January 2, 2026 (Brisbane, Australia) and January 1, 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: Okay, so the next session. Last time we got up to you had basically finished high school and had moved up to Brisbane a year or so after your mum and dad had moved to Bundaberg. Do you want to just say a little bit about what your first impressions of Brisbane were? You moved up to go to Teachers College, right?
Howard: Yeah. So how it happened was at the same time as I was supposed to be going to Teachers College, the Australian tennis open was being held in Milton, Brisbane, and I was in the South Australian Linton Cup team playing at Milton more or less while college started. So I missed the first two weeks of college while I was playing Linton Cup, and also played in the Australian Open Juniors. So that was the first year that all the pros came back—Laver and Hoad and a few others. They took over all the spots that we previously had the previous year.
Michael: So this is 1969 then.
Howard: Yeah. Would have been the year 69. The interesting thing about going to tennis—I got jumped off the plane and had to go to our motels. We were staying at Indooroopilly, but the taxi driver cracked himself when I asked him to go to Indooroopilly. And then we had to also go to Coorparoo. So we got a very good education from the taxi driver about some of the more interesting suburb names.
Michael: Yeah.
Howard: So I'm not sure where that warrants a feature in the book. Anyway, so the idea was that we stayed as a team for the entire two weeks in a place at Indooroopilly. And I think we ended up third or something in our Linton Cup team. I actually played—Mike Lorenzo and I played on the centre court at Milton in the junior doubles, which we lost. So that was a nice little experience, even though of course there was an early morning match, so there were hardly any people there watching, but that was good.
Michael: So this would have—how did you actually get up to Brisbane? Did you drive up or did you fly?
Howard: No, flew. So the interesting thing—I was picked in the South Australian Linton Cup team, they knew that I was going to stay in Queensland afterwards. So if they wanted to, they could have picked somebody else for following years, sort of investing in another person rather than me again, because it was the second year that I played in the cup. But no, they paid for all my fares and all that sort of stuff, except for a return fare from Brisbane to Adelaide. So everything had been set up and that's how that worked.
Michael: How much did you actually send up?
Howard: I can't remember the details, but I probably sent up just a few packages of stuff and then it would have mainly had just clothes, tennis rackets, a few other things. Anything that had been at home in Monash that would have been useful would have already been sent up the previous year—Mum and Dad would have taken that up.
Michael: Okay. Alright, so you would have gone to retrieve it from Bundaberg.
Howard: Yeah, but the thing is I was going to wherever I was staying—I didn't need beds or wardrobes or anything like that. Wherever I was staying, either at Bundaberg Hotel or with a family in Brisbane, which is where I did stay for three years, obviously that was like board and lodging.
Michael: Did you—actually, I'm really curious, where was that place?
Howard: That was at Wellington Road at Banyo. Banyo's out in the sticks a little bit at the time, just another suburb really. Fairly old suburb in some ways. And the O'Sullivan family were a really nice family. Terry and Lois and two older boys that were older than me and two young girls that were younger than me. They were 10 I think and 12 or something like that. And I had a little sleep-out bed on the veranda sort of thing. Spent three years there. When I think about it, I didn't really think about it at the time—it was just what happened. Had no car, so I went by train from Banyo Station or Virginia Station, one of the two, to Wooloowin Station, which is where college was.
Michael: It's not that far, I guess. I don't know, it would be what, a few stops, probably?
Howard: Yeah, probably half a dozen, I think. Northgate and Nundah. Actually probably maybe only four.
Michael: How much did it cost at the time, do you remember?
Howard: I don't. Well, as college students we had free travel, free rail, because we were under a bond from the state government. They paid us to go to college because they were short of teachers and they wanted to guarantee supply.
Michael: This was probably—Joh was probably premier by this point? Yeah.
Howard: He would have been, yeah. That was interesting in itself.
Michael: I guess you probably wouldn't have heard of Joh in South Australia, but you would have heard of him pretty quick once you came to Queensland.
Howard: Not really. Pretty much, yeah. I had a bit to do with Joh actually at one point when I was at college.
Michael: Oh yeah, what happened?
Howard: Well, it's a long story how it got to this, so I'll just give the short story to start with. At college, apart from doing a bit of studying, learning a few things, and going to prac and all that sort of stuff, tuning into lectures—it was like an extended secondary school really. A bit more sophisticated, but not much more sophisticated than year 11 or 12.
Somewhere or other, I got roped into being nominated as president of the student union. And so I duly got elected. Part of what we did at the end of the first year of that was we advocated to increase the allowance for teachers college students. That was knocked back a few times. We went and advocated. I probably met about a dozen ministers along the way, because it was a fairly important thing really, because the allowance that they had for most people was really hardly enough to subsist on. So there was a good argument for how that should change.
But at the end of the first year, my first year of college, '69, we realised that Joh's daughter was going to be a college student the following year, 1970. And so we hatched a little plan, which was to take our plight a little bit more in the public arena so that newspapers sort of ploughed the story about teachers college students not having enough money, and therefore affecting quality of teaching, etcetera. But what was actually happening, and we thought it might happen, was that—I think Beth was her name, really nice woman. We had a chat to her just generally speaking about stuff, and let her know that our plan was to probably go on strike maybe in the first few weeks of college. There was in no way a threat, it really was just "by the way, you might need to know, it's going to be announced shortly."
Anyway, before the strike could be announced, we got a phone call from Joh. Joh said, "We'd like to chat to you folks." So we went in, a little group of three or four of us there, had a chat with Joh about stuff, and we duly got the biggest increase of any union ever in the history of Queensland, which was from $10 to $13—so we had a 30% increase per week. And mostly, most people were paying about $7 or $8 a week for their board or rent or whatever.
