March 8, 2026 (Brisbane, Australia) and March 7, 2026 (Berkeley, USA)
Index to the full interview series.
The following transcript has been cleaned up slightly (using AI), and filler removed (errors may remain).
Michael Nielsen: All right, so we're starting up again after a few teething problems today and also several weeks' break. The very last one we got interrupted – the internet cut out. We were in the middle of talking about QIPC and Barber Road and working at Kelvin Grove campus. I was probably about seven, eight, nine, ten years old—a very self-centered way of thinking about it. You were in your early thirties. Probably a more appropriate way of thinking about it.
Actually, it was kind of good that there was a bit of a break. It let me go back over some of the sessions. There's a bunch of questions I wanted to fill in. One thing I realized: I don't know where any of the kids' names came from. I don't know where your name came from. What were your parents thinking, and then what were you and Mum thinking?
Howard Nielsen: I'm not quite sure what my parents were thinking, other than that they did choose different, not traditional names for their four children. So Sharon's not a traditional name, Howard's definitely not, and then Vicki and then Robin. Robin Lee. So Vicki Gay, Sharon Kay, and Howard Robert.
I do know that my dad's mum – who was married to Rudolph – wanted me to be called Rudolph. But my mum said, no, we're not calling him Rudolph. So I don't know where Howard came from. The only Howard I ever came across that was well known was a guy called Howard Keel, who was an actor.
Michael: John Howard — probably not your favorite namesake.
Howard: Well, they wouldn't have known him then. He was probably ten or something at the time. Anyway, in terms of Mum and I thinking about naming you guys, we quite liked not so much traditional names, but solid names. We've always liked Michael as a name. Aaron — not quite sure. Aaron's a bit biblical actually, but we didn't choose it because it was biblical.
It seemed to fit. And it's M-A-N, so there you go—you can be a man who you want easily through the acronym.
Michael: Did you actually think of that before naming me?
Howard: Not really. It did occur to us after we thought we'd like Michael Aaron Nielsen. It makes MAN anyway, but it wasn't the other way around.
Michael: How long did it take to name me, actually?
Howard: Not a long time. We wanted to call you Michael, but there were other Michaels that we knew. Some people think you shouldn't call kids by names that are known to others in the immediate vicinity—like Michael Kennedy. But that didn't really enter into it. We called you Michael Aaron Nielsen because we wanted to call you Michael Aaron Nielsen. It's a nice flow together.
Michael: Was there any significance to either name—Michael or Aaron?
Howard: I'm not sure. Maybe there is and I've forgotten what it is. I'd have to check on that.
Michael: I'd be very curious to know.
Howard: Yeah, there possibly is and I've just forgotten. I'll have a chat with Mum and see what we can come up with.
Michael: Did you always expect it to be Michael? Some people—I remember this with Kate—it was Catherine, but you were going to call her Kate. I remember that very early.
Howard: We call her Katie now, actually.
Michael: I remember being struck as a kid that you would name somebody one thing but actually decide, more or less at the same time, that you were going to call them something slightly different. It was an interesting choice. So I wondered if Michael was going to be Michael.
Howard: The other names for Michael are of course Mick and Mike. We didn't think we'd call you Mike for some reason—we just thought we'd call you Michael. And then of course internally within the family we've called you Mick, but you're not really called Mick by anybody else, I don't think.
Michael: No. And you only did that—it was funny, as a kid you almost always called me Michael. Then at about age fifteen, you would sometimes call me Mick. There have been periods on and off. Stuart is more likely to call me Mick than anybody else. I think of myself as Michael; I would only ever call myself Michael.
I'm always struck—sometimes in the United States I'll introduce myself, "Michael Nielsen," and the person will stick out their hand and say, "Nice to meet you, Mike." They mean well, they're being friendly, but it's an odd thing to do. I can't imagine you introducing yourself and the person being like, "Hi, Howie, how are you?"
Howard: Actually, there have been a couple of people who've done that over the years. They were people who had Howies in their own friendship groups and got used to that. My name is more of a sporting footy name—Howie—so people at the main football club would call me that.
I think the reason for things like Kate—sometimes when you're signing up for something and you've got to say your name. If Kate was to say "Kate," most people would say, "Is that Katherine or is that Kate?" They wouldn't necessarily accept that Kate would be the actual name. A bit like somebody who's a Tim, who's actually Timothy. But we never thought of calling you Mike—otherwise we would have done.
