January 10, 2026 (Brisbane, Australia) and January 9, 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, so last time we got to—let's see, we were up to basically you were teaching at Clontarf. You'd gotten married, you had a house at Walker's Road. Actually, I think I probably entered the story rather soon after this. I don't know, was there anything else particularly notable?
Howard: Not really. In terms of teaching, I left Clontarf in '74—'72, '73, '74—to do a year up at Mount Nebo. So I was principal of the school at Mount Nebo in 1975.
Michael: You became a principal very quickly.
Howard: Yeah, well, they must have been shorthanded or something. I'm not quite sure. One teacher school. The only thing that happened in between was with football—we won the Premiership in 1973.
Michael: Did you start playing at Mayne sort of immediately when you came to Brisbane?
Howard: More or less. That's when I decided I didn't want to continue doing tennis tournaments on the circuit or anything like that. I'd finished being a junior, under 19—I missed by about a week or something to stay on as a junior for another year—but decided not to and went to Teachers College.
In my first week or two at college, having been boarding with the O'Sullivans, Terry O'Sullivan became aware that I played Aussie rules. He had a friend at his workplace, Australia Post, who was a Mayne supporter. He said, "Yeah, he comes from South Australia, he can probably play footy." That's a pretty big stretch for anybody, but that's how I came to be at Mayne.
Turns out about a week after I'd signed, my dad, who was at the Grand Hotel at the time, had a friend from Coorparoo AFL who became very interested—in fact they offered me a secondhand car as a bit of an enticement. But I'd already signed with Mayne, so that wasn't going to happen. And Coorparoo was on the other side of the city. So I started playing for Mayne in '69. That was the first year in a long time that Mayne had ever been bottom of the table. Pick your eyes out of that one. So I won the Best and Fairest that year.
Michael: You're the best on a bad team, is that what you're saying :-)?
Howard: Something like that. There were some good players in the team, but they'd lost quite a few from their previous year and the year before when they'd won the Premiership. A few old hands retired—about three or four of them had played for Queensland, so they were at that level. So they were rebuilding.
Michael: What year did you win the Premiership? Was it '73 or '74?
Howard: '73. We were in the grand final in '74 as well, but lost that.
Michael: I remember growing up seeing Tommy Blacker and his family. You were obviously pretty good mates. Were you both fullbacks in the Mayne team?
Howard: He was a back pocket—the player alongside the full back who looks after the opposition rover, normally a smaller person. That's all changed now, but that's how it was then. I only just met Tommy through footy. He'd played for Mayne previously but had been conscripted to go to Vietnam, so he'd spent a year and a half there.
Michael: I remember Tommy always spoke very loudly and was obviously a little bit deaf, which I assume was from artillery in Vietnam.
Howard: He was in the artillery section. They would have had headphones and all that, but that probably only minimised the pain, not excluded it.
Michael: You weren't drafted, but I presume you knew a lot of people who were. Did it hang over you? Were you sharply aware of it?
Howard: The conscription was a lottery. Number 15—15th of January—came up. I was 14th of January, so I missed by one day. At the time you're certainly aware of it. You wait until the lottery happens, and then if you want to avoid conscription, you have to apply. Quite a few people who went to teacher education were allowed to not go. So it was fairly likely I might not have gone anyway. There were also guys from the tennis fraternity who missed even though their number came up.
As you get a bit older you get more of a sense of the meaning of war. In those years there was a buildup of anti-Vietnam sentiment in Australia, so there were a lot more conversations about it. I was glad I didn't go. That's why they're conscripted—because they couldn't rely on people wanting to go.
Michael: It's such an interesting change from just one generation prior. You were talking about your dad and Uncle Darcy fighting over the ability to go. Was that for World War II or the Korean War?
Howard: Second World War. People's attitudes were just very different. In the 30s and 40s, Australia was very attached to Great Britain. Whatever Great Britain requested, Australia sort of did, even though at the beginning of the Second World War Australia wasn't really in any danger—turns out it was later when the Japanese joined.
With Vietnam it was American-led. People hadn't quite gotten on to the idea that it was okay to do what Americans told us to do. There was a certain amount of that, but it was different. There was a lot of fuss about America being in Vietnam, as you'd have seen from movies like Forrest Gump—it captured the animosity pretty well.
