October 18, 2026 (Brisbane, Australia) and October 17, 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: Because we haven't done this for a few months, I was just looking back over some of the earlier recordings and thinking about some of the stuff that we missed. And one of the things that I really want to hear about is—it's been very focused on you and your life and family, and obviously that's great, but we didn't really talk about big events in the world and what your impression was of them. You've just seen so many different things: the moon landing, different wars, the fall of the Berlin Wall. There's a thousand events. There's a few particular events that I'd like to hear about, because I've heard you tell bits of the story before, but never really. I think the one that really came to mind was probably the moon landing. And then also just to find out what other things really stuck with you over the years that maybe I haven't heard about.
Howard Nielsen: Yeah, the moon landing—a few things come to mind. Actually, the Kennedy assassination is another one that I do recall.
Michael: So you would have been 12, right?
Howard: Kennedy—yeah, I would have been 12. The moon landing, I was 19, I think. So we'll start there.
Howard: The moon landing was on in the daytime, our time, in Brisbane. I was at college at the time and I was actually on prac. So I was on a prac session at Nudgee Beach—sorry, Nudgee Primary School—and the school had…
Michael: Hang on, hang on.
Howard: That's all right. You can interrupt any time you like, because I can regather.
Michael: I'm just wondering why you were on prac in July. What's the deal?
Howard: Well, there was no particular problem with being there in July. July was like mid-year.
Michael: Okay, so it would have been maybe the start of term then.
Howard: Yeah, well, it was my first year of college, so you would have had to have been at college for a few months before they'd dare send you out to prac, in case you stuffed up a whole school just by yourself, as a 19-year-old.
Michael: So they just let you stuff up a classroom instead.
Howard: So anyway, I do remember it quite clearly, actually: a couple of TVs set up underneath the school. It was a big school, like 800 kids or something like that, and the entire mob was sitting underneath the school on forms and chairs. They'd obviously gone to some trouble to set it up so that all the kids could see it. They weren't all there at the time—some of them were still in classrooms that had TVs, but not everybody had a TV in their classroom, apparently. So we just watched it there. And that was that, basically. Everybody was in wonderment.
I doubt that schools would have set up for every child to see a television event until that time. But it wasn't really a surprise, because we'd been—what's the word?—briefed on it in the media and what have you. It wasn't like we woke up that morning and surprise, surprise, there was going to be a moon landing. It was just the event itself and the pictures of it, which people have seen a thousand times now. And me being on prac, I was with a teacher—I can't remember the teacher's name—and there would have been conversations afterwards in the classroom about it all, and blah, blah. But it did remind me of—sorry, were you going to say something?
Michael: No, keep going. What did it remind you of?
Howard: Well, it reminded me that many, many, many years later, when I was teaching out at Kurwongbah Primary School, we invited a guy to come along and talk about Halley's Comet. He had seen Halley's Comet the first time around. He was about 85. They brought him into the classroom—a double classroom, actually—and I thought it would be a good idea for the kids just to ask him questions, a bit like what you're asking me, in a way. So: what do you remember? What were the important things that happened in your lifetime? He talked about Halley's Comet—I forget how old he was at the time, probably nine or whatever. And the kids said, "And so did they show it on TV?" And he just sort of looked, and said, "No, no, no, we were a long way off TV at that time."
So that's linked my thinking across from the moon landing to some 90-year-old guy observing Halley's Comet, which had nothing to do with the moon landing, of course.
Michael: So did you see the moon landing on TikTok?
Howard: Yes, right. Oh dear. Oh dear me. Well, no, I did see it on television. There you go.
Michael: So did people clap or cheer, or was it sort of silence, or what was the setup?
Howard: I don't remember there being a lot of clapping and cheering. I think there might have been some clapping. And I can't remember the detail, but I'm sure there was a televised commentator saying what was happening at the time. So that would have been the famous words, blah, blah—first step for mankind. Should have been humankind, anyway.
So that was one of the big things. The other thing that I do remember—no, no, go on. I was going to go into something else, so if you've got something on this one.