Names are interesting things. Both my mum and dad only had two names—Robert Nielsen and Leila Wesche. They didn't have any middle names. So it was interesting that both of them actually called us with middle names.
Michael: I also remember as a kid being very struck by the fact that you had your dad's name as your middle name. That was a fascinating pattern.
Howard: We probably thought we might do that with you or Stuart—with my name—but decided not to, just to have your own name without necessarily being linked to the parent as such.
Michael: Kate has the same middle name as Mum, of course. Elizabeth is a lovely name.
Howard: We thought all those names were good. They roll off the tongue quite well.
Michael: So what about Stuart and Kate? What are the origin stories for those names? And for that matter, Andrew and Elizabeth?
Howard: Stuart was just again a name that we liked. As it turns out, the doctor that delivered Stuart—his name was Stuart, so he thought that was good. We didn't call him that because the doctor's name was Stuart.
Catherine Elizabeth—I think we just liked the way it came as a flow of names. Catherine Elizabeth Nielsen. Stuart Andrew Nielsen. Michael Aaron Nielsen. Sometimes you have a whole lot of the same letters that can get mixed up—like Stephen Nielsen, we probably wouldn't have, with the N and the N. Not that we got down to syntax and all that.
Names can be traditional. Michelle—Shelley's family very much wanted their names to be the middle name. So it's Michelle Carol Nielsen, and then Mackenzie Carol Nielsen.
Michael: If I remember correctly, I think Grandma had some opinions about names.
Howard: Grandma Nielsen—that was the one who wanted me to be called Rudolph.
Michael: No, sorry—I meant Mum's Mum.
Howard: Right. So hers was about Peter Pan. Wendy was a figure in the Peter Pan stories. And also Ricky—we call him Pete. She had a thing about names that were linked to the Peter Pan stories. Wendy was most definitely an upfront name. You'd have to ask Mum exactly how that all came together.
Michael: There was something else about Mum's Mum and Stuart—she had some opinion. I think it was David or something that was her suggestion.
Howard: Yeah, there was a thought that we might call Stuart David. That was just a thought pattern. You do go through a whole list of names and eventually one pops out that you think, "Yeah, no, it's that one." So we had others as well that I can't remember. Same with yours—maybe yours might have been David too. I'm not sure.
Michael: I want to find out about the dogs. At this point there's GR and there's Seiko. I've always assumed Mum obviously just loves dogs—they're a very important part, she grew up with dogs. I know you like dogs as well, but not quite as much. Was it Mum who wanted to get the dogs?
Howard: No, I think we both wanted dogs. I think it was probably just assumed that we would have dogs because we had dogs all the time when I was a kid.
Michael: Did you have dogs growing up?
Howard: Yeah. We had Buster back in Monash, and Scamp. So there were two.
Michael: I don't really remember your mum and dad having dogs in Bundaberg. What were Buster and Scamp? What sort of dogs were they?
Howard: Buster was a mixture. Sort of brown, black, and white, about medium size. Some bit of terrier in him probably. Buster came to an unfortunate end, actually. He had apparently started to round up a few of the next-door neighbor's sheep and then killed one or two of them at least. I think the neighbor shot him.
Dad didn't tell us that to start with. "Where's Buster? How come Buster's not here?" "I don't know. We'll have to see." Then it must have been a few days, maybe a couple of weeks later, Dad just said—he probably talked to the neighbors, because the neighbors might not have said what they'd done. But in those days, if a dog's starting to eat sheep, they don't stop. Buster wasn't a ferocious dog by any stretch; he just got into the wrong company. I think there were other dogs in the area.
Then there was Scamp—a little terrier, black and white. Those are the two I recall. We had parrots as well.
Michael: Yeah.
Howard: Seiko was our—GR was our first dog, then Seiko, then Charlie. Of course, you know—
Michael: Yeah, very briefly.
Howard: And then we didn't have any dogs after that, apart from when Kate wanted Roxy. So we got Roxy and Goldie. You're aware that Goldie passed on?
Michael: Yeah. I talked a bit about it with Kate.
Howard: I really love dogs as well. I'm missing her now. And I know Mum would be. But they're not going to last your lifetime. Otherwise your lifetime is going to be short.
Michael: Goldie did amazingly. She must have been pushing probably nineteen or something. She was certainly at least seventeen or eighteen.
Howard: I'd be comfortable calling her nineteen, because I think Kate and Mum were saying she was eighteen about two years ago. She was old and had done well.
