I know many men who feel uncomfortable with the attention that they get on Father’s Day. I guess for many years as a father, I was one of those. I was very hesitant to celebrate Father’s Day. Many years ago I had the same negative attitude to Christmas Day, because of all the crass commercialism. I changed, you can too. As a man once said, “When you eat the chicken, make ...

The subbie was a weathered man in his late 50s with big, calloused hands and knobbly knees. His offsider was a skinny, tearaway kid with wraparound sunglasses and a hotted-up Holden. Watching them work at our house over a few weeks was an instructive experience. They were obviously on good terms with one another, and occasionally there was even a bit of leg-pulling. But there was no doubt about who was ...

Another piece of dad’s ‘irony’ was to allow me to do almost anything I liked (within the law), even take his new 1956, two-tone-green FJ Holden, registration GND 535 (that he would park in Kipling Street before leaving the keys on the ‘fridge’ and retiring to the lounge room to read the paper) for an unapproved drive past the milk bar where my mates were. He came out the next morning ...

I used to think that it was really tough of my dad to expect me, at age 18 (in 1958), to be home at 8:30 in the evenings on Thursday and Friday nights, so that my mother would feel secure in the house with my little sister. This had been the requirement for a number of years, and it included Tuesday and Sunday nights as well. The reason for this ‘cruel ...