Shane Howard

Shane Michael Howard was born on 26 January 1955 and raised in the Victorian coastal town of Dennington 5 kilometres north-west of Warrnambool. He is the middle child of seven children of an Irish Catholic family living in a cramped factory cottage. Their father, Leo Howard, was a worker at the local Nestlés powdered milk factory, for 48 years.The Howards loved music, led by their mother, Teresa Howard, who played the piano and sang.





I don't know a world without music. I don't know what life's like without music. It just was always there. I was a middle child, so there were older brothers and sisters and you just slotted into that. I guess, you know, singing at mass and singing at church were the first sorts of contact with that, and Mum would play the organ.

In May 1981, on a doctor's advice, Howard took a month's hiatus from performing and travelled to Uluru:


I had come from this beautiful inspiring aboriginal tradition, and the contrast between that and this harsh reality of conflict with western world 300 kilometres away, it marked me for all time. I saw an incredible injustice that needed to be dealt with. And also, I realised that this country that I grew up in, that I thought was my country, it wasn't. I had to reassess my whole relationship with the land and the landscape, and understand that we had come from somewhere else, and we had disempowered a whole race of people when we arrived.

In May 1983 Goanna used the pseudonym, Gordon Franklin and the Wilderness Ensemble, to release "Let the Franklin Flow" as a single, "in support of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society's campaign against the proposed damming of Tasmania's Franklin River.

In 2000 Howard was awarded a Fellowship by the Music Fund of the Australia Council in acknowledgement of his contribution to Australian musical life over many years. On Shane's 61st birthday, Australia Day, 26 January 2016 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to the performing arts as a singer, songwriter and guitarist,to the recording industry, and to Indigenous musicians.