March 23, 2026 (Brisbane, Australia) and March 22, 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: And we're back. After a week or so since the last one. At the end of the last session, you made some comments about having thoughts on optimism and health that you wanted to follow up on. I wasn't quite sure what you had in mind or what the right questions were. What were you thinking?
Howard: Nothing other than the concept of how optimism becomes a part of somebody's makeup. Is it nature versus nurture, or a bit of both? I'd probably have some events in my life where optimism was a handy attribute to have. At the same time, there might be times when you can be overly optimistic. So there might be a few examples of either or both. Some would relate to health, but others would relate to ideas and projects and thought patterns.
Michael: What was an example where optimism was particularly helpful, or where you feel like you were unusually optimistic?
Howard: I'm not sure I can think of an actual example. What I think has happened over a period of time is that I've had quite a few health scares, and after having quite a few of those, you come to a bit of a conclusion that maybe I was supposed to stay alive a bit longer. When I was only four—I think I mentioned this—I nearly drowned. At the time, it didn't strike me that I was being optimistic as a four-year-old. And then as a five-year-old, I got clunked in the head, knocked unconscious by a swing.
And then more recently, with the prostatectomy and having illness following that and other bits and pieces—it probably reinforces the idea that it's not just about optimism, but about making good with the time you've got, whatever that is. You don't think of that when you're a five-year-old. You just think, well, next day, blah, blah, blah. But when you get older, you think, well, I can really put effort into things I think are important. So the optimism is—I'm not sure whether you call it optimism—it's more around feeling the need to maximise the time that you've got for things that are important.
I did a lot of work on optimism with some of the groups I worked with. The guy Seligman, who's an author from probably 30 years ago now—I don't know who's taken over from him. In daily routines, you see or hear something on the news or observe somebody doing something, and you can either think that's a bad thing, or there might be some hidden gem in there somewhere. What is that and how to find it? Rather than assuming the worst from what people have done or say. That's fairly current now with all the Middle Eastern stuff. People can see it as "we're going to get blown up tomorrow" or "it's all going to work itself out." It's not going to work itself out by itself. But there will be a positive ending, maybe, to things like that.
I'm not being too coherent about what optimism is, but I'd say in my daily life, I probably see things as being half full rather than half empty.
Michael: There was something in particular you wanted to communicate to the grandkids. I'm just wondering what that was. You had a particular reason for wanting to talk about it. You said this at the end of last time and it made quite a large impression on me, but it might have been, from your point of view, more of an aside.
Howard: So you can't remember the context of that.
Michael: No, I mean, you said you'd like to talk about it at some point, and I thought that was quite interesting. But you may have had something very specific in mind, or it might have been more of a passing comment. It caught my attention maybe more than yours.
Howard: This may not be the thing, but it comes to mind. I know as a kid born in the country, isolated from the big city, just doing fun things like sport—I realise now that I didn't have a thought in my head when I went down to Adelaide that I wouldn't fit in. Whereas you could often worry about that sort of stuff. I see kids worrying about that, or that I wouldn't be successful, or wouldn't be happy. An important component of my attitude was to take off into the big smoke thinking, this is all going to be good—as different to thinking of all the things that could go wrong.
Howard: It helps the same with a whole lot of the advocacy things I've been involved with, whether it's the Woolies thing or getting a tennis centre built. One of the strategies I've used that reinforces the idea of being optimistic is that most of the agencies you deal with—state government, local government, federal government—they all have a rhetoric around how they deal with people and solve problems. And that rhetoric is generally very positive. "We're inclusive, we communicate effectively with our constituents," and all this sort of stuff.
What I've tended to do is when I've gone into an advocacy thing—say, with the tennis club—we went and found what they're supposed to do with sport and recreation in the region and said, well, all we want to do is that. We're helping you provide a service, and to do that well, we need to do it this way. And they basically said yes to everything. That's why the tennis centre is one of the most sustainably constructed tennis centres, probably in Australia, certainly.
And with the Woolies advocacy, which was a whole lot more difficult, we basically went to the government departments that had some responsibility—whether the planning department or the main roads department—and said, from what we can see in your guidelines, here's A, B, and C. We're assuming that will be held to. And of course we made that public so that people knew we'd put that to Main Roads, in particular, which helped save the day.
