Howard's hidden past

Howard's hidden past
David Marr
June 10, 2006


THE modest service station in suburban Sydney is sacred ground for John Howard and the modern Liberal Party. For nearly 30 years, the Prime Minister's father ran the business on the corner of Ewart Street and Wardell Road in Dulwich Hill in the city's inner-west, setting an example his son thinks Australia should follow.

"I was brought up to believe that about the best thing you could ever do in your life," he said soon after taking office in 1996, "was to start up a business with nothing, work your insides out, hope you earned a bit of money, and pass on a bit of it to your kids."

His mother's church and his father's service station have come to stand as markers of respectability, honesty and the Howard family's deep roots in the suburban heart of the nation. To be the son of a service station owner allows John Howard to claim, as a qualification for high office, that he was and remains an ordinary Australian.

But Howard's father had another life. While this old soldier worked his humble Sydney service station, he was also ?- on paper ?- a New Guinea planter with a string of estates where 200 native labourers grew copra in his name. Lyall Howard had cashed in his status as a returned digger to "dummy" for the trading house W. R. Carpenter and Company Ltd. His own father Walter was doing it too. The Howard case provoked secret, official investigations at the highest levels in Canberra, but they and their powerful backer got away with the scam.

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