Tribute: John Holland

There are half a dozen of us here who first met John 53 years ago. We were young first year science students at the University of New South Wales.

It was 1964. Also at university with us was John Mitchell who had known John Holland since school days in 1960. We were 17 years old and there was this really old bloke who was a little more than a year older than us.

This unusual red headed bloke we admired, he’d been in the work force as a clerk in the NSW Department of Education, he was world wise, he knew about drink, smoking, women, how the world ran and even stripping down motors and rebuilding without a collection of spare nuts and bolts.

He was like our wise old brother and he gave us advice.

He was a rebel then and was a rebel all his life.

John did it the hard way, left school early, went into the work force and went to night school to get his leaving certificate and university entrance. At that time, only two per cent of school leavers went to university. People then got real degrees underpinned by hard work, real scholarship and abilities. There were jobs. His father and uncle were greatly affected by World War II and this stayed with John all his life. He was very much aware of the casualties of war and many of these casualties were amongst the living.

He was totally unpretentious. He was modest, courteous and could be very charming. He was like this all his life.

He had the common touch, he didn’t big note himself, had absolutely no airs and was very much aware of and influenced by his working class roots. John had a great and finely-tuned left field sense of humour. He also had a great sense of what was right and wrong. 

An example. In 1964, a mob of first year geology students were on a field trip and were over-nighting at Lithgow. We were all underage, all had too much to drink, were walking along a road and a car screeched up and stopped next to us. The driver screamed abuse at us, claimed he was the local inspector of police and that we louts should be taught a lesson because: “This was Lithgow”.

That got up John’s nose. John became protective of us, accosted this man for being loud and rude and suggested that if this bloke reckoned he was an inspector of police, then John was Napoleon. This didn’t go down well because this bloke really was the inspector of police, a radio call went out and a mob of police cars came, surrounded us, dispersed us and took John to the cop shop to cool down for the night.

John never forgot this vulgar behaviour and throughout his life he would rail against rorting, injustices and abuses of power.

This sense of right and wrong was with him all of his life, he had a distrustful scorn of politicians, police and public servants. The irony of this was that John was actually a servant of the public by being a teacher at St Clare’s. But then, he was a real servant of the public.

He had a disdain for those who thought that they were special or better than him. In fact, he was better than pretty well all the people he ever met but he didn’t advertise the fact. And he let his opinions be known. Whether you liked it or not.

Even in those days as immature inexperienced teenage university students, we recognised that he knew a lot about a hell of a lot and that he had a very creative brain. We saw that he could be concurrently rational and irrational, he could be both patient and very impatient, and that he could have a foul temper yet be the warmest of friends.

Some things didn’t change. Even then as callow 17-year-olds, we saw that John would diametrically change his position on any issue without warning and that he could argue from many positions on the same issue.

Even in the 1960s, John didn’t like suburbia and he had then a great love of the bush. This love grew even stronger in later years. He needed space, the city constrained him and over time he became a great bushman. We saw then that John was John and that we accepted him and he accepted us.

The words I would use to describe John are: intelligent, passionate, compassionate, unpretentious and knowledgeable. He had great mental strength, was practical and very capable with anything he attempted. All these qualities just got better with time.

John was initially going to be a teacher, he went to university on a teachers’ college scholarship but got distracted into geology during a mining boom.

His first job was with the Australian Mineral Development Laboratories in Adelaide doing X-ray diffraction. This was a very pernickety hands-on job involving minerals, chemistry, mathematics and photography with a big dose of care and patience. It suited his inquisitive mind.

But day-to-day work in a laboratory and a dark room based in the city was not for him. Soon the call of being an exploration geologist became too strong and he worked for a consulting geology company looking at all sorts of mineral deposits, mainly in eastern Australia.

He explored for new tungsten, tin, gold and lead-zinc-silver mineral deposits. Later in his geological career, he became a pretty canny uranium geologist.

He was a good observer, fastidious and made a written record of everything. His technical work in the field was combined with organisation of bush camps, travel, bush practicalities, looking at rocks and writing reports. He was pretty good at all of this.