That reflects a bit of optimism but also a trust. Rather than being cynical about whether government departments will do what they say, just treat them as if that's true. We used to laugh about it ourselves. We'd go to the state government and say, "We're here to help"—rather than the other way around. Government departments are known to say "we're here to help," so we'd go in and say, well, we're here to help because we noticed these are part of your policy, and we happen to be in a position to help implement that. While you know not everybody's going to believe that, it's very difficult for the government officers to say no, because it's actually on their website under the Minister's name.
That's probably not so much an optimistic thing. It's a non-cynical thing, but it's got a legal basis. Anyway, that's possibly one of the things I was talking about. But more particularly, just in the daily stuff—seeing things as having a positive twist rather than a negative one. Not in favour of just being blatant "she'll be right, mate" for everything, because that doesn't work.
Michael: The only thing I'm going to say at the moment is that you're disappearing out of frame. The optimistic version would involve more of your face.
Howard: Got it. I'm not sure whether that covers all I'd want to say about optimism, but we can come back to it. Seligman writes about learned optimism. It seems to me it's possible, if you're aware of your pessimism, to adopt certain strategies in the moment—to choose to go down the optimism track until proven incorrect. What do you think? In a family context, is that something you've felt or knew about?
Michael: You're certainly a very optimistic person. To the extent that you need to be to want to create stuff, there needs to be some possibility that everything's going to work out. Problems will be soluble and opportunities will arise. You certainly seem to have a lot of that.
I very rarely remember you being down about stuff. I'm sure you were sometimes, but you kept that very close to your chest. I remember, both growing up and as an adult—you complained very, very rarely. And when you do, there's usually humour in it. You don't actually really complain, but you'll make a little remark that's a bit humorous. If you're annoyed with somebody—I always remember you saying, rather than telling a group of people they were being way too loud and you couldn't hear a damn thing, you'd ask them to keep it down to a dull roar.
I think that extended to most things. I didn't really understand often that you must be finding something quite difficult. You always seemed so positive and optimistic. Thinking about your mum as she aged—that must have been pretty difficult because she certainly struggled. I know it wasn't easy for you, but I don't think I probably fully saw how difficult it would have been.
Howard: Sure. It's an interesting take, because getting to the end of your life—in Mum's case, she just wasn't herself by any stretch, late in the piece. You worry about having any form of quality of life towards the end, and then what to do about that. That's where reality checks in. We've done all we can, and Mum's done all she can. What now? The way the legal system is set up, you just have to wait that out. Some of that's changing, but yeah.
Michael: It's hard to know what she would have wanted, because she did go quite downhill. I don't know whether you ever talked to her about that.
Howard: We did, but as her Alzheimer's got worse, that wasn't really part of her consciousness much. Although—I don't know whether I told you the story about how she died, the actual timing of her death.
Michael: No, tell me.
Howard: Sharon and I used to go every week or fortnight, taking turns to see Mum in the nursing home. Gradually, as time went by, she didn't even know who we were. Early in the piece we'd have a conversation, or at least say hello. The last couple of years were really pretty bad, to the point where Sharon and I would wonder, does she really want to live? And is there such a thing as wanting to live when you don't have any real consciousness?
One day we were at the nursing home and Mum was in bed. Sharon and I were sitting on either side of the bed, chatting to each other as much as anything. We'd chat to Mum, but there was no response. I said, maybe Mum—she was always very stoic about things, you did the right thing—maybe she thinks she's doing the right thing by staying alive. Maybe she needs permission to not be alive, to die. I wasn't sure whether that's even a thing. We talked about that while she's there, no recognition that she understood what we were saying.
I said to Sharon—it was nighttime—I'll go down and grab something to eat at the canteen and be back in a few minutes. I was back in a few minutes, and Mum had died.
More or less immediately. I said, did that happen? Sharon said, after you left, after our conversation, I did say to Mum, "It's okay to die if that's what you want to do." And she did.
You think, is that actually a thing? I'd have to read up on it more. But at the same time, you're also glad she was released from a life that wasn't being lived at all. Really, not even "really"—just wasn't being lived.
Michael: You've actually told me that story before, and I'm very glad you retold it. You probably added a bit more as well. I was in North America at the time.
Howard: Yeah.