Michael: My understanding is that Great Britain essentially allowed Singapore to fall, and that had quite an impact on Australian public opinion. There was this felt understanding that they were going to prioritise defense of former Commonwealth states, and then suddenly Australians realised they weren't. It was up to Australia to make its own alliances and fight its own battles.
Howard: Even a little bit of that had been born in the First World War. Churchill wasn't exactly top of the pops with Australians because we were seen as cannon fodder coming in from overseas to help the Brits fight a war they'd persuaded Australia had to be fought—same with the Second World War. Australia's never really had a war it's chosen to go into without it being led by another country.
Michael: They would have in the case of World War II. It would have been very hard for Australia to maintain neutrality.
Howard: I'm not saying they should have been neutral—because of what the Germans were perpetrating and also the Japanese. The Americans came into Europe to help Britain out; Australia had been there all the time. Then they were in more trouble with the Japanese, partly as a result of Britain giving up Singapore. There would have been mixed emotions—probably not from the prime ministers, who stuck to their knitting, but the public might not have.
The thing that was probably of interest to me as about an 11-year-old—we worked on the fruit block and one year, I think 1960, Dad employed a German guy and his wife and two kids as pickers. Erwin Koch was his name, and his wife was Bärbel. He was actually a soldier in the Second World War. I got to know him quite well—we were basically workers together, used to chuck dirt clods at each other. He was probably late 30s.
I remember asking him what it was like to be a soldier. He hated it. He said, "I just hated it. I didn't consciously shoot anybody, but I had to avoid being shot myself." You can understand then why the Germans lost—a lot of the soldiers would have surrendered quite easily rather than getting shot, even though they were in danger of being shot for treason from the German hierarchy.
So I went through the Vietnam conscription phase without event.
Michael: When did you start to get involved in politics? Once you're in the student union, you're already sort of shading into politics. Had you joined the Labour Party at that point?
Howard: No, that came later. Interestingly, I did apply for the job as General Secretary of the Teachers' Union after only one year of teaching. When I told a couple of people, they raised their eyebrows and said I had no chance in hell of getting that job—which I didn't, because it was already set up within the union movement. So I was interested in representing and advocating, but I also enjoyed teaching, so I didn't pursue it.
I first joined the Labour Party when I was married. I met Labour Party guys during an election campaign to get rid of Joh, I think it was. I ended up joining the party, probably in my mid-twenties. Just started going to meetings of the Labour Party locally at Arana Hills.
I wasn't ever really enamoured with the idea of factions in the party. It was unrealistic to think you would hold any powerful position without being a member of a faction. I had an interesting time with people wanting me to join their faction and me deciding not to. Another guy and I started something called the Forum — basically a group of people who didn't want to belong to a faction but were happy to be part of a forum, as long as they weren't tied to any decision that came out of it. It was an opportunity to discuss issues without fear or favour.
Wayne Swan became interested in the concept. He was Secretary of the Labour Party in Queensland at the time. He sent a couple of his factional people to our meetings. One of them disclosed to me later that he was there because Wayne Swan wanted to find out what we were doing.
Howard: When I started running as a candidate, the only places I was likely to run were seats that were unlikely to be won by Labour. In one, the seat of Petrie or Dixon, I ran for pre-selection in one that was borderline.
The way it works is you have a plebiscite with Labour Party members who live in that electorate. Then you go to a central forum, which is all factionally organised. The factional organisation gets three times the value of the local vote. But I ran a really strong campaign on the ground and actually won the local pre-selection plebiscite.
That caused a bit of a stir. People wanted to know how that happened—it meant quite a few Labour Party members in the electorate who were supposedly part of a faction didn't vote for the faction. They voted for me. Because it was a secret ballot, nobody could prove anything. Whereas at the centralised pre-selection, all the state representatives were factional operatives. Everybody knew who was voting for who.
It was so terrible that when it came to voting, they didn't personally vote. They handed their voting paper to a factional leader—they couldn't vote secretly, couldn't vote the way they wanted. They had to vote according to their faction.
