by John Howard
Mum’s family never owned their own home, and always lived in rented accommodation in and around Petersham and Lewisham, inner suburbs of Sydney. I suspect that my grandfather was an unsuccessful punter, and that his gambling habits were strongly disapproved of by both his wife and his elder daughter. Whenever I visited their home as a young child there was a sad atmosphere. As I grew older, and learned more of the background, I understood why.
Grandfather Joe Kell was a great walker. When over 80 he would regularly walk from his home in New Canterbury Road, Petersham, to his daughter May’s place in Wardell Road, Earlwood, a distance of almost 4 kilometres. That is something he passed on to one of his grandsons.
Mum’s brothers, Charlie and Arthur, had both fought in World War II, Charlie in the army, and Arthur in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). Charlie had been part of an army unit guarding the Cowra prisoner of war camp when the Japanese breakout occurred The experience permanently clouded his attitude towards the Japanese because of their behaviour during the breakout.
Charlie’s marriage had broken up by the time I was in my teens, and his only close family were his two sisters. Charlie had always drunk heavily, and his failed marriage only made this worse. I respected the way in which Mum tried to help him, having him home regularly, despite Charlie often being the worse for wear. Her tense reaction whenever he was affected by drink showed just how strongly her childhood experiences of alcoholism had affected her. She often told me that she thought Charlie had had a tough life, frequently mentioning the fact that he had spent the night of his 21st birthday sleeping under a bridge, whilst on the track for work in the Shepparton area of Victoria in the mid-1920s.
My mother and her sister May (Roberts) were very close. May did not marry until her early 40s and had no children. She lived in the same suburb as us and saw a great deal of our family, especially me. We formed a very close bond, as she also did with my brother Bob, when we were all a good deal older. May had a genuinely sunny and positive disposition. To employ a phrase typical of her generation, her life had been no ‘bed of roses’, yet she always seemed happy with her lot. She was a wonderful woman, and like my wife’s mother, Beryl Parker, had an extraordinary capacity always to see the best in people. She was a special person and I remember her with very deep love and affection.
Lyall and Mona Howard had four sons: Walter (Wal), born in 1926, Stanley (Stan) in 1930, Robert (Bob) in 1936 and me in 1939. The Great Depression had its impact on family planning.
As best I could describe it, I grew up in a stable, lower middle-class home. When Dad went into business, establishing a garage with his father, he was able to make a reasonably comfortable living for our family. Mum was a full-time homemaker, who dedicated her life to the care and upbringing of her four sons. Mum and Dad were both conservative, patriotic Australians.
The house I grew up in was a Californian bungalow, built in the early 1920s. Earlwood, in Sydney’s inner southwest, was full of them. It was heavily settled after the Great War. Street names such as Flers, Hamilton, Dellwood, Kitchener and Fricourt were testament to that. It was a three-bedroom home, so until I was well into my teens I shared a bedroom with Bob. About my earliest memory was looking at the blackout paper which my parents had placed over the small casement window in the loungeroom. That must have been in 1942, when there were frequent blackouts in Sydney through fear of possible air raids.
Politics was talked a lot at home. From a very early age I listened to discussions about world events, as well as particular issues affecting Sydney and Australia. Being the youngest in the family, it was natural that I imbibed much from my parents and elder brothers.
Towards the end of 1949, I knew that there was an election coming up from the talk at home, seeing the newspapers and listening to the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) news. Mum and Dad were both strong Liberals and had plenty of good things to say about Bob Menzies, then Leader of the Opposition, but soon to become prime minister and to stay in that position longer than any other person in Australian history.
Owning a garage, or service station, my father had been bedevilled from the war years onwards by petrol rationing. Dad would bring home the ration tickets and my brother Bob would join me in counting them on the breakfast-room table. I thought this was a lot of fun, and I missed it when it ended. My parents didn’t. Menzies’ 1949 election promise to remove petrol rationing attracted them greatly, and they were delighted when it was abolished.
Petrol rationing had been an understandable wartime measure, but in peacetime it was a real bugbear for anyone in my father’s business, and motorists generally. It was abolished for a period and then brought back shortly before the 1949 election.
The Labor PM at the time, Ben Chifley, was well liked. To his credit, his Government began the great postwar migration surge — then overseen by his Immigration Minister Arthur Calwell — which helped shape the modern Australia. He also launched the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, which remains a national development icon.
But when it came to economics, the Chifley Labor Government, in the late ’40s, remained locked in the wartime mindset of controls and micro-management of the economy.
Chifley led a government which tried to nationalise the private trading banks. This move galvanised into action many supporters of free enterprise, and not just the banks. Everything had gone wrong for Chifley following his Government’s re-election in 1946. His attempt to nationalise the banks had been rejected as unconstitutional by both the High Court of Australia and the Privy Council. Massive strikes on the NSW coalfields in 1949 produced prolonged blackouts in Sydney. In the end Chifley had to embrace what for a Labor man like him must have been a nightmare: the use of troops on the coalfields to keep essential supplies moving.