Michael: I was just reading Joan Didion, who wrote a book about a year in which her husband died and her daughter almost died, essentially simultaneously. Just very bad luck. There's this interesting thing where she said she instinctively wanted to say to her daughter, "I'm here, you're safe." She was reflecting on how strong the protective instinct was. She realised she felt she couldn't die—she had to be there for her daughter always.
I'm just thinking about your mum. She would have had that very—I mean, she was always so incredibly proud of you. I remember realising that when I was about four. She just thought you were God's gift to the world. Your siblings too—she was so fiercely loving and protective.
Howard: Yeah, and very generous. Not just generous with time but with money as well. It would have cost them money they might not have been able to afford, really, for me to go to Adelaide and pay rent and all that. As a kid, you don't probably appreciate that quite as much. And of course, when you're a parent yourself, that's what you do. It's the way of the world. But obviously there are circumstances in many people's lives where the financial side can't work out.
Howard: I suppose—what's your life expectancy? You grow up feeling like once you've hit 40, then 50, then 60, then 70 and 75, and you think—I just realised, that's going to stop one day. So what do you do with that?
Michael: I always remember Michael Kennedy and Mike Kennedy. Just the dreadful shock. I was 18 or 19 when I got a call from Mike saying that Michael had died in a fall from a horse that day. And then just a year or two later, learning that Mike had brain cancer. Michael was probably 18, and Mike was only 48—four years younger than me, never mind you.
Howard: Yeah, I think so.
Michael: Quite something. Every year is that remarkable gift that doesn't really feel like anything at the time. Just taking it for granted.
Howard: Yeah. I found it really difficult. I got a phone call—I was in London at the time, I'd just arrived actually. About two days later, Mum rang, said what had happened, and said she didn't expect me to come back. I sort of wish I had at that time. Our money was actually work-paid for my trip, which made it more difficult to play with somebody else's money.
I don't think it really hit me until probably three or four days later, when I was talking to people after the funeral. When I came home, I asked Mike Kennedy if I could come up and see Michael's grave. He took me up to the cemetery, and that's when it really hit me that he'd actually died. Well, I knew he had, obviously, but—it was quite an emotional experience. Mike realised that as well.
It's hard to know how your attitude to people dying gets affected by events. When I was in my first year in Adelaide, I got a phone call from Mum one night to say that my grandmother Rachel Nielsen had died a few days earlier and they'd had the funeral and all that. I said, well, how come I didn't know? Why didn't you call me? Because I had a good relationship with my grandma—she was the one who taught me a lot about cards. I spent a lot of time with her.
It disappointed me that Mum and Dad made that arbitrary decision that I would find it difficult to be at a funeral. Which I might have done, but which I needed to have done. After that, I sort of wondered—how would you cope with death? I probably found it difficult for a while to know quite what to do when friends or colleagues or distant relatives died, because nobody significant had died for quite a number of years after that.
And Mike Kennedy—he had a due date on him that he knew about. Going to see him was difficult. I probably took a little longer to see him than I might do now, as I get older.
Michael: Well, or fortunately, right? Going to lots of funerals is the right outcome. The alternative is you died when you were 22. You have two choices.
Howard: Yeah, okay, I should have looked at that more optimistically.
Michael: I really regret not seeing Mike, although I was living in the United States. Mum told me what happened [he was getting sick with cancer]. I came back not that long after, and she said he's too sick at that point for me to visit. She suggested I write a letter, which is what I did. I wish I had a copy. No idea what was in it. You think you'll remember, and I don't.
Howard: I'm sure he would have liked it. Just even the thought of somebody writing a letter, particularly a friend of the family, as different from family.
Michael: Well, I was probably 22 or something and probably didn't have a clue what I was saying. Probably struggling in my own way to understand what was going on.
Howard: Yeah. 48—way too young. What's not too young, I suppose. But these days the life expectancy is something like 82, and when you think that that takes into account people who died at birth.
Michael: Once you're 45, his life expectancy—he was a very fit and healthy 45-year-old. Living to 90 would not have been a surprise at all.
Howard: Do you know Bill Mitchell from Australia Post?
Michael: Very vaguely. I met him probably two or three times, quite casually.
Howard: He's been retired now for probably six or seven years, but every year he has a reunion lunch with some of his major clients—about ten or a dozen. He invites me even though I'm the only one that wasn't a client; he was actually a client of mine. So I keep thanking him for that.