However, he had no experience with shonky entrepreneurs, dodgy lawyers (excuse the tautology), thieves, liars and the Australian Stock Exchange which, at that time, was unregulated. It was his natural honesty and scepticism that made him a survivor in one of the minerals industry scandals in the late 1960s. He was a cleanskin and all those around him were dodgy. Notwithstanding, he had kind words for these crooks. But that was John. 

Even then, John wrote everything down in field note books and diaries, these are a story of an evolving life and these diaries give a picture of everything that John did in his life. They are mainly factual with drawings and photographs and rarely gave his interpretation or view of things. He was good at drawing people, machines and cartoons.

The mining industry has its booms and busts and as a result of the collapse of the exploration industry, John went to the New England and became an underground miner at the Hillgrove antimony-gold mine with (his wife) Jo’s father and brother. It was here that he could excel with his organisational skills, his knowledge of geology, his practical skills, his eye to safety and, most importantly, his use of that rare commodity called common sense.

He became a gun miner. These are a rare breed. Other miners just got an average pay, John’s team did very well because of his qualities. It was in Armidale in 1971 that a three year-old Cammy proposed to John on her mother’s behalf: “Will you be our new dad?”

Later he moved off the New England tablelands onto the slopes and became a store keeper at Wollomombi. That was hard work having to work long hours in a marginal business and dealing with difficult demanding people. John, Jo and family then came to Taree.

John loved his family and, later in life, was tickled pink to have grandchildren who he also loved. When in Taree, he then started his real passion for which most of us here know him. It was teaching. He completed his Diploma of Education part time while teaching at St Clare’s. He was outstanding at teaching. This was his true calling and he had the art of communication with school children.

Many of you here were taught by or worked with John. You know that he was inspirational and passionate. He had the ability to deal with dreadful poxy pimply pubescent boys and teach them chemistry, often using simple methods and materials from the kitchen, garage and shed. Many of you here experienced that side of John. Despite John being a true red head with a fiery temper, impatience and intolerance, he was exceptionally patient while teaching, guiding and inspiring young people. Because of his experience with the booms and busts of the mining industry, he would advise his pupils not to become geologists. This was despite his love and knowledge of geology.

In the early 1990s, John would sit down his son and my son on Friday night and teach them year 11 and year 12 chemistry in the bunkhouse at the Forest Lane, Old Bar house.

My son claims that he was a poor student and it was only John’s infinite patience that allowed him to learn and understand chemistry. And what are these two sons doing now? One is teaching chemistry at St Clare’s in Taree and the other is teaching chemistry at the Jesuit high school in Montreal.

And I look around this room here. One of John’s former students ended up at the University of Newcastle in the 1980s and studied geology. This bloke, Jim Weeks, became a senior executive with Rio and came from Perth to be here today. John has changed the lives of many many people. Almost all who had come in contact with him were inspired, guided, mentored or just impressed. He was a team player and leader.

We all were continually impressed with what he knew. It was absolutely amazing. A smattering of languages, botany, history (especially military and mining history), geology, literature, ornithology, meteorology, zoology, astronomy, geography, chemistry, customs of countries, biology and human anatomy. He was an old style naturalist. A Renaissance man. 

He was a reader, had had a polymath’s library and he just sucked up knowledge which was spat out in context at the right time. It was absolutely incredible the amount he knew. He did not have much time for lazy and sloppy thinking. John wanted to understand how things worked whether it was a machine or nature. He would take great delight on challenging me on a piece of information and would be gleeful when he could show that I was wrong or had no knowledge of the subject. 

His great love was chemistry. He was able to put chemistry into context with every person’s everyday life and, rather than have chemistry as a somewhat mysterious subject, he made it come to life with bangs, smells, colours and hands on. For example, he had practical class experiments on the flash point of fuels and heated aviation fuel, petrol, diesel and oil until they exploded. Now that was real chemistry, this was the way to learn and his pupils never forgot.