The times were clearly right for a man and a party preaching the gospel of competition and fewer government controls. Bob Menzies and the Liberal Party neatly filled the bill. Anyhow, that was what my parents, Lyall and Mona Howard, thought. So did my eldest brother, Wal, the only one of their children then to have a vote.
My parents were part of the ‘forgotten people’ who Menzies had defined in his famous radio broadcast in 1942: they neither belonged to organised labour, nor were rich and powerful. He called them middle class, with the description of ‘salary-earners, shopkeepers, skilled artisans, professional men and women, farmers, and so on’. Mum and Dad aimed to give their four sons more security and more opportunities than they themselves had had. In that, they were successful, for which I and my brothers are eternally grateful.
Several days before the election took place a newspaper I bought carried the headline ‘Final Gallup Poll Predicts Coalition Victory’. On election night, my brother Bob and I had gone to a local picture theatre with our parents. During the screening of the second film, the theatre management displayed a slide which showed that the Coalition had taken an early lead. In those days polling booths remained open until 8 pm.
When we got home, we found my brother Wal sitting on the floor in front of the radio. He said that Menzies had won and that the biggest swing had been in Queensland. On that latter score at least, nothing much has changed in almost 60 years. When the Coalition won government in 1996, Labor was routed in the Sunshine State, and in 2007 the Labor Party achieved a greater swing in that state than in any other part of Australia. Everyone in our household was very happy with the result. Daniel Mulcahy was comfortably returned as the Labor member for Lang. Those shed workers across the road had done their job.
For as long as I can remember, I was a regular listener to sport on ABC Radio, mainly cricket and rugby league. Cricket always came first. I knew the names of Bradman, Miller and Lindwall before I learned the name Menzies. My father took me to the Sydney Cricket Ground on 28 February 1949 to see Don Bradman play for the last time at that ground, in the Kippax-Oldfield Testimonial. It was the only occasion on which I saw the great man play.
I also had a keen interest in boxing. I could recite
, in order, all of the heavyweight champions of the world from James J. Corbett onwards. Controversies in boxing, such as the famous long count in the bout between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney, enthralled me. I was fascinated when I read that Sydney had hosted a fight for the heavyweight title in 1909 between Tommy Burns and Jack Johnson. In my late teens I went to Sydney Stadium, in Rushcutters Bay, to see several bouts. Years later, when I was in politics, some of my friends were horrified when I confessed to my boyhood interest in boxing. As I grew older I lost interest in it, in part because I realised the terrible damage people suffered, but I had been quite taken by it in my youth.
From a young age I was an avid reader of the Biggles books, authored by Captain W.E. Johns, which told the story of a group of British airmen who not only fought heroically in the Battle of Britain but did other great things in defence of liberty. A little later I devoured books such as Reach for the Sky, by Paul Brickhill, an Australian, which covered the amazing war service of Douglas Bader, who lost both legs but resumed flying in the Royal Air Force (RAF); The Dambusters, the saga of the RAF bombing raids on the dams of the Ruhr Valley; and Nicholas Monsarrat’s classic The Cruel Sea. This book, which like the other two led to a film of the same name, covered the perils and heavy human losses involved in keeping open the sea lanes from Britain to Russia through the North Sea. Barely a decade had passed since the end of World War II and books and films about aspects of that huge conflict abounded.
I read a lot of sporting books, naturally starting with cricket. Two which I still have in the sports section of my bookshelves at home are Straight Hit, co-written by Keith Miller, one of Australia’s greatest-ever all-rounders, and R.S. Whitington. It told of the West Indies’ tour of Australia in 1951–52. I read it again and again over a period of years. The other was A Century of Cricketers, by A.G. ‘Johnny’ Moyes. He had compiled the stories of one hundred famous cricketers, ending in about 1950. Moyes was an accomplished analyst. It was a different era and a vastly different medium, but he was something of a Richie Benaud of radio.
As I grew older my reading tastes expanded to include history as well as biographies. To this day I maintain a marked preference for books in these two categories. My father subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, a well-illustrated American periodical, which I read thoroughly. It gave me an early feel for some of the differences in both American culture and politics. This was the early 1950s, and hostility to communism came through strongly in the pages of the magazine.
We always had a dog. For almost 14 years we had a marvellous Irish setter named Caesar. He went everywhere with me, even to church, where he would position himself in the back vestibule. Nobody seemed to mind; it was, after all, his home territory. He had to be put down not long before I turned 21. I took him to the vet, and I cried as he died in my arms.
The 1950s, when I grew up, was probably the most stable, secure and prosperous decade Australia had yet experienced in the 20th century. There are many now who belittle 1950s Australia. In the process they do their country and an earlier generation much disservice. True, the Australia I was raised in was far from perfect. Women were denied many opportunities; the white Australia policy was still in place; and the plight of Indigenous Australians had yet to stir the national consciousness.
But it is beyond churlish to deny the achievement of an era when so many struggling Australian families secured a modest level of material comfort, sent children to university for the first time and laid the economic and social foundations of modern Australia.