We had one about four weeks ago. I think seven or eight altogether, the rest spread around the world. Everybody's in their 70s and a couple in their early 80s. We talked about this, obviously, as you would at a gathering of old farts who have cheated death a couple of times. It was interesting to see what people get up to in post-work years.
I haven't seen the actual research myself, but by hearsay, research shows that people in their 70s who have retired are at risk of premature death, just from not being in the right frame of mind. The numbers are higher than any other age group other than the teenage to young twenties.
One of them said he had a party when he turned 55, because he said that's a pivotal point—if you've survived to 55 without having a heart attack, you're likely to last a fair while. So he's banking on that now. He was 75, so 20 years later and still going.
Michael: Maybe we should go back to the linear narrative. Keeping track is becoming harder because now there are five central characters—and I never had quite as strong associations with your mum and dad or siblings, since they were all a long way away. We'd see them maybe twice a year.
You were talking about the transition—you'd started doing consulting work at Brisbane Education Centre. You were probably about 33, maybe 34. That was about when we moved to South Pine Road and then to Everton Hills. Have I got that about right?
Howard: I was with QIPC till 1985, and I spent a year teaching at Kurwongba School.
Michael: That's right, I'd forgotten that.
Howard: There's one year there, and then I took a job because while I was with QIPC, I'd done part-time work with the uni—or college as it was then. Then I did more work, another three or four years. We talked about Bob Elliott and all that stuff.
In terms of time: '86 at Kurwongba, then '87, '88, '89 to about '90 at Brisbane College of Advanced Education. While I was there, I got that part-time gig as acting director of Brisbane Education Centre. Then I started my MBA in 1989, I think.
Michael: Yeah, that sounds right. I typed a bunch of that.
Howard: It probably needed corrections as well.
Michael: It was fine. You used to pay me—I can't remember how much—a little bit of pocket money, which I probably spent on books and music.
So actually, I'd forgotten you went to Kurwongba. Why did you do that? I vaguely remember visiting your school a few times. I vaguely remember you seeming to enjoy it.
Howard: From 1980 to '85, I was with QIPC. Even though I'd been a classified principal before that—class six, class five, and class four schools—they had a rule in the department that if you'd been out for five years, you couldn't go back in at that level. So I had to start again as a teacher. I had a feeling I wasn't going to be there long anyway, but it was an exciting new school with some new stuff. The regional director was keen for me to go there.
The principal was a good guy and understood completely. I was basically a deputy principal really, but not as such. I went there for more experimentation in education and made some good friends.
Michael: I've got the timeline right. What did you think of the house?
Howard: Which, Cooloola Court?
Michael: Well, all of them. I remember you and Mum spending a tremendous amount of time with the builder, talking over designs for Cooloola Court. What was his name—Bjoern or something?
Howard: Bjoern Skibby. S-K-I-B-B-Y. He was Danish.
Michael: That's right. Funny guy. I liked him. He seemed like he really cared about making good houses.
Howard: He had semi-retired. He didn't come out and design any more houses unless he really wanted to—was doing two houses a year at the time. We got him because we had a particular style we were looking for, more Scandinavian, without necessarily articulating that. We didn't want a necessarily big house, just a really well-designed house.
We used to go driving around places where we knew there were good houses. We ended up seeing a house he'd built at Kenmore or Chapel Hill. We thought, this is a house we like the look of. So we looked up who the architect was, had a meeting, and it went from there. He knew we had specifically chosen him—it wasn't just another house to be built. Plus he had a carpenter who was also a Dane and was superb, so we knew the house was not going to fall down.
Michael: Do you remember an example of the interesting things he did?
Howard: One was the roof line. Most houses just have ordinary gutters. He said, I'll design a gutter that looks like it just extends the roof but actually takes more water than a normal gutter. He got guys to make gutters that were probably the only ones of their type—maybe not in the world, but certainly unusual. He said it would look really clean and also take more water so it wouldn't flood off the rooftop.
He was also very much into the bedrooms being smaller than normal—only 2.4 square metres, whereas most bedrooms would have been 2.7 or 3. He said, we'll fit a desk and a cupboard and a bed, and they don't need anything more. He was probably right, actually. Saved on square meterage but also suggested cork floors, which are nice and quiet and nicely insulated. His overall design with upstairs-downstairs—there's only five stairs going up to the top room where you had the playroom and three bedrooms and a bathroom.