He was very creative in the experiments and teaching methods he used and his pupils became participants in the experiments he devised. While he was in declining health over the last eight years, I would ask him questions about the periodic table, set him chemistry equations and ask whether they were balanced or not. He would look at unbalanced equations, think and then say “bullshit.” His chemistry was with him even when he was brain damaged. 

Not only was he a great teacher, he was a great mentor. John changed lives for the better. He did it to hundreds of people and the number and diversity of people here today shows that.

Many teenagers who had problems at home, who were off the rails or who had no moral compass gravitated to John. He was a leader who stood out. Young people loved and respected him. He was a decent man. He would just use common sense, experience and compassion to help people. Many of you here have received this advice and compassion from John. 

From a very early age John knew how to stand on his own feet, to survive and to make his opinions known and he tried to get others to enjoy this independence. He was admired. No flash Rolls Royce or palatial residences for him. He was practical and saw no need for excesses. He wouldn’t know Grange Hermitage from plonk but certainly had a strong opinion on wine buffs and wine aficionados.

John had a great and left field sense of humour. He was quick with a play on words and his brain was always working. His humour was zany and in the style of the “Goon Show”. Even after his fall eight years ago he still had a great sense of humour. For example, once at a neighbour’s house, there was banter, teasing and jokes and John copped some teasing. John said:  “Leave me alone, I‘ve got brain damage.” Even when brain damaged he could conjure up self-deprecating humour.

John had a good sense of theatre and this he did to entertain people. He liked making people laugh. He could act well, used accents and had a good knowledge of the English language with a smattering of a few languages. The language in which he was most proficient was German.

In the late 1980s in Broken Hill, the mayor of Broken Hill introduced John to the credulous local ABC as an eminent Scottish nuclear physicist who had come to Australia to study a weird effect of extraterrestrial particles near Broken Hill. John had to keep up a Scottish accent the whole time while in Broken Hill.

He pre-recorded a radio program about these particles which he called “get-ons” and “get-offs”, they were as big as the golf balls at St Andrews, they came from outer space, punched through the planet and came out of rocks just near Broken Hill. He had no script. He just did this off the top of his head. He was so convincing and used some many complex scientific terms that the dopey ABC journalist, another tautology, syndicated the program around Australia the next day to ABC city and regional stations. The ABC switchboards melted down the next day with listeners ringing telling the ABC that they had been conned. That day was April 1. He was always very proud of the day he conned the nation.

He could sing. He had a repertoire of all sorts of songs from undergraduate ditties to folk, rock and crooner music. He would write and play songs. He actually made a CD of country rock music with a group.

He had great powers of recall of all sorts of things, especially songs. Even over the last eight years when he was declining with brain damage, he could process music. One time when he was struggling to get out of my car, I asked him to hang on to the car door as it’s made of the Kaiser’s steel. His cogs were spinning and he started to sing an English ditty that he translated in his head and then sang in German. That was just incredible.

What was even more incredible was that he was brain damaged when he did this. Maybe it was not too incredible as he had a huge amount of excess brain power. During the last few years of his decline, a couple of us used to sing to him. This was a way of communicating with him while he was in a vegetative state. The wisp of a smile he showed us demonstrated that these songs had got somewhere into the unknown depths in his brain.

He had a habit of throwing himself into doing things whether it was building, marathons, basketball, learning a language, surfing, welding, fixing a machine, bush walking, photography or drawing cartoons. John loved travel. His diaries, photographs, yarns and mentoring showed this. He loved going on sapphire and gold prospecting trips with Jo and the family.

He climbed the Annapurna Pass in the Himalayas in winter with a group of blokes 10 years younger than him. This was a great achievement. He was always proud of this climb, which was really tough. He would often talk about the 18-hour day he had climbing through the Annapurna Pass.