I ended up losing by just one vote or one and a half votes because the value of my local plebiscite was pretty high—I got 58%, whereas the main faction there would normally have gotten about 52 or 53%. They said I was the first person in about ten years to actually win a local plebiscite against a faction in a winnable seat.
Michael: It helps me understand something I find quite strange in the United States. So many people look at Trump and his cronies and are quite rightly alarmed. They think, "How can he possibly have won?" But if you look across the aisle, the Democrats have a different set of problems, but they're pretty bad. It's as though the Democratic Party has been captured from the inside—a lot of inside baseball that makes them not particularly palatable to the electorate.
I remember Queensland politics in the 80s. You had this obviously pretty terrible premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, but then an opposition that didn't seem able to get its act together either—maybe for similar reasons, captured from the inside by factions more interested in their own games than winning elections.
Howard: The leader of the party at the time, a guy called Bill something or other, was totally factional, union-oriented, very strict. He had full control. That's how he wanted it.
I realised that during the pre-selection process. I rang a lot of people between the local vote and the centralised vote and realised I was done like a dinner. It was also the time of the refugee issues and vote boat people stuff that the Labour Party wasn't handling well, and the environmental stuff was nothing to write home about. So I thought I might as well go with a bit of a bang.
At the centralised vote you get a chance to give a five-minute speech. I decided to tell them the way it was for me.
I said, "I joined the party because of a book called The Light on the Hill, which I still believe in, which the Labour Party is based on. I don't see too much light at the moment, but I do see a big hill."
"I've got a couple of kids at home. They're going to want to know how I went today. At the moment, what I've got to tell them is that there's a senior person in the Labour Party who has full power over people like you sitting in this audience—you can't even vote for yourself in this pre-selection. Can you?"
A whole lot of eyes lowered.
"There's a person I know very well, Rosemary Hume, who was one of my competitors, and I know she had factional support. She's outside this room right now waiting for her turn, and I know she can hear what I'm saying. So I invite her to come into the room now and say she's going to withdraw from this process."
You should have seen people looking at the door. They knew she wouldn't, and I knew she wouldn't.
"I want to be able to tell my kids that actually it isn't that bad, that there are some good people around."
Then I looked at Bill and said, "Are you able to now say that anybody in this room can vote however they want? There's not going to be a collection of voting slips? I'll wait for an answer."
Of course I lost. But a couple of people said to me afterwards, "That was amazing. You've got no idea how that will affect people in this room. It's making us think seriously about our role in the party."
That's a little bit like the Democrats—rationally, there's no way they shouldn't be in power more or less all the time, apart from their mistakes and the stupid way they go about decisions. Policy-wise it's hard to say exactly because of biases. But the dollar makes the difference in America, much more than in Australia.
At least in Australia, people can rise from humble beginnings to become a member of parliament or even prime minister. They don't get there without support from others—not born out of their own richness.
Michael: Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer. Barack Obama's beginnings were fairly humble too—more a community organiser and academic.
Howard: That's true.
Michael: Why did you want to become a principal? A lot of teachers go their entire career and don't want to be a principal.
Howard: I like interesting things to happen. That can happen in a classroom—you can be a teacher your entire life and have a very interesting experience because you'll make it that way with the kids you're teaching.
But I realised from my role at college as student union president, and then the national network running workshops and conferences, that I probably had a capacity to get people engaged in worthwhile conversations that would be energising and powerful in terms of benefits for the community. One-Teacher Schools appealed to me as a good idea—it'd be fun meeting different parents.
I didn't know my first appointment was going to be Mount Nebo, which was probably the best One-Teacher School job in Queensland, as my mate said.
I did well there—being assessed by inspectors, working with the community. We ran a big pioneer fair that year, like hundreds of people coming up to Mount Nebo for a weekend fair focused on the natural environment. They'd never had anything like that before. That was fun.
You've got autonomy to make changes if you're the principal. If you're a teacher, you might not have that autonomy depending on your principal. But more than that, I realised I seem to have some natural capacity to facilitate conversations and get people to agree to do things they otherwise might not think they can do. It energises people.
Michael: What's an example from that time?