Michael: I do remember the cork. My perception of my room was that it was a fine size. I didn't actually use the desk much—instead I got the rocking chair in there. There was enough space for bookshelves. Eventually Mum created a gazebo outside, which I ended up using as an office. Before that I used the office down by the laundry. Pretty good for a 16 to 20-year-old kid—having your own little office at home.
Howard: We were there till about 1999, because then we shifted to Everton Park for a bit before moving out to Sanford.
Michael: Are you sure about Everton Park? I never visited you there. That might've been because I was in North America. There was a place in Everton Park before Cooloola Court, though—I think it was 956 South Pine Road. I remember that well. But there was nothing special about that place.
Howard: No, there certainly wasn't. It had a big dip in front of the road there, on the main drag. It was good for playing cricket on—that was really its feature.
Michael: We used to field out on the main road. Had to dodge cars.
Howard: That's right. Rather optimistically. And the kid next door—Brendan—he joined in more often than not.
Michael: Brendan was a bit older than me. Big kid. Pretty fearless—he'd just go run out on the road. That was a major road and it was absolutely crazy. I don't know what would happen now. You'd probably get put in jail or on television for allowing your kids to dodge cars while playing cricket. We just thought it was great.
Howard: It was nice to have that little dippy road because I don't think we had any grassed area in that house. Too steep or something. Anyway, we all survived. Hopefully Brendan survived.
Michael: At the back there was a little bit of grass, but we broke the window twice or something. After that you weren't so keen on us playing back there. So we'd go dodge the cars.
Michael: Why did you move out to Samford?
Howard: We'd always loved Samford and thought it would be a nice place to live. We hadn't planned to shift right at that time, but we were out driving one day, going for a drive out to Dayboro from Everton Hills. Coming back through Samford, I saw a sign: "House Open." I said to Mum, why don't we just go have a look? That's when we saw the house at Richards Road. We thought, this is pretty good. So that prompted an earlier start than anticipated.
Michael: It was a beautiful property at Richards Road.
Howard: Still is, although we planted up about an acre of cabinet timbers and most were cut down by owners who came in afterwards. That was a bit of a shame—the idea was to have a forest down the back, and if need be, cut it for timber to make houses out of. But it's all gone.
We were there for ten years. I remember being there at the same time Dennis Antony's son got killed in a plane accident up in North Queensland.
Michael: I don't think I met Dennis. But I remember Mum liking that school a lot.
Howard: I went to college with Dennis. He was in the same year I was. Bit of a character—quite eccentric as a principal. The kids loved that. His and Susie's son, Andrew, was an airline pilot. He'd just been a pilot for a couple of years and they crashed in North Queensland.
Every year now they have a Memorial Golf Day for Andrew. Whenever Andrew played golf, he had his own rules. If you missed the ball off the tee or just tipped it, you had a 20-second rule—go get the ball and come back and hit it. Out of bounds? No such thing inside the fence line. Close to a tree? You've got two club lengths, not just one. There was a whole list of Andrew's Rules that people played that day. Everyone was very happy about that.
Michael: Something I only dimly understood at the time—Stuart did all these remarkable things as a kid, taking his own future into his own hands. He goes off and plays soccer in Europe. I remember how organised he was. You'd think the coach would tell him what to do, but it was more like Stuart was deciding what to do way above and beyond what any coach would demand. He was studying players on television, setting up his own training regimen, found a fitness coach—all on his own initiative. And he was like 15 and 16. I'm not sure a lot of people are like that when they're 25.
What did you make of it? How did you feel about him going off and trying to strike this very unusual and daring path?
Howard: He was very self-sufficient with all that stuff. I remember him coming home from high school in year nine saying he had to fill out what he wanted to do in the future, which would determine his subjects for years 10, 11, and 12. I said, what do you want to do? He said, I want to be a professional footballer. I said, why don't you just put that? He said the teachers all laugh at me because nobody gets to do that. I said, they've got no idea. Somebody might want to be a doctor but doesn't end up being a doctor.
That's when he really had to agree with himself that that's what he wanted. When he was 15, he was playing X-League—top grade soccer in Brisbane. Jim Hurley was the coach at Grange Thistle. They defended Stuart playing at 15, which nobody else was really doing.