Michael: She was in amazingly good shape when she was seventeen or so. Like most dogs are when they're nine.
Howard: She had a brain of a nine-year-old dog. She thought she could do a whole lot of things. Like a few humans, probably.
Michael: She was a beautiful dog. A nice temperament and personality—so quiet, but still actually quite inquisitive.
Howard: When Kate wanted a family dog, it took almost a year for her to choose the right one. She had quite a few dogs that she'd checked out. Eventually it was Goldie—it just had a connection straight away. A few people would wonder why it would take a year to find your dog, but Kate got it right.
Michael: Goldie was just great.
Howard: Roxy was a bit more of a renegade. She would run away.
Michael: She was a great dog too. Definitely a bit more difficult.
Howard: You have to love Roxy. Very faithful dogs, both of them.
Michael: All of the family dogs had beautiful personalities. Really, really lovely.
Howard: Well, we had one that didn't quite fit. We had a bull terrier called Taurus. You might not remember Taurus. We only had him for a month or two, when we were at Barber Road. We ended up giving him to Reardons because he just wasn't fitting in at our place.
Michael: I don't remember that at all. How old was I?
Howard: Very young. I was thinking I could find a photo of him, but it's unlikely we had too many photos because we didn't have him for long.
Michael: That's funny, because I remember GR, which would have been before that. I even remember the day you brought Seiko home—just being very struck by this tiny, gorgeous little puppy. And then she just exploded in size for the next few months. Not to mention the rambunctiousness. She was a rambunctious dog. But I don't remember Taurus at all.
Michael: I know how you met the Hewletts. You met the Reardons at Teachers College, right? And Mum knew Beryl from high school. I've never asked you how you got to know Rob Reason.
Howard: I met Rob Reason when I was principal of the school at Mount Nebo. We were living at Mount Nebo for that one year, and we were part of a small schools network in the region. The small schools network used to run an annual sports day. That sports day was held at Pee Chester School in the year I was there. Rob was the principal of Pee Chester School at the time—a small school, maybe ninety kids, a hundred kids. Mount Nebo was probably the smallest school in the whole lot.
I met Rob through that because he was the organizer. We just got along well. He helped out a lot. I learned quite a bit from him. Similar thinking in terms of—I mean, he was crazy about some things I would never agree with him on—but he was a really good positive influencer in terms of how to teach. That's how I met him. Five of their kids were up at Pee Chester at the time. They had two more after that, I think.
Michael: You met Mike Middleton through QIPC, is that right?
Howard: Yeah. Part of what QIPC was doing was trying to get parents more engaged in a positive way with their schools. One of the core elements was how the kids actually learn and how they get access to education. Mike was doing a whole lot of work around vertical timetabling, which allowed kids to access different parts of the curriculum to what they would normally have done in a normally timetabled school.
I met him at a conference—somebody else in the region brought him up to Queensland to speak. I heard him, we got chatting, and then I applied for some extra funds from the federal government to employ Mike for a couple of years to do something around changing students' access to learning. A big part of that was parents understanding why that was a good thing. And of course, parents didn't have any problems figuring that out, because most of them were on the wrong end of that when they were at school themselves.
A lot of kids were around the middle ground, and the middle ground is well looked after in schools. It's the ends that aren't necessarily—even now.
Michael: I remember Mike as a very positive influence. He came and spent some time in Brisbane, living with us for a bit. I think his daughter Sarah did as well. Mike was a very positive person, but he did something very unusual, which is that most adults don't really take kids seriously. Mike took kids tremendously seriously. He wanted to know what you thought and why you thought it and what you were interested in. He would treat you like a proper person. If you said something, he'd consider it. I think he talked to kids a lot better than a lot of adults know how to talk to other adults. He really wanted to have a proper conversation with you.
Howard: That's right.
Michael: Part of that was telling you if he thought you were wrong. He didn't hold back. He didn't necessarily humor you all the time, although he knew when to deploy that. He'd ask a lot of curious questions. He was a really sweet man, fundamentally. It was very striking as a nine-year-old or something.
Howard: That's part of the reason I asked him to come up. I knew he would cope very well with conversations with all people—from the minister or the director-general to the parents of kids next door. He was able to tap into where people are from. And his curiosity was genuine—he wasn't just going through a process. He would explore things.