Michael: I was just curious, do you remember any conversation about it, or just the response to it? Did you think it was beautiful? Did you think it was a waste of money?
Howard: No, I thought it was a great thing. And we talked with student teachers about it, probably more than anything else—in the lunchroom and what have you—about the event itself and how important it was, and "I wonder what's going to happen next." And of course it's been a long time since then with moon landings. There's been lots of other stuff happening.
Michael: Sorry—the connection's not great, so what's happening is it sounds like you've stopped, and so I start to talk, then it turns out you haven't stopped, then I interrupt, and you stop because you've noticed I'm talking. So it's a bit of a…
Howard: Yeah, so that's probably it. Now you go. Well, I think we're both just trying to be polite, not interrupting the other person. I'm happy. Let's keep going.
Michael: I suppose I'm curious, then, if you were anticipating a lot more. I can't remember how many moonwalkers there were, but there weren't a lot. It was just a few missions. And then we haven't been back in my lifetime—so well over 50 years. Were you expecting more at the time?
Howard: Well, not immediately. No, because it had taken a long time before even the first moon landing. So I don't recall thinking, "I wonder what's going to happen next week or next month." But you did sort of think, well, this is momentous. The moon's up there. It's a bloody long way away. How did we actually get there? And how did we actually get guys back alive? That was quite a freakish sort of thing for humans to be able to do.
Of course there were probably questions about the cost and so on, but I don't really recall that impacting too much on my thinking at the time. I think there was talk about what had been invented to enable them to get to the moon. As you know, there's always been stuff that's been of practical use to human beings as a result of some of the experimentation that NASA and associates had to do, to invent things that needed inventing. I can't remember any of them, but obviously there's been quite a few—in terms of deflection and reflection, and just the mechanical side and the electronic side of getting stuff to happen.
But I was probably more interested in how the astronauts themselves handled everything, and how amazing that would be. You sort of think of new things that you go to. A new thing for me, not that many years earlier than that, was to leave home and go to Adelaide by myself as a 15-year-old. But as I recall, I took that in my stride, because I knew I was going to go and have some fun with a new lot of people and play a lot of sport, and blah, blah, blah. There was no danger attached to it. It's only psychologically you have to be ready to leave home at a time that's good for you. Not everybody gets that—those who are put into kids' homes and all that sort of stuff.
So, the ability of astronauts to manage what really was a freakish event, when you think about it. And of course all the people back at home base on Earth doing their thing—how much pressure there was for them to get it right, because they were dealing with people's lives. The astronauts' lives were in their hands, basically.
So I don't recall it affecting me enormously in a personal sense of, "What does this mean for me?" It was more around what human beings can do. So I suppose in some ways it gets your own thoughts going about what's possible and not possible.
Michael: I'm struggling to articulate the question. You say it affected your sense of what human beings could do. How did it change it?
Howard: Well, it's sort of like almost no limit. If you really set your mind to it, you can probably do most things. People have thought you can go to Mars, or blah, blah, blah. So it's not just about all that. It's more around not seeing limits, really, to what people can do. That would probably be a generalisation, I would say. And it probably suited my optimistic slant on things—it reinforced that in me, I would think.
If I'd been a more pessimistic type, and the landing hadn't occurred, or somebody lost their life or something like that, that would impact on your thought patterns—either to reinforce a pessimistic slant on life, or to overpower that with an optimistic streak saying, "Well, better luck next time," basically. And of course the space shots that have not worked and lost people's lives, they certainly have an impact on you. So that's probably the extent of it for the moonshot. I hadn't really thought about it much since then—well, on and off.
Howard: One of the things that did occur to me: you remember Irene Walk and their kids, Darrell and Adam—that's right—and the father, I've forgotten.
Michael: Was it Neil? It might have been Neil. Stuart and Darrell, of course, were close friends, and they were in the same grade. I think Adam was two grades older than me. I knew him, but only sort of vaguely.
Howard: Yeah, I knew Irene through the P&C. She was quite involved with the P&C when I was, et cetera, et cetera. But I remember us being around at their place one night and chatting about stuff, and it came to pass that she just said she didn't believe that the moonshot actually happened. And that struck me as being—well, how do you figure that? How does her mind work, if it doesn't allow something that seemed to be quite clear to me and to most other human beings? How could you say that didn't happen?