All that enabled Stuart to feel fortified. He made the Queensland team to go to Adelaide for the national titles. He should have probably gone to the Australian Institute of Sport then—was on the shortlist but didn't quite make it.
Michael: I remember being in Adelaide then. There was another kid—Mark Viduka or similar—and some chatter about half a dozen kids as potential future stars. I remember watching this kid thinking, he was clearly better than Stuart in some ways, but Stuart was also clearly better in others. Physically, Stuart was going to be a very big kid and very fast. Those were very central. It was interesting years later to realise the AIS might have been another level of coaching and preparation he didn't quite get.
Howard: He was pretty lucky having his state coaches—Gary somebody and another one, one from Rockhampton, one from Bundaberg. They were very thoughtful coaches. That's where Stuart cottoned on to playing to a rhythm, playing to a style, playing to a plan, being able to analyse what goes wrong and right. That's where he is now—he's acknowledged as being tactically very good.
A few years ago, when Mackenzie was 15 or 16 and in the QAS, the QAS bosses asked Stuart if he'd coach the team. He was too busy working and couldn't manage full time. That's helping him out now. Gary was a very good coach for him. They used to talk a lot, and other kids couldn't do that. The coach was quite frustrated with a few kids in Stuart's team who just didn't get what they were trying to do.
The difference between Stuart and Mark Viduka: Stuart needed to make up a bit of space with his first touch—Viduka was very good with that. But Stuart was more two-footed and faster and probably had more goal-scoring ability, even though Viduka was a forward. But he was a hold-up striker, basically. Held the ball up and distributed.
Howard: When Stuart went to Germany for two weeks with a German training camp and then spent three weeks in Italy training with Padova—it was only recently he said that while he's happy with what happened since, at the time he was so homesick he just wanted to come home. He said otherwise he should have stayed, because he had big opportunities there. One of the guys he trained with at Padova ended up playing top grade for Juventus.
Then Stuart and I talked about where in Europe would be best for him to play in terms of style. He said, I want the Netherlands. I said, well, I'm going to England to do some work with Oxford Uni, so why don't we make contact with Haarlem? Ruud Gullit and a few others were at Haarlem at the time. They made contact, and arrangements were made for him to trial with the team about six months later. That's when he did his hamstring really badly. That became a turning point.
Michael: I remember he came back looking sad and sorry and largely unable to walk. But he gave a big smile explaining that when he limped onto the plane—possibly with crutches—the flight attendants made a huge fuss about him. Typical Stuart. I think he might have got an upgrade out of it.
Howard: He got into first class. They had a bed to lie down in. He was in hospital for two or three days, and I was thinking of going across to help, but he said no, just catch the plane home. It was a shame, because the coach really liked him and he did his hamstring while playing in a possibles-versus-probables match with the top team. They were looking at him not for junior football but senior football—maybe reserve grade to start with. Not to be.
Michael: When he was 15 or 16, he would show me games on SBS. His eye was really interesting. He'd explain what Gullit and Frank Rijkaard and Marco van Basten were doing, how special they were as players. They were the next iteration of Cruyff and total football, in some sense anticipating Barcelona 20 years later. It was fascinating as a kid to understand how much Stuart saw on the field that often the commentators didn't see, and certainly most other kids and probably many coaches didn't see. He had an amazing eye and analytic mind for it.
Howard: Such a good observer. Even now—he's coaching under-23s, Blake's playing in the under-18s and occasionally plays up in the 23s. Stuart always goes early to the 18s game and observes. At halftime, the other coaches ask him what he thinks. He tells them, takes over a whiteboard. The second half is totally different from the first. I asked Blake what happened and he said, "Dad just knows what to do and how to do it. He's already analysed the other team to find their weaknesses."
He's done his B or C coaching licence. I think his current club wants him to take over the national premier league team in a year's time when the current coach moves on. When he was doing his coaching course with an A-class instructor, they were analysing Premier League matches. Stuart said the instructor was pretty good but missed a couple of things. He mentioned one instance where the instructor predicted A, B, and C, and Stuart said, I think this coach will do this in the second half, and the other coach won't be able to pick up on it for at least half an hour. That's exactly what happened. The others in the group were like, "How did you know that?"