Part of my role with him—because I was really employing him, when it all came to the crunch—was to make sure that parents were as engaged in this change process as teachers and principals were. Most of the time he spent on the vertical timetabling stuff was with principals and deputy principals, who had the power-broking role. That was a necessity to get anything happening in any school. Then getting parents on board—because the kids were very on board. "Thank you very much. Where have you been the rest of our lives?"
Mike was a great speaker. He could enunciate what other people might turn into complex things into quite simple things.
Michael: I asked him when I was eighteen or so if he got nervous before he spoke, because he seemed so confident. He said he got a lot less nervous than when he first started speaking publicly, but he still got nervous. And he thought it was actually good—you want to be a little bit nervous. It gives you a bit of extra charge in what you say.
Howard: One of the things you mentioned—that if he disagreed with somebody, he would state his case—he developed a very diplomatic way of disagreeing with people in high power positions. I was in a meeting one day where the minister was there, and the minister made a comment or two that wasn't quite right. No big deal. But Mike just sort of got around to saying, "Well, actually, that's not quite right." He didn't say it like that, but the conversation went back on the track it should have been on.
I saw him do that with principals at conferences as well. If somebody put up a critical question—as if to say the whole thing was a stupid idea—Mike would pick up on that and say, "Let's just have a bit of a look at that for a minute. What assumptions are we making about that?" And then he'd take those assumptions and pick them apart until it became fairly obvious they were assumptions that weren't really valid unless you had a stereotype in your own mind.
He's still like that. I've been talking to him a bit recently. He's done a couple of videos on education and educational change, trying to get current educators to have a good look at it. He sent me the stuff, and I had to do a similar thing to him that I just described he did to others—because there are some things about it where I said, "So how are you going to get those people who need to make those decisions to actually make those decisions?" I said, "There'd be a lot of people around at the moment who wouldn't disagree with a single thing you said in your video. It's actually the next step—acting on it."
I ended up giving him a suggestion about the group most likely to have any influence, and he agreed. But I think he's reached an age where he just wants to explore his ideas a bit more, put them into video for posterity, and probably not go down the next advocacy track. Just let those words speak for themselves. We're still in touch—a bit more than I was for a while. Wendy and Helen got along really well, Wendy and Mike as well. They'd both retired and I wasn't quite as retired, so I didn't have as much time. But more recently we've been in touch again.
Michael: I'm curious how you decided how many kids to have, if you don't mind me asking.
Howard: Some would argue that after the first one we could have stopped and thought, "We've done enough here." Or, "One was too many."
Michael: One was too many? Right—don't repeat your mistakes. Fortunately Stuart and Kate came out better. You improved on the first.
Howard: How did we decide? We both came from families of four or more. Mum comes from five, I come from four kids. There was no sort of mindful limit on how many kids you might have. Go back another generation, it's not unusual to have seven, eight, nine, or ten kids, because the nutrition rate was not good for kids and there were health things.
I think we just decided to have probably three, maybe four. But Mum had this condition—I've forgotten what it's called—where having babies is a little bit problematic in terms of blood types. The doctor said if you have a fourth, there may be a problem. But he said it's not a reason not to have another child, because it's not a hundred percent risk.
Michael: I didn't know that.
Michael: I have a vague memory of you talking a little bit about adoption or foster children. You did think about it at least a little bit.
Howard: Yeah, I think at various points you think about whether having another of your own children couldn't be replaced by adopting a child that needed a parent—not in foster homes or orphanages for too long. We probably did talk about it, but I don't know that we seriously looked at adopting or fostering.
Fostering is an interesting one because it's not permanent. It's not just time-consuming but psychologically consuming. You've got to feel that you have enough space in your head and heart for doing the right thing by not just the foster child but also by your own children. Sometimes foster children are very difficult and can cause disruptions that affect other kids in the family.
Michael: What I remember is Mum—it might have been both of you—asking me and possibly Stuart what we thought about it. Mentioning a specific kid who had been through several homes. I didn't get the sense it was a hundred percent likely. The feeling I got was that it wasn't very likely to happen, but it might. You were taking our temperature on what we thought about the possibility.
Howard: Yeah, checking it out.
Michael: Tommy Blacker. You mentioned him in a previous session. You're playing on a football team with probably twenty, twenty-five guys in the squad. Tommy—growing up, I always remember him as being loud. But he's a lovely, lovely guy. And his wife Jill was really sweet and sensible. It's an interesting personality match that you ended up friends with Tommy in particular out of the team. He's quite a different person than you in some ways. And yet it made sense—he's so likeable fundamentally, even if he does shout because he can't hear.