Michael: Was she at Kedron Park Teachers College? [Yes] Okay, yeah, so kind of very awkward for her, no matter what, if you guys have decided that you're gonna go on strike and now all of a sudden—what does she do? She's actually in a pretty tough spot. So it's an interesting situation.
Howard: Well, I think Joh was smart enough to realise that he didn't want to put his daughter into that position. Small amount of money was involved anyway, and they should have done it per se. So that was a meeting with Joh—he actually wanted to know whether I could speak Danish, because he could speak some Danish.
Michael: Really?
Howard: He was born in Denmark. Anyway, it was quite an amicable meeting, all over in 15, 20 minutes. And the parting remarks were, "Okay, yeah, no, I'm sure we can do something about that. We'll let you know probably next week. I'll be talking to Cabinet tomorrow or next Monday or whatever it was." So there it was.
Michael: So just to go back—I was just sort of thinking about stuff that you brought up to Queensland with you. Obviously clothes and other items like that. It's occurring to me, I don't know whether or not you listened to music or had a record player or read books or did anything much like that. Did you bring records up or books or magazines or anything like that?
Howard: Probably would have bought a few things like that. I would have bought some cassette tapes more so than records because I had a few of those and then we could play those at various spots at college. There was always somebody who had some music going.
Michael: So what kind of music did you like?
Howard: Well, I quite liked some of the Beatles stuff and Bee Gees. But interestingly, when I got out to teach in my first year with my year five-six class, I had a music session at the beginning of every day. So we just came into class and I selected something that I thought might be of interest to people in the classical music line. So there's a whole lot of that. And then there are the occasional pop music stuff. And of course kids got to nominate some things that they might like to hear as well. So it would have been at least 10 minutes of that each day. I must have thought that music was a good way to start the day and to get people settled into something, even if it was just settled into their chairs.
So I've always actually liked music, but very varied stuff. Some Rolling Stones stuff I like, but other stuff I hated. In the classical music line it was things like the William Tell Overture and a few other Mozart, Tchaikovsky. But I couldn't say now who was what with all that. I wouldn't say I was big on music, but quite enjoyed it.
Michael: And the O'Sullivans—I don't think I ever met them. Did you stay in touch with them at all over the years?
Howard: No, not really. Terry was an interesting guy. He was always up for a talk about anything, particularly sport. He worked full time with Australia Post in the city. He was pretty vigorous with supporting sport, which I found out one day when he and his brother took me to Lang Park to watch my first ever match of rugby league. Wests played Norths. I didn't know much about it, but he was sitting next to me. I was sitting actually between him and his brother.
Anyway, things were going quite fine, just normal sort of crowd reactions. At one point I realised just how he had a bit of a volatile approach to barracking. And there was a guy in the crowd, two rows down, who said something that Terry objected to. So Terry told him his objection—I can't remember what it really was, but "what would you know mate," that sort of thing. And the guy turned around said, "what would you know, mate?"
Anyway, before I could do anything, Terry had jumped up and was about to leap across two rows of people and have a go at this guy. And his brother—he knew what was about to happen—so he held Terry back. I sort of thought, wow, that was a near miss really. But Terry wasn't really like that as a human being normally, but footy must have got him going there.
But they were just a really nice couple and I got along quite well with the young girls who just liked the idea of having another brother basically. And I did touch base with them for a little while, probably for a year afterwards, just the odd phone call or something like that. But I think they also had another person staying with them at that point. So they were fairly permanently having college students board with them. I probably got overtaken by whoever friend was next.
Michael: So it was a two-year teachers college, right?
Howard: It ended up being three. Well, it was two to start with, so I was on a two year scholarship. And then after the first year, they changed over to three years. And if you're already at college and you wanted to go into a third year, you could apply for that, which I did and which I got. Obviously that meant I just spent one more year studying, but also it meant that you got paid a higher rate when you started as well.
Michael: Okay, three years at Kedron Park Teachers College. We should probably talk more about that. I mean, that's where you met Mum. And you also had, I gather, quite a few adventures involving the Student Union and probably some involving tennis as well at that point. So let's start with Mum.
Actually, I'll tell you the version of the story which you told me many, many years ago or Mum told me many, many years ago, which is that you had both decided to run for the student council and Mum was going to run for secretary and you were running for president. I don't know where those respective ideas came from. Actually, I'd be pretty interested to know how you had the ideas. But then apparently Mum was like, "Okay, I'm going to go and meet the other candidates." So she's just sort of asking around, "How do I find out where these people are?" And when she asked about you, they said, "Go down to the tennis courts and there'll be a big tall guy bashing a ball backwards and forwards." And that's how the two of you met.
Howard: That's right. That's very accurate. And how we came to be nominated was interesting, because Tom and Carmel Hewlett — well, Tom was president of the student union the year before I was, and Carmel was secretary as well the year before. And they met.
Michael: I didn't know that.
Howard: But Tom was very keen to make sure that another person who was nominating didn't get elected because he thought he would be. And then he sort of knew of me a little bit, but not much really—mainly through my sporting stuff—and he basically enrolled me in the idea. And then Alan Morgan, who was in the same year as me, he was also from Bundaberg as it turns out. So he was nominated as Vice President and he convinced me that I should run as President.