When John and I were in our late 50s and early 60s, we had an annual walk along the Australian Alpine Walking Track. We would do about 200km each walk each year. Twice we got caught in a blizzards and a couple of times we had to sit them out as we had zero visibility. John was great company when we were shacked up in the Snowy Mountains waiting for a blizzard to blow over. He was a bush cook but his porridge invariably had black ‘things’ in it but we would eat it with relish.

Almost every walk John would lose the soles of his feet and bits of skin the size of 50-cent coins kept rubbing off. He would soldier on. He was tough and fit and never complained, despite being in agony with blood-soaked socks. He was like this in everyday life. He accepted his lot and dealt with what was thrown at him. He recently told Jo and I that these were some of the best times he’d had in his life. They were also for me.

I was always amazed that he could do or make anything. He would think, use common sense and then use his hands to make something. Very commonly when he was using his hands, he would slice pieces of meat from himself and we always knew when John was on one of his projects because he had cuts, bruises and scabs.

His interests were very diverse and he got so much joy out of so many things. This joy he transmitted to others. And when he achieved something, he beamed with fulfillment. The same beaming we see in photographs of John with his family at weddings, bush functions or just lazing around on the veranda. He was proud and loving of his growing family. 

John very much enjoyed doing things for people, especially making or building something. He built a few houses in his time and renovated others. He built a bush shack for me out of second hand timber, third hand roofing iron and trees from the forest. Even some of the nails were second hand. The shack had a few well thought out amusing Holland quirks. This was a gift to us when we returned from living abroad. That was the nature of the bloke.

John was the quintessential red head. He had a short fuse yet had infinite patience with pubescent children. He could be charming one minute and then thunderous the next with communication by grunt, scowl and black looks. 

Some 53 years ago John and a couple of others entering university were being sent backwards and forwards between the NSW Education Department and the University of NSW because each institution said that they must enrol at the other institution first. John lost his patience, became florid-faced and told the Education Department officer that he used to work in the Education Department, knew how the system worked and would take it higher. We will never know whether it was the crimson face, the red hair or the threat that made things happen very quickly but they did.

John didn’t suffer fools, could not stand people pushing him around, would not stand bureaucratic stupidity and would stand up for himself and others.

When genetics showed that red hair derived from cross fertilisation between modern humans and the Neanderthals, John was very pleased that he had Neanderthal genes expressed as his red hair and his big head. He was also very pleased of his Celtic genetics that he claimed were expressed as his hair colour, body shape, thinking processes and music. He always had a soft spot for rangas and was very pleased that he had a red-haired grandkid. 

We all had a lot of fun with John. We respected this decent man. It is not often in life that we meet or are directly influenced by a great person.

I thank folk for coming from the Northern Territory, far North Queensland, Western Australia and eastern Australia to celebrate John’s life. We share our condolences with Jo and the family.

We are blessed by having our lives touched by someone who was truly a great man.

I was asked to give a 10-minute eulogy. It expanded into a 25-minute eulogy and yet I could not possibly deal with everything in a very full life.

My apologies to the late Jack, the dog of steel, a slobbering cattle dog who thought feet were for sitting on. John rescued Jack from being put down, Jack knew this and they became great mates. In the 1990s I purchased a $US10 Doctorate of Divinity for Jack and Dogter Jack and John were an item at the beach, building sites and in the bush for many years.

John’s school science experiments have entered folklore, especially adding metallic sodium to a bucket of water to explain chemical reactivity. No pupil ever forgot these explosions. Nor did other teachers trying to control a class after the explosion.

He showed how plants regenerated by burning out part of the school playground with a grass fire and then, week-by-week, the pupils were able to observe regeneration. And his rockets that streaked across the playground, his demonstrations to pupils of the power of a chain saw, his showing how aggressive the deadly blue-ringed octopus could be when poked, his class runs to the lime quarries and his yarns based on his travel, work experience and people he had met.

Sometimes, when asked about his welfare or given a compliment, he would shout back “Mind your own business”. This was his amusing way of saying thanks.

One of his adventures was to crew a Sydney to Hobart yacht on its delivery back to Sydney. There are many more. If you ask nicely, Jo might even let you look at his diaries.