Howard: Yeah, there are definitely personality differences, and it's the same as a lot of friendships, and even in families. If you have a consistency of underlying values, that's the thing that enables the friendship to continue. If you have likes and dislikes that are different, that doesn't really matter all that much.
With Tommy—you don't know all those things when you go into a footy team. Tommy was a long-time player with Mayne as a junior. I came into the club in the year that was his first year away, because he was training for Vietnam and then went to Vietnam. So he was away for two years. I was in the club before he came back. I was playing in A grade, and he'd played A grade as a probably seventeen, eighteen-year-old. I was eighteen too when I played in their top team, my first year at Mayne.
He was known on the field—he was a pretty tough character. No holds barred. Whereas I was probably a different sort of player. He would have been described by people in other teams as a dirty player, because he'd throw his arms and his elbow and stuff around. Partly because of his size—he was not big and he just had to muscle up a bit.
Whereas I just liked playing football, basically. I probably had a reputation for playing well in big games—I always played well against the toughest teams. For me, football was probably about fourth on my list of priorities at the time, even though I enjoyed it. Family, study, work—they all came first in terms of thought processes. I didn't always give attention to the next football game until it was almost there, unless it was a game we needed to perform well in.
I think he valued what I brought to the team in a way he hadn't really seen much before. I was probably more tactical than a lot of other players. And although I wasn't overly physical—physical enough, I guess—I never really thought it was okay to give up, even if you're five goals down with four minutes to go. In my mind: how long does it take you to kick a goal from the center-bounce? Ten seconds. So you could theoretically score four goals in one minute.
I used to talk like that on the field. A few times we ended up winning games that other so-called tougher players—Tommy wasn't in that lot, but there were others in the team that had to be bolstered up with positivity about outcomes. Other than that, we just enjoyed each other's company and a bit of sense of humor.
Michael: It's funny hearing you say Tommy had a reputation on the field, because he always seemed very just and to have a sense of fairness. He had this larrikin quality and was quite loud—it doesn't surprise me that he could be a bit unruly on the field. But there was also this—it took me a while as a kid. I was probably a little bit scared of him because he could be quite loud. Then eventually realizing: this is actually quite a just person underneath. And he was actually quite gentle in interesting ways. Whenever he detected weakness in somebody, he had this quite protective instinct. You'd certainly see it with his kids.
Howard: Definitely. He was a coach—he coached the reserve grade team for a few years. He enjoyed working with other players.
Howard: I retired from playing A grade footy when I was twenty-five, twenty-six. When we went up to Croydon and then Evergreen, I didn't play. I was only twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine. I retired early.
But when I came back from Croydon, halfway through the year, Tommy rang me up and convinced me I should play for his reserve grade team because they were struggling and wanted to win the Premiership. There were only about five matches to go. I said, "Mate, I haven't played football for four years. I'm in no condition." He said, "You'll be right. You'll be fit enough."
Probably took me a week to say, "Okay, I'll come and train and I'll play, but get your expectations sorted." Anyway, the stupid thing was that on the first training night, he had a guy from the army—an army phys ed sort of guy—taking the group, and he was on about everybody doing the hard yards. I knew that wasn't going to be good for me, because all my muscles would tighten up and then I'd be pulling muscles. I said to the guy, "Look, mate, this is my first training run in four years. I'm not scared of doing exercise, but I don't think it's a good idea for me to be doing all this stuff." He said, "You'll be right."
I said, "Well, actually, no I won't." I went on for another ten minutes and then said to Tommy, "I'm not going to be able to play on the weekend if this keeps up, because I already feel myself tightening up."
I played three or four games and then there were finals. In the fourth game I played fullback and I played really well—exceeded my own expectations. We won. But I pulled a muscle—not a hamstring, but in that region—and couldn't play the next week, which was the first final. The team lost, so I didn't play. I wouldn't have done it for anybody other than Tommy, probably.
And everybody else was happy, because the reserve grade team and the A grade team trained together, so the A grade coach—whom I knew—said, "Are you sure you don't want to play again? You're up to it, just seeing your training." I said, "Yeah, I'm sure." I was thirty, I think, then.
Michael: You were doing this teaching at Kelvin Grove and Castledine campuses. I remember a big deal was you losing your job and coming into conflict with Bob Elliott. Can you take a trip down memory lane and refresh my memory?