And so it was me as President, Alan Morgan as Vice President, Wendy Ricardo she was then as Secretary, and then a woman, Cathy Pryor, was Assistant Secretary. And she took over as Secretary when Mum went over to Mount Gravatt College where the special needs courses were run. So she was only at Kedron for one year. That was about half of the term in office basically. So she went to Mount Gravatt and did her stuff there. She was still only on a two years scholarship. So she finished two years. Yeah, we just hooked up basically and the rest is history.
Michael: Do you remember your first conversation or what was the first actual impression? What actually happened?
Howard: Yeah, good question, because I still remember exactly where we were when we had our first conversation. Obviously she'd done her reconnaissance and decided that I looked okay at least. And apparently people seemed to think I was an okay person, so I passed that test without her chatting to me.
But then somebody pointed her out or—I've forgotten exactly how—and she was at the top of a set of stairs and she was leaning over the set of stairs and I was coming up the stairs and said, "Oh, we should probably talk." And I remember what she was wearing—a dress that was like a mixed colour of like a maroon and orange, which sounds interesting.
Yeah, she looked pretty good to me. So I thought not that looks are everything obviously, so yeah, and then so that was just to being elected and we ended up getting elected—I think I got 78% of the vote. So it was a fairly strong win basically.
Michael: What was your first conversation about then? Do you remember how long it was? Was it a short conversation? Was it a long conversation?
Howard: It was probably relatively short, like it might have been five minutes. And it was more just about this idea that we might get elected. I can't remember the exact detail or anything like that, but it was more just saying hello and knowing who was who, and then probably organised to meet with the other candidates, the others in our team basically. Four or five. And went on from there.
Michael: And when did you see her next after that?
Howard: It would have been probably daily really, to organise things and what have you. And certainly after the election—the election was probably only about two weeks after that. It might have been a bit longer.
Michael: Was this early in the year?
Howard: No, it was a changeover thing. They decided that previously they had elections at the start of the year and people hardly knew anybody. So they changed it during that year so that it was about two thirds of the way through that year when I got elected. We got elected around about August, September, something like that. And then we went through to like August, September the following year and it just kept going like that. So Tom and Carmel were only running the show for about seven months.
Michael: And then basically you had a year over which you were president and Mum was secretary and so on. Is that right?
Howard: Well, she was secretary for three of those months because she went over to Mount Gravatt.
Michael: Of course. Yeah. Because of the Mount Gravatt switch. Right. But okay. So how quickly did you realise this was going to be an important relationship?
Howard: Probably fairly quickly I would say.
Michael: What's fairly quickly? Are we talking about 30 seconds, 30 minutes, 30 days?
Howard: Well, the first 30 seconds were quite attractive. I didn't walk away saying, "I'm gonna marry that girl." But yeah, she was very good and alive and well and kicking and all that sort of stuff. A bit of a sense of humour was important. It's just one of those things when you meet somebody that you haven't met before and you go away with a positive vibe. So that's what happened.
And then we had our first unofficial date. Alan Morgan and Cathy Pryor were pretty good friends too. And we went to the pictures one night, the four of us. So that's when we sort of started holding hands and all that sort of stuff. It was good.
Michael: When was that? Like a few weeks after the first?
Howard: No, I think—well, there's a bit of intrigue, because I had been going out with another girl up till then. And then probably a few weeks after the election, after we teamed up, I sort of dropped her, I suppose, is the way of saying it. So she and I parted company and I had in mind that Wendy and I would hook up. So that's how it turned out. And then we got married two years after that, more or less.
Michael: When did you decide to get married and who asked who and how did it all happen?
Howard: Well, it sort of got to the point where we both felt like we probably didn't need to ask. But I remember the time when we thought—well, I think Wendy might have even said, "Well, we should probably get ourselves a bit organised." Because it was nearly the end of my year in college, and we knew that we were going to probably get married soon after college finished.
I think it'd be fair to say that we both were aware that we were going to get married. And then just formalised that.
Michael: So hang on, let me just see if I've got the timeline right. So you started college in 1969. You met Mum sort of the second half of 1969, September of 1969. And then it would have been early 1971 that you decided to get married. Is that like March or something of 1971 during your third year that you realised that you were going to "get organised" as Mum apparently said? Is that right?
Howard: Yeah, those words—I'm not sure whether it was "get organised," but "let's sort this out" or "let's get some dates." So that would have been it.
And that was pretty much it. Wendy had her second year of college obviously over at Mount Gravatt—it was pretty full on because it was special needs stuff which was new, like a totally new thing. And she had to travel from Redcliffe to Mount Gravatt. In the early days of that, but then she got a unit with another person over at Stones Corner, which is not that far from Mount Gravatt. And she had a car then in the second year, an old Hillman. So we got around a bit in that.
And then after she graduated at end of 1970 and was getting paid to teach, she bought a Mini Clubman, actually. And that became our car. Other than that, we used the old Hillman thing that she had and then used her dad's car a bit to get around in when we needed to.
Michael: So it must have been pretty hard on both of you if you were over in Banyo and she's over in Stones Corner and Mount Gravatt. I don't know how long it took you to make your way over but it would have been at least an hour, probably quite a bit more.
Howard: Yeah, about that. Mostly because it was Wendy—Wendy had the vehicle while I was still at Banyo. It was her mainly doing that travelling when we met up and etcetera. Because in my second year, I was president there from September through to the following September, more or less. And then I got elected into the Australian Student Teachers Union as the state secretary for that. So we had conferences and other events for that during second and third year. And also I was the president of the state Student Teachers Union, which again advocated for all student teachers. That would have been in the changeover years, '70, '71 sort of thing.
Michael: So what other stories do you have of that time?
Howard: Oh, zillions really.