I would probably get it more now, because there's so much done with graphics and what have you that somebody could invent that. But at the time, back in '69, that wasn't a thing in movie world or anything like that. Possibly it was, I don't know, but certainly it didn't seem to be a thing that was affecting her thinking. She couldn't believe that it happened, and therefore it didn't happen.
Michael: It's interesting that that is possible. You think about what would be required. Of course, it cost a couple hundred billion dollars in today's money. If you wanted to fake it for half that, you could probably do a reasonable job. But even if you just think about Cape Canaveral, the liftoffs—there were like half a million or a million people who showed up. That's not a fake thing. Just to stage that would be unbelievable. I've seen a Saturn V rocket, because they actually had two spares, and so you can go to Cape Canaveral and see them. Having that thing full of whatever the fuel was—that is a serious, serious fake job. That's quite something to do.
Howard: I'm still in wonderment about those rockets taking off. Every now and again it comes up on a newsreel that something's been happening, and I think, how do they get it so it's absolutely dead straight and goes where it's supposed to go? That's amazing, no matter which way you look at it.
Michael: It is. And such a strange thing as well, because basically all they are is a great big tower of fuel. So you've got [the astronauts] in this tiny little thing on top, and they've just got this giant explosion going underneath them. It's ludicrous.
Howard: Yeah, that's right. You wouldn't want to think about it for too long. Obviously they've got their mindsets that they play with, and they're not going to be sitting up the top of that pile of fuel unless they were totally committed to it and believed that it was going to happen. If they believed it wasn't going to happen, they wouldn't be sitting there. There'd be some other astronauts sitting there.
Michael: The thing you told me about Irene Walk—you wouldn't realise this, but I actually knew, because when you came home that night, or maybe it was within a couple of days, Mum mentioned it to me. She wasn't being critical of Irene. She just said Irene didn't believe it, and Mum was very surprised, and I think reported it in that way to me. And it's really stayed with me ever since as just a very interesting thing: that people can come to that conclusion. And it makes me think about why I believe certain things happened or didn't, and the ways people can get fooled.
Howard: So, happy to move on to another thing. And just to say, I'm due to go and see Landy play futsal in about an hour and a half.
Michael: Okay, yeah, we're going to be worn out well and truly by then, I think.
Howard: Yeah, well, I'd have to leave here by 2.30, so it's about an hour from now. As you say, that'll probably wear us out.
I think with the Kennedy assassination, I can remember exactly where I was when I heard that on the radio, because we were over at the fruit shed, which was a few hundred metres away from our house, where we were cutting apricots and putting them on trays to turn them into dried fruit, et cetera, et cetera. I was just outside, chucking out some apricots that weren't any good. We had the radio on and the news came over. And I just remember thinking, wow, that's bad news, because at the time we'd been schooled into thinking that the Kennedys were good for the world, basically. And I think they probably were. People have thrown doubt upon anybody who's done anything, so whatever.
So I remember the shock of that—and that's being an Australian living in Australia, nothing to do with America. What did I think about that? I felt really sad for his family, and also for Americans, and therefore for people who were friends of America at the time. And what does that mean? It was the first time I'd really thought about assassinating politicians. That hadn't really been part of a conversation you would have at that time. There had been assassinations before then, obviously, quite a while before, but not in my consciousness. So what effect did that have? Probably just a shock thing, really, more than anything, and thinking about why somebody would do that, and how somebody could get to do that with all the security on and all that sort of stuff.
Michael: I suppose you were in a small town at the time, and probably almost everybody knew everybody else, so there would have been almost a collective or shared sense. Actually, I suppose it was a big enough event that that was true even in big cities and around the world. But I'm just wondering what the atmosphere was like. I presume everybody was talking about it with each other. Were people very upset, or just shocked, or what?