Howard: The short story is that when I was working for QIPC, I needed extra income. A guy called Jim Lennon—I mentioned him before—was on the board for QIPC and was also acting team leader of the curriculum and teaching studies group at Castledine campus. He said, "No worries—with your background, you qualify to do lecturing work here." He employed me for three days a week, nine hours a week.
Then I had a two-year contract at Castledine after I finished with QIPC. But in that time Bob Elliott came onto the scene. He was more demanding of having a PhD and said, "We're going to open these up again for the next contracts. If you'd like to sign up for a PhD, you'll qualify—that'll be okay." But at the time, I didn't want to do that. I knew the commitment of time wouldn't be okay with our family at the ages we were.
Bob was just unfortunately a very unpopular person with all the other staff, because he had no consultation ethic or anything like that. The short story after that is that I missed out on the job to a guy I became quite good friends with—similar mindsets about stuff, good chats.
But there was a bit of a mutiny in the group in my favor. I didn't ask for anything, but they said, "You can't lose this guy. We've got to keep him here." So the head of the school employed me on a full-time contract for a year to do freelance stuff across the whole college—which was a bit of a kick in the guts for old Bob. I was housed over in the halls of power, as everybody else called it, for a year. Then I took up the job at Brisbane Education Centre as an acting director.
Michael: Growing up, I don't remember too many times when you criticized or had much of a negative word to say about anybody—including some people who, if you'd asked me at my ripe old age of ten or eleven, I would have had some quite critical words to say. One of the very few occasions I remember—it was gentle humor at some level—somebody asked you about Bob and you said, "Well, just put it this way: when he's walking around the corridors, he leans into the corners to take them more efficiently. And that's the kind of person he is." I just remember thinking that was a very, very evocative thing to say about a person.
Howard: I don't remember that! But now that you mention it—the other thing I remember about him was that while I was still in his group, I was asked to do some outside consulting jobs. Kilcoy Pastoral Company—Bill and Mike Kennedy and his board asked me to do some stuff on leadership in the meat industry, and another group from somewhere else as well.
I just told Bob what I was doing—we were supposed to do consulting work, so it wasn't like I wasn't supposed to do it. He had this look and said, "So why would they employ you to do that?" As if to say—I said, "Well, you'd have to ask them that, Bob, but I guess they figure they're not going to spend their money on somebody that's going to be useless." He couldn't figure out why a more senior person wouldn't get that sort of work. Himself, maybe.
The funny thing is that he and one or two others there were involved in research activities. I got involved in two or three of them, and it became quite clear to me very early on that they were quite flawed in the way they went about the research—very traditional, not at all inclusive and collaborative. There were a couple of times when I had things to say that changed the flow of the research to a point where it actually became successful. Others recognized this, but Bob had fought against it. He didn't really have expertise even in the field he thought he was expert in.
I never rated myself an expert researcher necessarily, because I didn't think of it that way. We're just trying to find stuff out. So why don't we do this in a way that's more likely to get that insight from people?
Howard: I remember one day the staff were in the staff room having lunch. We'd just had a cricket match—staff versus students or whatever—and somehow I'd taken a reasonably spectacular right-handed catch, caught-and-bowled somebody. I walked into the room just as someone was finishing that story and having a good laugh about it—how I took a tumbling dive and caught this ball. She said, "And it was your right hand too, and you're left-handed."
That turned into a conversation about right hand versus left hand. People were saying things like, "If you're using both sides of your body, you're more likely to be a bit more creative," and the left side of the brain is supposed to do this or that. Somebody said to Bob, "So are you left-handed or right-handed?" He said, "I'm very much right-handed." "Do you do anything with your left hand?" "No."
Depending on what you believed about that research, it matched up with his personality.
Michael: You've sort of made light of it, but at the time, I remember feeling that you and Mum were quite stressed about it. You're quite an optimist—if your middle name wasn't Robert it should probably be Optimism—but it was quite notable to me that you were concerned. I remember you doing that contract with Kennedy's at the Kilcoy meatworks. I remember the first time you came back from the abattoir—it had obviously been quite the experience.
But then in the few months after that, you started to get a lot of consulting work quite quickly. You sort of realized that maybe this was a much better job in general—you were going to make more money doing more enjoyable work, with a lot more control over whether or not you worked with the Bob Elliotts of the world.