I suppose a lot of it was around sport being played and all that sort of stuff. Because the college had a senior physical education lecturer who was extremely well organised and positive about students learning all the rules of as many games as possible so that when they went out as teachers they knew all those. So there was an intergroup competition that went on for the entire year in about 12 different sports. And so all groups played in a little mini comp at lunchtimes. So every lunchtime there was something on—volleyball, tennis, rugby union. Not all sports got a Guernsey but we did play rugby league as well. And basketball—I found that I really enjoyed playing basketball and volleyball. And we played hockey as well. They were games that I hadn't played competitively but ended up playing for the college as well in the Brisbane comps—basketball and volleyball and baseball.
So I enjoyed all those, but they took up time as well. So they dropped out soon after. When we got married, you have lots of things that you're doing outside of what you'd done previously with study. But I played a bit of baseball and a bit of basketball after I left college, I think for just one year.
But during the year, there was a big competition on that the sporty types all lapped up. Those that weren't sporty types knew that they were at least learning how to play the various codes of things. So it was good.
Michael: So my understanding is—I'm just going to change the topic a little. There was some scandal associated with Hair, salacious stories appearing in the Courier Mail about the youth of today.
Howard: Yeah, well, Wendy was more involved with that than I was actually. So Hair was presented in Sydney actually. And I think Wendy went to go—this is I think before I knew her actually. And she and others, I think they hired a bus and took a bus down to watch Hair. That was probably what the newspaper article was about—was teachers college students bothering to take transport down to Sydney to watch this terrible show. And then there was a follow-up show that one of the students actually produced in Brisbane as well that was not much different to Hair. So probably that happened a year or so later. That was about as scandalous as it got, I think.
Michael: Okay. I didn't realise that didn't actually involve you. It was just Mum.
Howard: Yeah, that's right. And she had a couple of friends—Susie O'Connor I think was an actress and into all sorts of things theatre-wise, and Wendy designed and produced a whole lot of props for musicals and what have you. So she had an interest in all that.
Michael: So there's another story I've heard bits and pieces of which is that somehow you ended up escorting Princess Anne around Brisbane. So can you tell me about how that came to be and then what actually happened?
Howard: I'd like to better say that they took a selection process of the most exciting young people to do that, but they didn't do that.
What actually happened was that the Premier's Department—well basically there was a royal tour going on and Princess Anne was part of that tour, and they wanted to have a big fashion show out at a place called the Oasis in South Brisbane that they could invite a whole lot of teenagers and young adults along to, and she would see all the fashion of the day and she'd be excited by all that, etcetera. And so there were a couple of people to escort her. If Wendy hadn't gone to Mount Gravatt, she would have been there. She would have done it with me as well, because what they did was they asked Kedron Park Teachers College principal to nominate two people, a male and female, to do the escorting. And because I was president of the Union and at the time Cathy was secretary of the Union, we got the nod.
And I remember being asked by Norm Anderson. He sort of asked me and said, "But if you don't want to do it, you can get somebody else to do it." And I thought, well, this could be interesting if nothing else. I wasn't a monarchist or anything. I wasn't a monarchist, so it's not like I was doing it because I believed in royalty. But then again, I didn't not do it because I didn't believe in royalty. I've changed my mind since then.
Anyway, so that's how we got selected—by being preselected through another process, I suppose. But the interesting thing that I learnt out of all that was that, well, A, we had to greet her at the front of the Oasis, take her inside, sit down, chat about what we chatted about, and then the fashion parade started. And then after the fashion parade, we took her outside to mingle with all the guests. So there were probably a few hundred young people there. So we took her out and introduced her to some of the people that I already knew.
She had quite a sense of humour, so it was good fun. She didn't object too much to my jokes. So I call them witticisms—some would call them half-witticisms, but anyway.
But the interesting thing that happened, which I haven't disclosed to more than a few people since then—during the whole show, a guy, Desmond Hughes his name was, was the very pronounced fashion director, if you can imagine what that might look and sound like. He was very full of himself, let's say, probably with good effect. About three quarters of the way, nearing the end of the show, he appeared out of nowhere with a great big flourish of a huge cape and he presented the Cloak of Australian Fashion to Princess Anne at her knees.
And I just sort of—yeah, because it was pretty easy to tell that she wasn't really into that stuff. She was doing this because, whatever.
So what happened then was the talking point that I haven't talked about publicly is because I thought it might throw some bad light on her. I'm sitting here, she's sitting next to me on my left, and she picked up the Cloak of Australian Fashion, turned around so I could hear it and gave it to her lady-in-waiting behind her and said, "Put that with the other 12."
Michael: Ha!
Howard: Which I can sort of imagine—a bit boring. So anyway, I laughed because it was funny. She appreciated that—I thought it was funny, not derogatory. So she must have picked that up by that time.
Anyway, so that's all done, said and done. But afterwards, of course, there was a little press conference. And at the press conference after we had the normal sort of obligatory comments about the day, the guy from the Melbourne Truth, which was a paper that was up for salacious gossip and what have you big time, he asked me, he said, "Oh, there was a moment there where you had a bit of a laugh about something when the princess turned around…"
And I said, "Yes, I must have heard something witty that she said." And I left it at that. And he said, "I saw exactly—what did she say?" I said, "I don't think—I really can't recall exactly what she said, so it's better off not recording anything."
Anyway, he knew that there was a story there that he would have put over the front page of the Truth probably. "Princess Denigrates Australian Fashion" or whatever. Anyway, I'm glad that I sort of intuitively knew it probably wasn't a good idea to answer the question.
Michael: Clickbait journalism pre-dates modern social media.