Howard: I think shocked and upset would probably put it down. I'm recalling something that was 65 years ago. All I can remember is my own shock at hearing the news, basically. I'm absolutely certain there were conversations about it at our place at home, at the dinner table, and with other people—where people say, "Did you hear about the assassination?" That would have happened. But that was during school holidays, I'm pretty sure. I can't remember what the date was actually, but if we were cutting apricots it would have been during summer, usually around Christmas time. So we probably didn't have a school sort of space for it.
Michael: Do you remember much—there were later attempts on—sorry, I dropped it. Go back and say what you were going to say.
Howard: One of the things I did think was, so what happens now? And ever since then there's been speculation about who actually shot JFK. Was it really Lee Harvey Oswald, or was it somebody else? And what did Jack Ruby have to do with it? All that has been percolating through the film industry and the documentary industry ever since, and conspiracy theories about the CIA, and blah, blah, blah.
So what do I believe? If I was pushed on it, I'd still say I couldn't be absolutely certain who actually shot him. But I'm not speculating on what happened. If you're cynical about governments and groups like the CIA—and as you get older you probably get a bit more cynical about that—you think, well, yeah, look, they could have done that. It could have been some rogue person in there, because some of those sorts of people get attracted to those sorts of organisations. And they thought they were doing good by getting rid of a president that was too friendly with whoever. Anyway, I don't really recall anything else. Do you have a question?
Michael: Yeah, a few. Also a comment about logistics, which is you're gradually disappearing. Tip your camera up slightly. Yeah, you're supposed to be visible. It's not a phone call—or, for that matter, an interview with your ceiling.
Later on there were assassination attempts on people like Ronald Reagan, and I'm almost certain I remember one on the Pope. I was a kid when those happened, and of course they had no resonance at all—I suppose there was Robert Kennedy, there was Martin Luther King, and most of all there was John F. Kennedy. But did those attempts bring back thoughts about it, or seem somehow a bit of a piece?
Howard: I don't really remember the sequence of all those—you probably do. So I couldn't say for sure. But I think overall, with assassination attempts, you sort of think, well, it's a dangerous world if you're in politics, in a sense—if you're in the public arena—because there's going to be nutters out there who will do stuff. Nobody deserves to get shot. So that becomes your bottom line. At the same time, you think, well, for anybody who's had an attempt made on them, whether it's a Kennedy or a Trump or Reagan, whatever, is there anything to justify that that was an okay thing to do? No.
At the same time, is it okay to justify what Putin does to a country? That's just another form of assassination, really. So does that justify assassination attempts, on the basis that we're trying to do away with a bad guy? Who decides who a bad guy is? I mean, you can decide for yourself if somebody might be affecting you—not that you're going to go and assassinate somebody you think is a bit of a dickhead or whatever. I've worked with a few people that are probably in that category, but I didn't ever actually think of shooting them. You'll be pleased to know.
Michael: Dad, you've got that on the record.
Howard: Yeah. So I don't recall any other assassination attempts, apart from more recent ones with Trump, that had an effect on my thinking, other than what I've said already about assassination and the stories behind them: why and how and who, and what type of person does those sorts of things. And how can you justify poor behaviour against somebody? I hadn't really thought about that, but yeah.
Michael: Do you remember the fall of the Berlin Wall? Can I just prime you with one other thing? Something that was a striking event for me in my life—it must have been in the mid-1980s, and I was just starting to get some sense of the world and the fact that there were different countries and so on. I had a conversation with you and Mum about communism, and particularly the Soviet Union. And you had a very interesting way of explaining it. I remember in particular you didn't really give an economic explanation. Instead, you made this comment that there were some countries—and the Soviet Union was a leading one—where people's movement was controlled. They weren't allowed to leave. And this was a way of keeping control of them and keeping them where they were.
I don't know that you even necessarily made it explicit, but it was obvious to me as a kid that if you've got to control outflow in that way, you've got a bit of a problem internally. If you're desperately trying to stop people from exiting, you're probably not doing such a great job as a country, and maybe there's something a bit wrong with your system and you should look into that. It was an extremely striking thing, and I think it probably impacted my perception of the Berlin Wall a few years later. In retrospect—of course I didn't know at the time—I think that was a very perceptive way of explaining something to a kid about the nature of politics, deeper in some ways than a lot of the standard explanations.