Howard: The pioneer fair. I was talking with a parent one day and asked, "Have you ever had a fete or fair up here?" "I don't know." "We should do that. What would you do if you were going to do it?" One thing led to another and we did it.
I had the advantage that the principal before me had been there for 20 years and had outworn his welcome probably 15 years earlier. There was bad blood between some parents. I just ignored what had happened before and treated it as a new good environment, which it was. The parents were really good—but a few of them had been treated not so well.
Michael: Mount Nebo seems like quite a remarkable community—a lot of idealistic people, people with unusual ideas about the world. Not everybody necessarily practical.
Howard: There were quite a few interesting characters. Among the parent group you had a solicitor and a retired architect at age 35—people who'd come to Mount Nebo to get out of the rat race. We became quite good friends with a couple of them.
Howard: Just about what you can do in a classroom—I remember something that worked really well at Clontarf Primary School when I had the big double teaching space. We had 66 students with two teachers.
I suggested, and my co-teacher agreed as long as I organised it, that we construct the classroom as a city. On a monthly basis the various groupings—I think there were six groups of about ten—could nominate and elect their own councillor to represent their group's views.
Each month a new councillor was elected with responsibility to represent their group and conduct discussions. Then each month one of them would be elected mayor for a month.
It worked really well. Kids who hadn't normally been seen as leaders, when they got to their position of being a leader, they surprised a lot of other kids about how good and responsible they could be if given some responsibility.
A lot of one-teacher schools didn't really do that, but in a big classroom like that, I thought it would be worthwhile. Which it was.
Michael: You had a teacher's assistant at Evergreen. I talked to you once about your fairly laissez-faire approach during my first year and a half at school with you as principal and teacher. You basically pointed to the books and said, "Have fun." But I have a vague memory of you telling me the assistant wasn't so wild about this.
Howard: I didn't read it as something she was adamant about, but certainly something she wasn't familiar with. She had questions, so I explained why I wanted to do that and how it would work. Eventually she came to see it was right. Interestingly, she became a bit too laissez-faire at one point, so I had to have words about the way she communicated with students. There's a difference between having a friendly demeanour and one where students are a bit disrespectful—in a humorous sort of way, but not quite. So we had a conversation about that.
It's easy to misjudge all that stuff—what's allowable and what's not. Everybody's got their own take on what's acceptable. You don't know until you have a chat.
Michael: My memory is that you had very firm control over the school. There was no doubt who was running things. But within that, there was quite a lot of autonomy for people to make decisions—as long as you didn't do something stupid.
Howard: Yeah.
Michael: Something else I remember from Evergreen was very sad. We had this wonderful dog, GR. I might get teary talking about it. She got hit by a ball in the backyard, yelped, took off, and ran onto the road. That was a very empty road—probably a car every 15 minutes—but a car came along and hit her and she died.
Howard: That was pretty sad. I remember the whole thing going into slow motion. I could see GR had run out onto the front grass. I thought, "I hope she doesn't go on the road." At the same time I could hear a car coming from 400 or 500 metres away. I'm thinking, "No, this is not going to happen."
I was calling out to her to come back, but I think she got hit in the eye with the ball and probably couldn't see momentarily. I had to go get her and lift her up. We buried her in the backyard at the school.
She was a great dog, the old GR. Do you know why she was called GR?
Michael: No.
Howard: GR stood for Great Reluctance. So whenever I left the house, I could say I left the family with great reluctance. A bit of a joke but with some truth in it.
Dogs are family members really. She'd protected us at Everton Hills from the next door neighbour we had who was potentially a bit dangerous and drunken—had been in jail a few times. She got a sense of that. It was a no-go zone for him on our property. She didn't do that with everybody—it was like a feel.
We're going through something not similar with Goldie now—not getting accidentally killed, but she's 18.
Michael: GR was only about four or five.
Howard: It's interesting that the emotions come back even 45 years later. Just proves how important family dogs are.
And then we got Seiko.
Michael: That's right! We got Seiko at Evergreen. She was such a beautiful puppy—you got her as a pup.
Howard: I'm pretty sure we did. She used to love digging holes in the ground.
Michael: She used to scare the living daylights out of me.
Howard: Is that right?