Television arrived in 1956, the year that I did my Leaving Certificate. For most of the decade, and before television changed forever the leisure habits of Australians, going to the pictures was a major social pursuit. It certainly was for the Howards, and going to the pictures for us meant on Saturday nights. Saturday afternoon matinees were off limits. That was when young men were meant to be in the open air, playing sport.
This was Hollywood’s golden era, years before the renaissance of the Australian film industry. American films dominated the screen, although there was a reasonable stream of British productions featuring such talented actors as Alec Guinness. The familiarity I felt with both London and New York, especially the latter, when I first saw those cities in the 1960s was a mark of the cultural deposit left by Hollywood in its hey-day.
We four boys and our mother attended and were involved in the activities of the local Methodist church, which stood opposite our home at 25 William Street. The church played a big part in the lives of all of us, but in different ways. For my eldest brothers, Wal and Stan, it was in their teen years a large part of their social life, more so than for Bob and me. I maintained regular attendance at the church until I left Earlwood in my late 20s. My brothers and I indulged our sporting passions through the church.
Earlwood Methodist Church had a large congregation, and was able to field several teams in the very extensive Protestant church cricket and soccer competitions. At one stage the four of us, and one of our uncles, making five Howards in all, played in the church cricket team. I have fond memories of many Saturday afternoons in the sun, playing cricket for Earlwood Meths at grounds such as Rudd Park in Belmore, and Tempe Reserve and Steele Park in Undercliffe. This cricket competition proudly boasts Bob Simpson and Brian Booth, both Australian Test Cricket captains, amongst those who played for their local church teams at a very young age.
Although our lives revolved very much around the church, religion and theology were rarely discussed at home. My father was a very infrequent churchgoer. He was a believer, but not a participant. My parents belonged to a generation of Australians which did not talk a lot about religion, even if they held to their faith. Then again, it was an era in which personal feelings generally, and not just about religion, tended to be internalised. The willingness of today’s generation, especially men, to speak more openly about their feelings is something to be welcomed. This is an area where the good old days were definitely not better.
We grew up at a time when church attendance was much higher, and when a moral consensus flowing from the Judaeo-Christian ethic held a largely unchallenged place in Australian society. The influence of the Christian religion, even amongst those who privately repudiated it, was both strong and pervasive.
The fundamentals of Christian belief and practice which I learned at the Earlwood Methodist Church have stayed with me to this day, although I would not pretend to be other than an imperfect adherent to them. I now attend a local Anglican church, denominational labels within Christianity meaning nothing to me. Any religious belief requires a large act of faith. To many people, believing in something that cannot be proved is simply a step too far. To me, by contrast, human life seems so complex and hard to explain yet so extraordinary that the existence of God has always seemed to offer a better explanation of its meaning than any other.
The extended Howard family, given that Dad had been one of nine children, was quite large. My paternal grandmother, Jane Falconer Howard, lived with one or other of her daughters for the last years of her life. Most Sunday afternoons involved visits to my grandmother. She was a stoic woman, confined to a wheelchair from the age of 62 as a result of rheumatoid arthritis. Deeply religious, she was in every way the matriarch of the family until her death in 1953, when I was aged 14. I have quite happy recollections of extended Howard family gatherings for special occasions, which brought me in touch with my numerous cousins.
A great Howard family ritual was observance of Bonfire Night, strictly speaking Empire Day, 24 May, that date being marked because it had been Queen Victoria’s birthday. We always had large amounts of fireworks, built huge bonfires, had a half-day school holiday and enjoyed ourselves immensely. Like all Western societies Australia has become a nanny state on activities such as this. As a consequence today’s children are denied much innocent fun. I think that fireworks prohibitions are ridiculous.
My parents were quiet, even shy people whose total focus was the care and upbringing of t
heir four children. They wanted us to have better educational opportunities than they had enjoyed. Doing homework or studying for university exams took precedence over everything else at home. My mother and father would frequently forgo listening to the radio — after the ABC news of course — so that one or more of their children could study undistracted. Often Stan would be at his desk in his bedroom, and Bob and I would be working on the dining-room table. They wanted their children to succeed, and did all in their power to bring that about.
There was nothing self-important or pompous about either of my parents. They actively discouraged such character traits in their children and were scornful of anyone who exhibited what their generation called ‘side’. We were taught to be polite to people doing menial tasks. My mother rebuked me at the pictures one night because I had used my foot to push a sweet wrapper towards a cleaning lady who was collecting rubbish during interval. She said that I should have picked it up and handed it to her.
Due to the age difference, I had a minor form of hero worship towards my two eldest brothers, Wal and Stan. At the age of 15, I was absolutely devastated when Wal was not elected captain of the church cricket team. This was because he took it for granted, owing to his seniority, that he would be elected. He had not bothered to organise his numbers. I thought the decision of the team was most unfair, and it left me feeling upset and angry for weeks. I found it hard to accept that the other members of the team would not all want Wal as captain. It also taught me a lesson about ballots, which I have never forgotten.
I attended Earlwood Public School, the local primary school, and won admission to Canterbury Boys’ High School, then one of the limited number of selective high schools in Sydney. Its catchment area was the St George and Canterbury-Bankstown districts, a large chunk of southwestern Sydney.