Howard: Well, it might have been at the time when—I'm not sure whether you'd recall this, but probably when you were a teenager, I would imagine—friends of ours, Rob and Denise Reason, had a Chinese woman stay with them for a whole term.
Michael: Yeah, yeah, I remember her.
Howard: I've just forgotten her name for the time being. She was a lecturer in English in Chinese universities, and she got leave from the government to come to Australia to learn English. Not quite sure why you'd come to Australia to learn English, but she did—as in Strine. She probably learned quite a few words that were not in the English language: Australianised versions.
She asked if it was okay for her to come and sit in on my lectures—I was lecturing at Carseldine campus at the time, so that would have been in the late 80s, I think, maybe early 90s—just so she could immerse herself in stuff. She was also quite interested in learning about curriculum and teaching studies, blah, blah, blah. So I got to know her quite well. I used to pick her up from Rob's place, take her along with me on a Tuesday, whatever it was, and then we'd chat on the way home.
One day, after a few months of all that, I dropped in to pick her up, and Rob said, "She's not here." Have I told you the story?
Michael: No, I don't think so.
Howard: I said, "What do you mean, she's not here?" And he said, "Well, at one o'clock last night we had a visit from two men from the Chinese embassy, who came and picked her up and took her to the airport and sent her back." It might not have been one o'clock, but it was some odd time; it might have been early that morning. And I said, "So what's the go?" Shock, horror, really.
Apparently they'd done all their due diligence on her, recording conversations she had, and they understood that she was thinking about staying in Australia. Even though she had a husband back in China, she was contemplating it. And she did talk about that with me in my car during that time. And a whole lot of things you think: wow, so that's real. These guys, the Chinese government, that's what they do. They didn't see any need for policing her in any other way, other than taking her back home and presumably not letting her loose again on the world. Their reasoning was that she did not have permission to stay, and she shouldn't be talking about staying, and so they were going to take her away from that. So there you go. That's when you stop and wonder just what happens in the world of espionage, really. Who's listening to who? That was 40 years ago.
Howard: And that reminded me of a not dissimilar thing. When I was a kid—I was only about 10—I was out with Dad on the fruit block picking grapes. There was a big screech of brakes, and a guy that Dad knew, who was from an Eastern European country—I can't remember exactly which one—raced up, and the fear of God was in him. He said, "They're going to come to take me away." And Dad said, "So what do you mean? Who's doing what?" Blah, blah, blah.
It turned out that during the Second World War, which was like 15 years earlier, he'd been included in a photograph at a dance in Mackay in Queensland with another person who, it turns out, was a spy, for England or for whatever. And the country he was from—Yugoslavia or whatever—had come to take him away, or at least to question him. He was scared as hell. The only person he knew that might help was Dad—he knew of him as a local councillor and community leader, et cetera, et cetera. So that struck me as being pretty interesting: that they'd gone through photographs that professional photographers had taken at a dance in Mackay in order to find this guy. They must have been scouting.
Michael: You wonder if he was paranoid for some reason, or maybe he was imagining it.
Howard: Yeah, well, Dad saw him as not being a paranoid person. This was not the sort of behaviour he was prone to. And he had a visit from these guys. They came and visited—interrogated him, basically.
Michael: So this was for real. Okay, that's interesting. I know of cases where people have had breakdowns and they've also claimed that they've been visited by whoever. So I would wonder about that, but if your dad independently thought it was plausible, then that's a different matter.
Howard: We just took it on face value, really, which is all you can do. It may have been that he was paranoid, but apparently this had all happened. The interrogation had happened, and they hadn't taken him into custody or anything—they hadn't put handcuffs on him or whatever else. So he was free, but it just put the wind up him so much that he was wondering whether or not that was the end of it. It turns out it was. He was okay. Nothing else happened. So these are events in a life which are not world events, but they're things that…
Michael: No, it's very striking. So you were going to say—that's right, the Berlin Wall. The Berlin Wall, or any other event that has come to mind.