Howard: That's right. Exactly right. Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Actually, I thought nowadays would be a time to bring that up again when she was on a visit to Australia and just make contact with Buckingham Palace and say, "By the way, you might remember me, but back in 1970 Princess Anne and I got along really well and I'd like to catch up with her again this time when she's…"
Michael: Your 55 year past friend.
Howard: That's right.
Michael: Other college stories?
Howard: Mostly sport really.
Michael: Do you have a sense of—I suppose you had already in fact been away from home quite a bit. So a lot of people have a very distinctive experience, but you'd maybe been a little bit more gradual because you'd been off in Adelaide already and it wasn't such a discrete experience. Was there some sense of—a lot of people just grow a lot when they leave home and they have some sense of becoming an adult because they've got to—did you have that sense of being stretched or…?
Howard: I probably did actually because I think one of the things I was going to raise with you as a topic was what it's like to be the country kid in a city. Because I definitely felt that—when you live in the country, you just do whatever you do. And in the city, you don't realise that city people see country people as… Well, they're surprised when they're good at something. Or not surprised, but I can remember a few times people saying to me—with the sporting stuff in particular—things like, "How come you're so good at that? You're from the country." And I said, "Well, I don't know. I'm accepting that I'm okay at things."
And then I got elected as a [High School] prefect, which in the day was a leadership position—as a senior prefect as well. And I took on responsibilities to lead teams of people. And so you did learn to be—if you've got some level of responsibility attached to you, then you sort of grew. You got older earlier in a sense.
Michael: So what was an example of such a responsibility?
Howard: Well, just organising first and second year students to get involved in things like going to sporting events or dances or something like that. I suppose the thing that I got feedback about was really positive—one of the things that prefects were invited to do, were directed to do by the principal of the school, was to help keep the school clean. And so it was our job to round up all the first and second year students and to clean up the grounds from time to time.
And most of the, well in fact all of the other prefects that I know of, did exactly that. They organised for the students to do that menial task. And I sort of felt that was a bit—I couldn't do that. So I actually picked up stuff with them. "Come on guys, let's go and do this."
And so I think I probably, without knowing I was winning brownie points, I think I got quite a few brownie points for that. Because then students would recognise that I didn't need to do that because nobody else did it. But actually picking up papers yourself as a prefect was seen to be below some of them perhaps. So that's just a little snippet. That's something that I remember having to think deliberately about what to do with that. Because it would have been easier just to organise the troops really.
Michael: Can you remember any sort of specific time when somebody looked down on you as a country kid or any specific thing where they were just a bit surprised or derogatory?
Howard: Yeah, it was nothing really derogatory. It was more the opposite. But I hadn't thought of myself as being somebody who wouldn't be as good as anybody else in an area that I felt I was good at. It's not like I went around comparing myself, but there was a bit of—it was probably one or two people that were a bit jealous of achievements because a couple of the other prefects certainly were but didn't just disclose it really.
There were a few other country kids that came to the school as well, so we got along really well, actually.
But there was a guy—actually he wasn't so much from that school, but he was from the tennis fraternity. So during the year, the Upper Murray Tennis Association organised a visit between country kids and city kids. So city kids would come up to the Riverland and play. So this happened while I was in my second last year of school or something like that.
We boarded people. So the young fellow that came to our place and stayed with us, I knew quite well. Wasn't from the school, he was from the tennis fraternity. Michael Freed, his name was. And Michael was a really nice guy. And his father was, even in that day, like a multi-millionaire. And I knew that. So at the same time, Michael was coming up to our humble little abode in Monash to stay with us for a couple of days and to play tennis. And he didn't live in this palatial sort of house at North Adelaide. He lived in this little brick thing.
And it was a really positive thing that he said. He said, "I can't believe that you are the sort of person you are. When we think of country, we think of not having lots of opportunities." He said, "But I could see that you have, and that's more to do with your parents and your own demeanour."
Because the Nielsen family, at various times three of us would go down to Adelaide for state titles. There was hardly anybody ever from any other country place. And that was a factor of my dad feeling like that was a good thing to do and worth doing and we would be up for it, which it turns out we were.
So Michael sort of made this comment. It obviously affected his thinking because he could easily have been drawn into—like his father was obviously extremely well off and he could have had anything that he wanted materially. But he wasn't really after that.
I might have mentioned it some other time, but his father was smart enough to not give him a car when he could. He got him to catch the train and catch the bus and occasionally take him just like most other parents would. And when he did eventually get a car in his last year of school it was an old secondhand car.
And I know another guy, Neil Higgins, who was an extremely successful business person in South Australia—met up with him at a reunion of Adelaide High School only about 15 years ago. And he had the same thing, he said the same sort of thing. So it was a positive experience for me, except that I hadn't actually thought that people might have thought that we weren't up for it. And in those days, of course, there was a pretty big difference between country and city than there is at the moment, partly through the communication mechanisms and what have you.
Michael: It's really interesting. I'm just thinking about your dad's influence and I would imagine the thing with the prefects and the picking up of litter—that's something I can easily imagine your dad being pretty strongly in favour of. He was a very service-oriented person. That's my sense.
Howard: Yeah, probably.
And I think too, the other thing that—again, you get feedback when you get elected as a senior prefect for the reasons that particularly young first year and second year students gave some feedback to somebody else actually, who then told me that the reason they voted for me—because it was all by election by nomination from the school—was that I bothered to talk to anybody and everybody. It wasn't like I saw myself as just communicating with other 16, 17 year olds. I mean, we did that, but yeah.