Michael: She was always so excited to see me come home from school. As she got older and bigger—as Labradors do—her way of expressing excitement was to absolutely bolt towards me. She didn't necessarily realise she was growing faster than I was. She'd leap up and I'd get bowled over. There was probably a period of a month or two where I was a little wary. I loved her, but she didn't always know her own strength.
Howard: Not as controllable as she needed to be. Eventually we managed to train her not to kill our children.
Michael: I remember the Centenary Parade with all the floats.
Howard: That was the centenary of the Shire—might have been 150 years. Mum won lots of plaudits for the design and delivery of a float that represented Evergreen. I think it won the prize for best float.
Michael: I didn't remember Mum had made the float. I remember being very impressed by it—I thought it was incredible as a kid.
Howard: We've got photos of it somewhere. I should put them in the book.
Evergreen was a nice two years. The tennis was big in Evergreen and Kulpi and those areas. The client group, the demography, was very similar to Monash—farming people and a few running the local shops. In that area of the Darling Downs, they'd just gone through an era where the government decided to shut down quite a few one teacher schools. Then they closed Evergreen down probably ten years later.
Michael: But it had been going for almost 100 years, right?
Howard: Yeah. The centenary was actually for the Shire Council—150 years. We decided to do something interesting at Evergreen.
Michael: My memory of Evergreen was that it was a relatively peaceful, relatively functional community—a little bit of drama, but at the level you get with any group of people. Whereas then we moved to Croydon, and it was very evidently a huge jump in dysfunction. Even the road up was quite an adventure.
Howard: We were advised not to drive up necessarily, but to have our car put on a train to Cairns and then drive from Cairns. What happened was the car had all its tires punctured during the train trip. We had to get them fixed in Cairns, then drove through a couple of inland towns to Croydon.
There was 150 kilometres of dirt road with rocks. A rock went through our windscreen—it shouldn't have because we had a windscreen protector, but it just skimmed over the top. We drove probably the last 50 kilometres without a windscreen into Croydon. Not exactly the best beginning.
Michael: What was your first impression of Croydon?
Howard: Pretty much what I thought it would be. An isolated town, a pub, a history bigger than it was then, so consolidated building structures. There was a courthouse, a police station. The school was relatively new—not the original school.
Little known fact: Wendy's great-grandfather or grandfather was the principal of Croydon School way back in the 1890s or 1880s. There were probably a thousand kids at the three or four schools in Croydon at the time because of the gold rush.
Michael: It peaked at like 10,000 people, and then it was like 250 by the time you were there?
Howard: The whole Croydon Shire, which was as big as Victoria, had a voting population of 150. So probably about 300 people including kids.
The publican was a nice guy. They'd been in trouble with the last mayoral election—somebody tried to burn his pub down. Then the flying doctor came in the first night we were there. Some guy was drunk, going out of the pub, cracked his head on a curbing. They had to call the flying doctor because there was a hospital but no doctor, and they didn't have proper X-ray machinery.
That was our first day.
Howard: We stayed at the hotel that night because the truckies who brought our furniture had just dumped it all inside the school residence and backed it up against the wall so you couldn't get in properly. We had to go back the next day to get it fixed up. But staying at the pub was okay.
Howard: I was only there for six months. You were only there for probably three or four months. I taught the kids how to play Aussie rules. The AFL had sent nice videos, sets of footy jumpers, football boots, and footballs. We taught the kids well enough to go into Cairns and play against a Cairns team. The girls played softball, the boys played Aussie rules. They'd never played before.
Michael: That must have been incredible for those kids.
Howard: At least half of them had never seen water—sea waves, water in the Pacific. Some might have seen it at Normanton in the Gulf Country, but quite a few hadn't.
We stayed overnight in the library of a school that we had contact with. They allowed us to sleep there for two nights. We had to get there—it's a long trip, eight hours I think.
Normally under school rules parents would take the kids with permission, or you'd get a bus. There was no bus. One parent said, "We can put them in the back of a truck." So about seven or eight kids went in the back of a five-ton truck, and the rest went in cars or utes.
I said to the parents at the P&C meeting, "I'm going to need you to sign off on this because this is not according to the rules. If you want to do it and take that risk—and I'm sure this is not new for you guys because you go camping and do that."