Howard: Yeah, well, I think just there being a Berlin Wall in the first place was striking enough. I wasn't alive when the wall went up, I don't think. How long after the Second World War was the wall erected, do you remember?
Michael: I don't know. I don't know the construction history.
Howard: Anyway. And then I do remember your friend from Germany having a piece of the wall when it was broken down. So I thought that was quite another thing. The idea of there being a wall to separate people was again part of that conversation about communism, I suppose: "We're running East Germany here, part of the communist regime, Russia, et cetera, et cetera. And while people don't like it, we're going to keep them. Bad luck."
It was interesting—just at a recent Progress Association meeting here in Samford, we were doing a rerun of our Samford Futures process, which we did first of all 15 years ago, and we wanted to do a review of all that. It was just an ordinary meeting, but there were probably 30 people there. And I was asked my take on the first round of things that we did, and blah, blah, blah. And I said that was a very fulfilling process, but very strenuous, so I'm not sure that I'll be up for doing that again. Somebody else is going to have to put their hand up for all the organisational side of things. Other inputs are fine, but not all the rest of it.
There was a bit of laughter about that—fair enough, I guess. But one person, half seriously—well, more than half seriously—said, "Yeah, but why did you bother doing it in the first place?" And I said, well, not to be too corny about it, but my view of life is that the world goes around a whole lot better when people have some level of autonomy over what they do. And that's the same in their household as in their community, as in their country, as in the world. So this is just an example of what we do in our little location to make sure that the things we want in Samford Valley are known to those others who might otherwise deem to make decisions for us.
And our kids, in some way, shape or form, may get a whiff of this. Kids are a good assessor of what's good and what's not good, and they would see it as good if the adult caregivers were doing something useful for the community and for them. So that might just rub off in their sense of autonomy, and their sense of capacity to determine things for themselves—not entirely by themselves, but in a collaborative sort of way. So that's probably consistent with other stuff that we've talked about.
Anyway, I'm trying to think of other world events that had significant impact. I can't really. If you said one, like the Berlin Wall, I saw it as an aftermath: a good win for the good guys, whoever. And then the stories, of course, of people who escaped from East Germany—there's a whole lot of movies about that sort of stuff. I've always been a bit interested in those sorts of movies, for some reason or other.
Michael: Yeah, right. Well, there are many questions I want to ask, but let's just go towards that. Were there any movies or books or music or anything like that that were particularly formative? I sort of remember you as being a bit of a movie person in some ways.
Howard: Yeah, I'm not good at remembering the titles of books or the titles of movies, but there was the one—it wasn't exactly on the topic we're talking about, but it had an impact—about the guy who was a German living in Germany at the time. He wasn't Jewish, but he had Jewish friends, and he set about the task of employing as many Jewish people as possible in his workplaces, so that they could stay alive. And he did that by having to work with German authorities in a way that was probably illegal at times, in terms of what the Germans thought was illegal.
Michael: Are you thinking of Schindler's List?
Howard: Yeah, Schindler's List. So that sort of thing. And there's a couple of other movies where people have helped people escape, and they've put themselves at risk in doing so. That had an effect on me, in thinking: well, gutsy effort, guys. You could easily have been shot along with others who were shot for less than that. And Schindler's List, the movie, is quite compelling at the end. You probably remember the actual film of those who were still alive, and their memories and what have you, and the actors that acted for them.
Michael: If I remember correctly, the Schindler Jews—the Schindlerjuden, I think they called them—who were still alive were asked to come and lay a rock on his grave, together with the actor who played them, or somebody close. It's very striking, particularly because eventually the grave is just covered in rocks, and you start to realise, oh my goodness, even after so many years, and so many of them must have passed away, there's still just an enormous number of people who were impacted by this act of bravery.
Howard: Yeah. So it does have an impact.
Michael: Another example of what you're talking about, actually: people enabling autonomy in the most basic way for others.
Howard: Anyway, got something else?
Michael: There's a zillion other things. We're 52 minutes in. We could potentially call it quits—I know you have to head off—or we could do one more. Okay, let's do one more if you're feeling good enough for it.
