I remember that well.
Howard: We came back down through to Monash and we went to the club and had a drink. There was a new guy taking over—all that sort of stuff that had happened years before, everybody had moved on.
And then some of Dad's old tennis mates—the Fundaks and the Vineys and the Harrises—we met down at the pub and had good chats about stuff. But Dad was not quite himself then really. People were expecting him to make a little speech or something like that. He deferred to me actually. I must have been like mid to late 30s. So I made a little speech just to say how appreciative we were of those people who had been good friends of Dad's for a long time, and how it was just a pity that things hadn't worked out quite the way they expected originally.
But that was a good night. It was interesting though—when we talked earlier about my approach to playing tennis professionally and how that changed—on that night at the club, one of the guys, John Hinwood actually, we were having a little chat on the side and he said, "I'm surprised you didn't actually play professional tennis. You're better than so and so and so and so," who he mentioned.
I said, okay, it was just quite simply from his point of view, he saw it that way. I didn't see it that way. Not that I was comparing myself to other players at the time because you just go out and play. But it was interesting that he had a perception that that's something that I would have done. And that he thought I was capable of doing that.
Michael: I'm just thinking—your mum was so, so, so proud of you. When I was 8 or 9 she'd take out old scrapbooks and show mostly me and Stuart—Kate would have been a bit too young—all these old things of you and particularly Sharon and to some extent Vicki and Robyn. Stuff you'd been doing and races you'd run and all the tennis stuff.
I'm just connecting that to this sending you off to Adelaide Boys High. It probably wasn't really just about your tennis. She and your dad were probably thinking of it in terms of—he's very good at lots of different things, and this is a slightly bigger world, and maybe he can go off and see some of these other possibilities which you're not necessarily gonna see in Monash.
Howard: Yeah, quite possibly. I can't recall a particular conversation saying that, but I can imagine that might have happened. Like, "there'll be other things that you'll enjoy," which I did.
It was quite a different environment for me at Adelaide High, because I went from Glossop High School where it was pretty much white Anglo-Saxon population to the class that I started in at Adelaide High which had 29 kids and there were 17 different nationalities. Because it was in a city—Adelaide—so Italians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Czechs. And they had all been either the next generation, so they weren't the first generation there, or they might have been born overseas and come very early to Adelaide.
So I got to see a totally different culture really. That was interesting times.
The interesting thing with me is that I actually failed my third year at high school. My intermediate year.
Michael: This was at Glossop.
Howard: Yeah, and so between Glossop and Adelaide High—theoretically in the day if you got good marks for everything that was fine, but if you didn't get a pass mark in English you would fail the whole year.
So I still can't figure out how, because I wasn't that bad at English at all, so I must have stuffed up something that I didn't know I was stuffing up. But whatever, Mum went and advocated for me to the high school that I shouldn't stay in intermediate at Adelaide High, that I would go into the fourth year, the leaving year, which I did. And then I repeated that year.
So because I was always a year and a half younger than most people—a year at least—some people were probably similar age but I didn't come across too many. So I had to repeat year 11. Which I didn't mind, that was sort of okay, because I was only 16 at that point. But more or less the same age as you. When you went to school, you were five when you went to year one and you were 16 when you finished year 12. 17 when you started uni.
Michael: That's right.
Howard: Anyway, so I wasn't a very good student, as it turns out. If I was smart or anything, it wasn't at physics and chemistry and maths 1, maths 2—even though I got through, rather miraculously.
Michael: So your attention was elsewhere. So then your Mum and Dad moved up to Bundaberg—
Howard: Mm-hmm.
Michael: I'm just looking at the time here. We've been going for an hour and 20 minutes and we did a bit of setup time as well.
Howard: Yeah. No, I'm ready to call it a day.
Michael: Alright, let's stop it.