That was a bit of a risk. It would never happen now.
The main reason wasn't just to play football or softball—it was to have that experience of seeing Cairns.
We played against what turned out to be the primary school rep team from Cairns. I'd told the Cairns teachers to not put us against their best team because these kids had never had an actual game before. They forgot about that bit.
I didn't tell the Croydon kids what had happened. They just went out to play. We got done by about eight goals to one, but they acquitted themselves really well.
Except—there was one young kid, an Aboriginal kid, Jackie. He was a bit temperamental. Very early in the piece, he had the ball and a kid from Cairns tackled him to the ground as you're allowed to do. The other guy got a free kick. Jackie went berserk. He said, "What's this guy tackling me?" and belted the kid in the head.
I said, "He's allowed to do that, and you're not allowed to punch him in the head." A little bit of on-the-job learning.
I happened to be on the sideline not far away, so I intervened. The umpire understood what was going on. A memorable event.
All the kids got to have a swim. There must have been a salt water pool close to the beach, given the baddies in the water up there.
Michael: Do you remember Samantha? She was in my year at Croydon.
Howard: Cara was Evergreen, same year as you. Samantha was year two at Croydon, which was actually fortunate because I knew my strategy with you was to let you loose a bit and just help out if you wanted to know something. You had stuff to do, but that wasn't the most exciting part of what you were doing at school.
Cara was a smart little cookie. She was okay to work independently, and so was Samantha. From my point of view, I had two year ones and two year twos in consecutive years that you wouldn't normally rely on being responsible and autonomous. Obviously a lot of teaching went on, but being able to work independently was a big thing.
Michael: I remember it being such a strange experience going back to large schools in Brisbane. Samantha and I covered in three or four months what we later learned was about five years of supposed reading. Then going to the school and being told, "This is the normal rate at which we progress because people are only smart enough to do that." And I'm thinking, every kid I've been with was able to go at this rate. You already understand at some level that this is not true.
I remember struggling to keep up with Samantha at times.
Howard: Oh yeah?
Michael: She got ahead of me on the reading. We were competitive. I remember getting behind her and thinking, "Hang on, I gotta up my game." Then coming back to Brisbane and going at about 10% of the pace, but being told there's something special about you if you can go faster. We'd gone three for three—in fact four for four, because there was another little kid who started while I was in year two who'd been going artificially slow somewhere before, and then he sees the two of us and starts going through another grade of reading every three weeks as well.
It made me very sceptical when we came back to Patrick's Road that there was anything normal about this. It seemed convenient for teachers, damn inconvenient for the kids.
Howard: Such was the system. Fortunately you had a year and a half where you didn't have it and knew what it could possibly be.
Pine Community School was designed to try and manage that in a more systematic way. But then we had a bit of a problem with the teacher.
Michael: Was it really the teacher, or did the community kind of get out of control?
Howard: There were some parents who had unrealistic expectations about what it was about. They thought they understood, but they didn't. The teacher we employed—the evidence showed she knew what she was doing—but she wasn't able to manage kids' behaviour well enough. Some of the parents were behaviour problems themselves. That was unfortunate—a learning experience. At the time we were worried it might affect you and Stuart emotionally. That's why we took you out.
Michael: I don't know. The most stressful thing was realising how stressed you and Mum were. I could see why. The school internally was very funny—a lot of stresses between parents about what the school was going to be, reflected in behaviour of the kids. It wasn't really impacting Stuart and me too badly, but it was very stressful for you guys. It was definitely a good thing to get pulled out. I remember a kid getting punched and collapsing. That was just down to the teacher not having proper control—you can't have that happening.
Howard: I went to the 40th anniversary of Pine Community School a few years ago, and I've had quite a bit to do with the teachers and principals there for some of the workshops we ran at Samford Commons and the sustainability stuff. They're going really well now. It's in a different location. It was good to see some old faces again and some kids I couldn't really remember but remembered their names.
Michael: Dad, we've been going for almost 90 minutes. Shall we call it quits?
Howard: Yeah. My brain's feeling a bit fatigued. Let's just call it a day.