Howard: One more, we'll do one more. I'll see how I go. It's good. I enjoy it.
Michael: So, another one, just going through—this is something I have no idea about. Obviously the smallpox vaccine was 200-odd years ago, but a lot of the modern vaccines—polio—start to overlap your life. Actually, I think polio was during your lifetime, and certainly its wide deployment was within your lifetime. Do you remember that as being a big deal? Was it something people talked about? Or was it something that you just took for granted as part of your life?
Howard: Well, by the time I was at school—by the time I was five or six and went to Monash Primary School—there had been a vaccine, I think, in operation. But one of the things that struck me when I went to school was that one of the young girls at school had polio. She had the callipers on her legs and what have you, and couldn't walk properly. I never really fully understood that at the time, and even now I probably don't know all the effects of polio. But I can remember her name, Pauline Vanderwaard, and she was an interesting person in herself anyway, characteristically. She fought her way through the physical problems with polio.
At school she was probably one of the only people that would have been classified as having some level of disability. There were probably others that had disabilities that might not have been known, or were not obvious. But in the rest of the community it wasn't obvious that polio was active—but that's only because I didn't come across it other than with Pauline. If I'd lived in a more populated area, there would have been more people. But it sounds like it was on the down at the time. My memory of her was she was probably about eight or nine or 10 when I went to school, so she was older than me. So it might have been that the polio vaccine was only just invented in that previous 10-year period. I don't know.
Michael: I want to say, for whatever reason, 1952 is coming to mind as the…
Howard: Okay. I was going to say, it was in the 1950s that I went to school. When I was five, it was 1956.
Michael: I remember it being rolled out very quickly. Quite likely by the time you were five or six, you might well have been able to benefit from it. But I'm making these numbers up. I don't actually remember what it was.
Howard: Well, we were all having vaccines, and I'm pretty sure I was one of them—or was I? I don't know, to be honest with you. But when you're a baby, you had whatever you were supposed to have. The measles vaccine was probably one of them, chickenpox, et cetera, et cetera. That's what you did as a kid. You had your needles.
Michael: Okay, so in some ways a lot of that really predates you a bit, with some overlap with polio. Just thinking of big, big changes in the world. I suppose there have been quite a few, but…
Howard: Well, I think a big change was the telephone, for example. That was introduced for use more around when I was probably seven, eight, nine, ten. The telephone was invented before then, but… Our telephone was number seven.
Michael: Oh my goodness. That's an easy number to remember. Better than a URL.
Howard: That's right. And then as more and more people got phones, it became 17, and then 217.
Michael: Too bad you didn't get to keep your number. That would have been great to keep.
Howard: Well, I think from then on they might have gone up—it might have been more like six digits then, but I can't remember. I'm pretty sure the last number we had when I was at home was probably five digits. Maybe only four. I don't know. And of course at the time they had the exchange, so you had people staffing the telephone exchange. It wasn't direct calls. I don't know how that worked. And there was always chat about people eavesdropping on phone calls who weren't supposed to be doing that.
Then you had computers—around the time you were a youngster, really, or just a bit before then, probably. So those are significant things that change your life. When I look back on, say, 75 years, a lot happened with the technology. And now, it's quite an amazing shifting of innovation in technology and communication and calculation and experimentation and all sorts of stuff, just because of technological advances—all the things that you've been associated with. I probably would have been seen to be not the earliest adopter, but a relatively positive sort of user of technology, as different to seeing technology as interfering with the way of life. It seemed to be more of an enabler in terms of the way you communicate with people. So therefore a good thing, provided it was used well. But we're doing a rerun of all that right now with AI.
Michael: Oh, yeah. What comes to mind as the biggest felt change in the world? Sorry, that's one of those impossible questions. Nobody sits around ranking them all, so they don't know what the number one is. It's like somebody says, "What are your top 10 favourite movies?" And you're like, "I'll get back to you in a month, when I've thought about all the movies."
Howard: It's true. Well, okay, give me a week.