Howard: Some things happen too that were positives that you can't really manufacture. On my first day at Adelaide High School—again I was late because I had been playing tennis elsewhere—so the senior teacher took me down to the classroom that I was going to be in. So it was during school time.
And so we went down this long corridor, got right to the end to the fourth year study that I was in. And the teacher in there was a guy called Marty Perslow, who was a really ragamuffin type teacher actually, and was prone to having some interesting stories and all this sort of stuff. Anyway, so the other teacher that escorted me down knocked on the door and said, "Mr. Perslow, you've got an extra student." But he had interrupted a story that Marty Perslow was telling the rest of the class. He was midstream in something or other.
So anyway, we interrupted that. He said, "Right, okay, what's your name," and all that. And I just poked my head really around the corner. I wasn't actually in the room. I was sort of in the doorway. So all the class could see me, but I wasn't really right in there.
Anyway, he said, "Okay, so yeah, you can come back. Later, I'm going to get your gear, and I'll see you shortly." Anyway, so I half turned to go back up the corridor. But he continued his story with the class. And the actual line that he said was, "And he offered him a cigarette." That was the line that was part of his story. And I pretended that he was offering me a cigarette and I just ducked my head around the corner and went [mimes accepting a cigarette]—and everybody killed themselves laughing.
And he thought that was—as I walked away, I heard him say, "That could be an interesting kid." So I just jagged a good witticism. But I think that story went around fairly quickly because not many odd things happen in schools really. So maybe a bit of reputation built there for whatever. As I said, you can't really do anything with that but it probably helped people feel like I'd be an okay person to have a chat to.
Apart from the fact that I didn't ever smoke—they didn't know that.
Michael: Alright, let's jump forward again a bit in time to—so you're getting married and I guess finishing up at Teachers College and presumably, actually I don't know what happened. So what's the exact ordering of events there? Because you would have finished Teachers College and gotten married. But you also, at some point I know you went off to university. Did you teach first or did you go off to university?
Howard: Taught first. The ordering is pretty much as you said up till then. So finish college, graduate, etcetera. Have the wedding organised for January of the year after I finished, which was 1972.
Michael: So 54 years ago in one day.
Howard: That's right. Tomorrow. So then I started teaching. I taught at Clontarf Beach Primary School in '72 and I was there for '72, '73, '74.
Michael: Alright, so can we just go back to the wedding? How much work was it? How did that all come together? I don't even know where it was!
Howard: It was at a church, Sacred Heart Church at Redcliffe. And then with the reception afterwards at one of the hotels at Bellevue, I think it was. And of course Rick [Wendy's father] had a photography business so his best photographer took all the photos and all that sort of stuff.
I stuffed up the joy for a lot of my mates who were there because what they had done during the reception—the ploy is to sometimes take the mickey out of or disrupt the bride and groom in some way, shape or form. So what they had done during the evening was they'd all gone outside and 20 guys had lifted our Mini Clubman up off the ground and shifted it about 50 metres to a place just up the driveway from the pub. And then they parked the photographer's car—he had a Mini as well—and parked it where our car was.
And the idea was that we were to go out and see that we couldn't get into our car, and "this is not our car," and the whole thing—we were supposed to be embarrassed by all this stuff. But as it turns out, what happened was that during the night, I went in—we both went to get changed into something more comfortable, so to speak. And I went out halfway through the night—two thirds of the way through the night—because I realised my belt, I didn't have my belt for my going away sort of stuff.
So I had to go down to the car and I discovered, of course, the car was not there. But I'm thinking, God, what's going on here? Where's the car? And then I looked up and there's the other car with toilet paper all over it and all sorts of stuff to isolate itself as our car. So I thought, okay, smart. So I got the key out and went to there and got the stuff and didn't tell anybody.
Because when we actually went out to get into the car after the reception, of course all these guys were following very closely, wanting to see the initial response on our faces. And I said to Wendy, "By the way, this is what's happened. So I'm just going to walk straight past the car that they think we think should be ours. And we'll just take note of what happens with them." So that's what we did.
And then I just turned around though and acknowledged—"Great idea guys. Unfortunately I had to come down earlier to get my belt so I could have played along but I decided not to."
They had the last laugh though really without knowing it. The wedding night was in Tower Mill in the city. And so we drove the car into the Tower Mill and drove it in underneath in the parking lot. And it still had shaving cream all over it, etcetera. Anyway, we went up to the room and had a few drinks or whatever else and getting to know each other, so to speak. I got a phone call from reception saying, "There's two policemen down here need to speak with you."
I said, "Oh yeah," I thought it was one of the mates trying to—"No, no, no, I'm sorry, sir." "No, no, I get it. It's a good idea." But they said, "No, you'll need to come otherwise we'll send these detectives up to your room."
I thought, okay. So I went down to there and the detectives said, "Just need to check with you on a couple of things. We noticed—we're chasing a Mini Clubman and we noticed that your car has got the defaced number plates on it." So it had shaving cream over it and they couldn't see what it was.
I said, "Yeah, it's just—we got married, just upstairs at the moment. Can this be a short thing?"
And they said, "Oh yeah." So they wiped off the number plate to discover that it wasn't the one that they were looking for.
Michael: Oh wow. Okay. So it was for real. That's really interesting. What a funny coincidence.
Howard: Yeah. They must have been checking most motels in the city precinct if they were chasing somebody.
Michael: It's amazing. I wonder why they—I mean that must have really wanted them because even at that time, it's not like car theft was particularly unusual. They must have been really interested for some reason.
Howard: I'm not sure it was about car theft. I think it was about a robbery or something, not of a car, but of something else from somebody's home or whatever. And then they used that car or a car.