My feeling about Stuart is that it was all very much self-driven. We were happy to help and facilitate, making sure we weren't pushing him into stuff he didn't want to do.
Michael: I had no sense you were pushing him. Partly because it was a pretty difficult thing to make work. You couldn't really make a living as a soccer player in Australia at that time. Maybe a few superstars making a reasonable living, but the very top-paid players were probably lucky to make $100,000 a year, with a shelf life of maybe ten years. The great majority of A-League players were probably making a few grand a year.
Howard: Very different from today. Even in the Samford team that Cooper plays for—Division 2 Brisbane, not that high really—the goalie was getting paid $300 a game. Above that, some get $500 to $1,000 a game. In the NPL they'd be getting more. Mackenzie gets paid a reasonable amount—a couple hundred dollars a game, maybe more. She's on contract, so they still pay her while she's not playing. Decent conditions, really.
Howard: Stuart didn't really continue with cricket. He was a very, very good cricketer but got bored with it by about 13 or 14. His era for cricket was probably now—T20 and one-day cricket. I told him he was born 30 years too early to enjoy the fruits of this.
I remember you playing. You had a really good outswinger—or was it an inswinger?
Michael: It's funny to realise I wouldn't have been able to continue bowling. I didn't really know that at the time. My ankylosing spondylitis—it's classic. There have been a couple of top-level bowlers who retired because of ankylosing spondylitis. Ian Woosnam was a golfer diagnosed with it in his early 20s—would have been much more successful without it. There was a good Australian bowler whose career was cut short by it. I wasn't a bad bowler, but I don't think I could have kept going.
Howard: You were a pretty good bowler. I was remembering being an umpire in a match when you were bowling. I had a good vision of what you did. Quite impressive. Being a swing bowler is harder than being a cutter—cutting the ball is like an accentuated spin. Swing bowling has a bit more class to it.
Michael: Stuart took off to Sydney to try and make soccer work there. He was about 17, I would have been about 19. What did you think about that?
Howard: A big call from him. Of course we helped him find accommodation, but he really managed his conversations with coaches himself. Well done him on that. He was fortunate to board with a young couple in their 30s—really nice.
His big chance was with Manfred Schaefer, who was a Socceroo previously and quite a well-known coach—I think he coached Australia at some point. He was coaching Marconi at the time. Manfred said, "I would have you in my team now, but I've got a board with relatives whose kids need to be in this team. I've got no wriggle room." I went and watched Stuart train a couple of times with Manfred Schaefer's team. He held his own.
Same with the guy from Parramatta Eagles—Rale Rasic, I think. He didn't play Stuart in the top team, and the coach in the lower team didn't like the fact that Stuart knew so much about football. I'm pretty sure it put him offside. This guy wasn't a good coach. I remember one time when they were coming up to play the Queensland team, he specifically didn't choose Stuart—the first match all year he hadn't chosen him. Just out of spite.
Michael: I remember Mum telling me there was a scandal involving one of the coaches. Stuart was quite despondent about it.
Howard: I vaguely remember something like that. I think it might have been Parramatta Eagles. It was part of the game at that time.
Michael: I was reading about it on the ABC News website. Seeing people in coaching positions in Stuart's team being implicated was pretty crappy. Hard enough trying to make your way as a semi-professional athlete without then realising the club wasn't all it should be.
Howard: Terrible. Enough to put up with without that crap going on.
In terms of Stuart's footballing career now, he's certainly looking at wanting to coach at a higher level. He's hoping to make enough from his current work to retire pretty soon and then go do other things. He's got a bit of the gift of the gab, can explain things really well. That knowledge base—I'll be at a match with him and he gets agitated. I ask what's happening and he explains what they should be doing. I say, how do you know all that? He doesn't say "can't you see that?" because he knows I can't these days. He has to explain why they need to change, and I say, good on you, I'm glad you understand that because I don't even know what you're talking about. I'm getting slightly smarter.
Mackenzie's very good with it as well. In fact they all are. Her coach—not a very good one—invited her to be in on the debriefs with the other coaches at the matches while she's been injured. The coach has sort of forgotten about it and taken on other duties. But it's nice to be acknowledged for that part of your ability.
Michael: Alright, we might leave it there. We've been at it a while.
Howard: Yeah. My brain's probably done enough, but it's good. It's good for me. I really enjoy reflecting on it all.