Howard: That probably came at the time when John Quinlan from the Ed Centre approached me and said, "I'm going to be leaving shortly. Can you do at least ten hours a week?" I agreed. Then he left and they wanted me to stay on full-time. So I shifted out. That all worked nicely without even being properly planned.
Michael: I remember a conversation with Mum where she said she'd been so stressed about it. The one specific thing I remember as a kid—holidays were limited and we weren't staying at the Hilton. Then all of a sudden, at about age eleven, we would go to Coolum for a week, and the car would actually start each time instead of taking five minutes in the morning. Just realizing that a whole lot of financial burden had been lifted.
Howard: Probably, yeah. Not by a huge amount. The change from QIPC—I was originally employed for ten hours a week, then that jumped to twenty and to thirty within a few months. But there was no guarantee of that. It was potentially quite stressful. If it hadn't been for Jim Lennon at Castledine campus with the other stuff, I would have had to do some other part-time work. Fortunately I had some good supporters amongst the funding authority who could see it was money well spent.
Howard: I think autonomy and fairness were probably important things in my life, really.
Michael: Can you say more about that? What does that mean to you?
Howard: Autonomy to act in a way that you think is okay is important to me. But of course a lot of people might say that—"I have the autonomy to rob the bank too if I want to." So there's a sort of shared autonomy—it's a way of collaborating with others at the same time as you're using your own autonomy to act in a way that's professional.
That's where the fairness thing comes in. Zelman Cowen once said, "The freedom to swing your arm stops at the tip of somebody else's nose." I thought, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I just make sure if I'm swinging my arm, I'm not belting somebody else with it, or that nobody else is doing that with me.
Fairness probably still gets to me. If something is unfair in the way things are treated—that's what happened in Samford with a couple of projects here, where politics got in the way of really good ideas. But it has a way of going around in mysterious ways, because the unfairness that was there for that stuff around Samford isn't there anymore. People are saying, "That stuff you were doing that was stopped by Peter Dutton and others—we're interested in that." So it might be ten years later, but it looks like some of that will probably happen.
I'm not committing myself to any workload. It has to be something that others want to do. Otherwise it's not fair on me or Wendy or anybody else in the family.
I think my dad was probably very much one for what's fair and not fair as well. I probably learned that either by osmosis or by conversations. I think there's a genetic thing there that some families have. All of our family are pretty much—they've got a fair streak in them, and they know when something's not fair. Whether you do something about it is another thing, of course. That's where the autonomy to act is important—to act on behalf of yourself or on behalf of others.
Michael: We've been going for an hour and twenty minutes, and we talked for a bit beforehand. Seems like a good point to stop. We filled in a bunch of gaps and advanced the narrative as well. It feels good to go through your life in narrative order. I didn't think too much about it, but it's really good organizationally—you're very indexed to it somehow, and it's easy to think about lots of questions.
Howard: There were a couple of other things I was thinking of for next time. In terms of putting something together—how it gets categorized. I quite like your little subchapter headings [/thanks Claude! – ed./]. I'd like to work on what's missing so far.
One thing that hasn't really occurred to me until the last few years is my health, and how health affects your life in all sorts of different ways. I've had to do a chronology of my medical history in the last year or two so that doctors are fully aware, particularly with dysautonomia, where it's by no means certain what that really is. It's a combination of things, some more readily understood than others. Because I've had to do that, I've ended up looking at the list of things that have gone along with me from a medical point of view—and if I saw somebody else's list, I'd be a bit worried.
I'd like to talk a bit about how your attitude about your own health and fitness is important.
The other one is your attitude to learning—study, learning, whatever. Bearing in mind that my original reason for doing the book was to tell a message to the kids and grandkids and anybody else who wants to listen. What are the learnings from that?
I don't want to overdo stuff. I don't want it to be a two-hundred-page thesis on fifth-level things that don't really matter. I don't think we've done any of that. But I think health, attitude to learning, and the autonomy-optimism-fairness things are probably worth exploring a bit more—which parts of my life have been affected by that. We've already done that at some level without naming it, but it would be good to come back and circle around it.
I'm trying to think: if I was one of my grandchildren reading this, you kids are more likely to understand it all without needing to downplay it. I just want to make sure it's in simple enough terms for a twelve-year-old.
The good thing about this is that I wanted the book in the end to be something like a conversation anyway. So that's what it is. I'd be looking to use large slabs of it, probably taking out some intermediary rambles that are inconsequential.
Michael: Okay. All right. I'll finish this and—
Howard: Okay, Michael. Let's take a break.