Michael: I think you've—it might've been Mum who told me at some point in the past that your mum wasn't necessarily entirely keen on the marriage. Is that right?
Howard: Yeah, we put two and two together and figured that was probably the case because she just sort of made life a little bit difficult at some points. And I knew that while she was part of the role of sending me off to Adelaide and what have you, she really wanted me at home for some other time. And then I think that was part of the reason why I was going back up to Bundaberg or up to Queensland. And then when I didn't actually end up going to Bundaberg—we all went up there on holidays and did a bit of work at the pub and all that sort of stuff, but it wasn't the same. I think she was disappointed that I wasn't going to be around in the same way.
But secondly, I think she was not so keen on the idea of me marrying a Catholic.
Michael: Yeah.
Howard: And that's all I can put that down to. Disappointing.
Michael: Did she ever say that?
Howard: More of a question. "So you're aware that Wendy's a Catholic?" "Yes. Yes, I am."
Yeah. Apparently, Mum and her sister-in-law, who was equally dismayed at that because they were fairly right, Protestant sort of church types—they both actually went to Wendy's mum and dad's place to see whether there was something that they might do to stop us from getting married.
And my dad didn't want to be a part of that, so he didn't go, wasn't part of that show. He could have stopped them from doing it, I guess, if he'd so thought.
Anyway, my mum had asked Merle to keep it from us, the fact that she'd come to do that. But eventually a few years later, Wendy's mum did tell Wendy, because we didn't know at the time that all that had happened. But she felt that it was something that we should know about.
Michael: So what was the—did Mum's mum, Grandma, did she say what the appeal was?
Howard: It was just the Catholic-Protestant thing.
Michael: Right. That's pretty remarkable.
And I suppose Mum's mum—that wouldn't have really had any traction with her at all. I mean, she had a—I mean she married, I don't know whether Pop really identified himself as Jewish, but certainly he had a lot of Jewish heritage. So she was a Catholic marrying a Jewish boy.
Howard: Well, he was also the Salvation Army, probably more so than being Jewish, really. So yeah, no, they would have—as you say—not much traction there in terms of the religious differences.
Michael: It's an interesting thing to do—not telling you at the time and then a few years later having decided to bring it up.
Howard: Well, Wendy's mum did that. That's what Wendy's mum did.
Michael: Yeah, I'm saying it's interesting that she made that choice. I think I can understand both of those choices, but there's obviously some tension between them as well.
Howard: Yeah. And I think Wendy's mum brought it up with her because Wendy had sort of indicated that there were times when my mum seemed to be a bit defensive about stuff anyway, generally speaking, with Wendy about me. So I think Wendy's mum thought it would be a good idea to disclose what had happened to make more sense of that.
Michael: Yeah, right. Well, that can't have been easy for—well, probably in different ways for anybody.
Howard: For sure.
Michael: Was your mum at the wedding?
Howard: Yeah, yeah.
Michael: Alright, so you get married at the start of 1972 and then you go off and have your first year teaching at Clontarf.
Howard: That's right. At Clontarf Beach Primary School—1200 students there at the time. And I started off with a year three class, but then I was asked to take over the year five class halfway through the year because—anyway, it doesn't really matter—the teacher there had, was being questioned about some of his behaviour with some of the students and they wanted me to take the class and they put him onto other duties.
I don't know exactly what it was—all I know is that it was a year three class and a single year class, and the year five turned out to be a double class—60 students with two teachers. Really, really good fun. With both year threes and year fives I really enjoyed that. And I took the year fives through to year six the following year as well. And we were in a double teaching space, which was a new thing at the time, purpose built for that situation.
Howard: Then I got quite involved with running a mutual aid group for teachers who were also in a situation where they were teaching in a double teaching space. So how to teach in a combined way with another teacher with 60 kids. A mutual aid group called the MAITI group, M-A-I-T-I, for Methods, Aims, Innovations, Themes and Ideas.
Michael: Ha!
Howard: Why not? Of course the MAITI thing sort of attracted people's attention because they wanted to know what that was really about. That group we kept going for about three years and a whole lot of—it was all after school workshops. Sometimes we had a hundred people come along to workshops where we had some teachers apart from ourselves, other teachers came and talked about how they did things and what have you.
Michael: Gosh, that's remarkable.
Howard: When I think about how advanced it really was—one of the teachers was a bit of a video expert. So he videoed some of the classes in action and we actually all had sessions around all that. So that's in 1973. A bit unusual.
And that mutual aid group thing took up a big head of steam. It was very popular because it was run by teachers—wasn't run by departmental regional office people or whatever. It was run by people who were going through the same experience.
And that's when I first came across environmental studies stuff, during the time at Clontarf, at a different workshop. An American guy came across talking about environmental studies, which we hadn't really done much of. He kicked me into that.
Michael: So that's been sort of a pretty big theme of your life—organising at a community level, getting people together to help themselves in some sense.
Howard: Pretty much.
It was during those years that we started the Bunyaville Environmental Education Centre a couple of years later. And that was basically just working directly with schools and negotiating with the Department of Forestry to use some of their space for a building and what have you. So that in itself was quite innovative.
Michael: I didn't realise that you were involved with that actually.
Howard: Yeah, I was the coordinator of the project actually, and the principal.
Michael: Well, probably tens of thousands of people at least have gone through that, maybe hundreds of thousands.
Howard: Probably. So that would have been—I think it opened probably in '75 or '76, so that would be 50 years ago. It probably has had a couple of thousand people each year, maybe not that many.