Michael: What comes to mind when you think about big felt changes? Particularly something that maybe is a little bit not so obvious. A lot of people would say the computer, and of course that's a great answer and really interesting. But I'm just wondering if you…
Howard: Well, I think—it's not actually technological change, although technology has helped it—it's awareness about and interest in—I'm not quite sure how else to put it—the whole thing around environmental impacts. When we're ignorant of anything, we can do whatever we feel we need to do. But when we become less ignorant about things, become more knowledgeable, then it changes our behaviour.
I remember as a kid in Monash—Monash was like a valley, and it was irrigated from the rim of the valley, so the water all trickled through the rest of the valley and fed the vines, et cetera, et cetera. And of course there were the effects of irrigation on our country. I can remember, down in the bottom of the valley where the football fields were, I said to Dad, "So what's all that? What's all that white stuff on the surface there, where the grass is not growing? There's no white stuff elsewhere." He said, "Scientists don't know yet, but there's people who think that the way we irrigate draws salt to the surface." I've forgotten how he explained it. And that affects a whole lot of things in life.
Why did I remember that conversation in particular? I'm not sure, but I think it must have been something I thought: well, if scientists think there's something wrong, how come something's not being done? I don't know that I actually articulated that, but I was thinking that. So I think it's been one of those things where technology and scientific discovery and knowledge about the science of the environment has helped an awful lot, and without it there probably would not have been any changes to the way we treat our environment. So funnily enough, if I stopped to think, I might have thought about something that's actually a thing, as different to a technology. But the awareness of—or the need for awareness of— environmental stuff has probably had the most impact on me.
In fact, when I first went out teaching, I went to a workshop run by a guy called Professor John Settlage. He was from America, and he was a scientist—an environmental scientist, although he wasn't called that at the time. He ran workshops on environmental stuff, and he stimulated my thinking: once you know it, it's a bit hard to turn your back on it. So therefore knowledge is important. And I think that's why I took on the job as an environmental studies consultant and what have you—so that the kids, at least in those schools that I was visiting, were going to get knowledge. That doesn't necessarily mean that they will act on it, but it's hard to act on it if you don't know it. So teachers would need that as well. That's partly why I went and did a whole lot of work with teachers in particular about all that, and since then with communities and with businesses. It sounds like a highly planned strategy of mine, but actually it was just the way it turned out. It seemed logical to do it that way.
Michael: I would have been probably in my mid-20s; you would have been about the age I am now. And you were getting involved a lot in environmental stuff, and the Greens, and solar power, and all these other things. For me, I suppose I was a bit surprised. I wasn't anticipating it. And it's been really interesting through all these—just all these earlier things. I had no idea you'd been involved with the environmental education centres and all those things, and a whole lot of these earlier stories that you have. And the story about the Murray-Darling and the salination, which of course turns out to be a huge, huge deal—you being alive to that decades earlier. It's really interesting to have it all filled in. It's kind of little light bulbs going off in my mind.
Howard: Yeah, we might pick up on that a little bit more next time, when I think more about it and we've got a little bit more time. But I'm glad you asked that question, because I haven't really thought about that before.
Howard: I suppose if there was one other thing, it would be just around what democracy really is: how does that actually play out for people, and why is it important? We've obviously talked about it in terms of communism and the thought patterns there—control. It's really still about control, or lack of control, of people's ability to manage their own lives. I think Sir Zelman Cowen, who was the Governor-General for a time, had that one-liner—I don't know whether I've told you about it—"The freedom to swing your arms stops at the tip of someone else's nose."
Michael: Yeah, you did.
Howard: And I think you could do worse than live by that sort of thing.
Michael: Right, because it's kind of going back to your autonomy thing before. Autonomy doesn't mean you get to do whatever you want.
Howard: No, that's right. Anyway, I'll take your advice. We went half an extra one there, and that's okay. We'll know where to pick up next time. No, I really enjoyed it. Thanks for taking the time, mate. I know you've got things you can do, but you're taking time to do this. I appreciate it.
Michael: Well, this is fantastic. It's just wonderful. I'm so glad we can do it. Okay, Dad.
Howard: Me too. Me too.
