David Malouf

And what they would then do is have an examination at the end of primary school.

And if you pass that examination, the government paid half your fees at any private school you wanted to go to.

They themselves had secondary schools.

There was only one secondary school in Brisbane, which was State High, and a technical college and a commercial college, and a few high schools in large towns throughout Queensland, but 95% of the secondary education was provided by...

other sources than government sources.

So the vast majority of Queensland kids went into the workforce at the age of 13 or 14?

Yes.

That's extraordinary.

And they went usually as, say, the boys were office boys in firms, which they would one day become CEO of.

Extraordinary.

It just seems like a whole other world.

Were you exposed as a kid in wartime Brisbane to... Do you have memories of the war, of the huge amount of American...

servicemen and women that flooded into Brisbane all of a sudden?

Was it half a million or a million that came into Brisbane all of a sudden?

Well, it passed through Brisbane, yes.

But Brisbane was only about, I think it was under 400,000 people at that time.

So if you put 100,000 servicemen from elsewhere...

into the city, the whole town changes.

Most of those were Americans and the city really became completely Americanized.

And for us it was a complete revelation because it's difficult to explain that Australia was actually quite closed off from the world all through the 20s and 30s and had not developed really very much from the end of the First World War.