Michael: It would have, because I remember we would go and do stuff when I was at Patrick's Road and places like that. It was just one of those things that existed out in the community and I took for granted that schools would take kids off [to them]. I can't remember—we probably went maybe five to ten times over the course of my primary school to go and see it. I think there were a lot of different schools taking classes off. There would have been 200 kids from Patrick's Road probably going through it every year at least. There would have been at least a dozen other schools.
Howard: Yeah, I think the centre there probably would have had kids at it for at least 30 weeks of the year and probably about four days a week. So it's 120 or whatever, multiplied by—usually busloads of at least 50.
Michael: That sounds right. That's whatever, 5 to 10,000 kids a year. Over 50 years, it's a quarter of a million kids. That's a lot of kids.
It's funny, even here when I'm walking around [here in Berkeley] — I remember going around Bunyaville on those trips and they explained to you the different gum trees and stuff about the bark and whatnot. And now when I'm walking around Northern California—there's a beautiful eucalypt forest five minutes walk from where I am and it puts me in mind of those actually.
Howard: Is that right? There you go.
Michael: I had no idea of that. That's really interesting. And yeah, a bit more community organising to help itself.
Howard: Well, part of that was I got hooked into the Morton Region Environmental Education Council, which was chaired by Lady Anna Cowan, who was the wife of the then Governor General Sir Zelman Cowan. So she was on that. And then Dr. Peter Botsman, who was the principal of Kelvin Grove Brisbane CAE or whatever it was then. And then another guy who was the chief executive of the Department of Environment at the Commonwealth government level.
So they were the three main people involved with that council. And I was there as a fourth person. There might have been another fifth one. Eddie Butt was an architect from the Works Department.
And my job was really—I was sort of the coordinator and secretary to that group and helped organise a whole lot of different things to do with environmental education. And we convinced the director general at the time that it was a good idea to have environmental education centres. So he helped spawn a few, including the Bunyaville one. It might have happened actually before that. So that's how all those things sort of merged into a bit of momentum about that.
Michael: I notice that you say "somehow it happened." And just over the years, you've told me an awfully large number of stories where "somehow it happened." I suspect you're probably understating your role rather considerably. That you're actually pretty good at going into bat on these things and then people trust that whatever you're doing is a pretty good thing for everybody involved.
Howard: Hmm. Maybe. I don't know. You'd have to ask them.
Michael: Well, I sort of implicitly have, because I don't know how much that environmental centre cost to get going and keep running, but it's not a trivial sum of money. So somebody trusted that it was a pretty good idea. And I guess the same is true of the other environmental centres.
Michael: Okay, so we're in the early '70s at Clontarf. Actually I did want to ask—when did you buy a house? Walkers Road or I don't know—where were you living?
Howard: We started off—we rented a couple of places, one at Nundah and then we bought the house at Walkers Road. And that would have been probably—we were probably only married two years. Because we actually had the house before you were born. We've got photos of you in furniture that we had only at that place.
So we invested in that, which is interesting because we'd been looking at houses out at Bracken Ridge and all those places and we ran into a guy who was a real estate agent. He took a bit of a liking to us, I think—we told him what we were trying to do. He said, "I'll keep an eye out for you." He said, "I think I've got a place over at Everton Hills. Would you be interested in that?" I said possibly, depends on the price really.
So it was $10,850 to buy this place which was on 64 perches which was like double the size of a normal block. We were always keen on a bigger block. Yeah, so we went there and then we went off to Barber Road after that, after probably three or four years at Walkers Road.
Michael: It would have been probably closer to five years because I was four when you moved to Barber Road.
Howard: Okay, there you go.
Michael: That place wouldn't sell for ten thousand eight hundred dollars today. I mean, that 64 perches there, probably the land alone is probably worth at least half a million dollars.
Howard: Yeah, the house there—well, I'm not sure there'd be more since then.
But the people we lived next door to were rather interesting. The Harts. So Roy Hart and his wife—he was in and out of jail a bit for various things, including arson. So we were a bit worried about the house getting burnt down, etcetera. And his wife ran a prostitute ring in Fortitude Valley.
And so they had a house on about an acre next to us—it was very much like dueling banjos out of Deliverance, actually, the whole sort of setup. But we worked at getting along quite well with them, which we did. Roy knew that we had a dog and the dog didn't like alcohol. And a couple of times GR [the dog] had gone for him, kept him off the premises if he ever wandered a little bit too close.
He just came out of jail when we came into that house next door to him. What was he in for? He was in because he had burnt down the house of the judge who had put him in jail for burning down the pub at another place.
Michael: Oh god.
Howard: So evidently it only took him a few months to do that. Anyway, talk about funny. So we weren't too keen on staying there for too long anyway, even though we'd apparently managed it quite well.
And then we went to Barber Road. Actually, the builder who built Walkers Road—which was there, we bought it as it was, we didn't get it built as such—he was the same builder that ended up building our house at Barber Road. So we got him to build our house there. He was also the guy that I convinced he should build the Environmental Study Centre building. So he did that as well.
Michael: Really? That's interesting.
Howard: Yeah. Wendy was, as you know, pretty good with designing houses and so on. She designed that house at Barber Road. He so liked the house that he asked Wendy if it was okay if he used the house as an entrant into the Master Builder Association Home of the Year—which it actually won in its category. So that was pretty good. Wendy was pretty happy with that. Well, so was I. And Vic Newell was the name of the builder. He was very happy.
Michael: We've been going an hour and a half, maybe not a bad point at which to call it quits for today. We'll pick it up another day.
Howard: Yeah. No, thanks for that, Mick. That was very good.