Richard Branson said, “If happiness is the goal – and it should be, then adventures should be top priority.” It is the priority of adventure that makes being out in the bush with a bunch of dads and their kids really exhilarating. Wollondilly River Station, the place for our annual Dads4kids Bush Camp, is set in a deep valley not too far from the famous Wombeyan Caves in the Southern Highlands ...

Counting Crows had a hit in 2002 with Joni Mitchell’s famous song Big Yellow Taxi. Good songs never get old. The line that stands out in the song for me is “all and all it seems to go, but you don’t know what you got till it’s gone”. Such was the case of a good friend of mine, Mick Robbins. We had only met a half a dozen times, but he ...

Eric Clapton sang, “If I could change the world.” Many men dream about changing the world, but very few actually attempt it. Some succeed in bringing change, but is that change healthy, or does it create more problems than it solves? As a student radical, growing up in the late sixties, I believed it was possible to change the world. Of course, when you are young, and want to change the world, ...

I have a dream to change the world. Before I tell you what I believe the secret to changing the world is, let me share with you a few other perspectives. The radical feminists have developed a very simple solution to changing the world. They watched which gender was responsible for most of the violence, theft, rape, war and crime in the world. After identifying that the greatest proportion of evil ...

Some time ago a friend invited me to meet the Founder & President of ‘Champions of Honour’, a significant men’s network from the USA. I quickly rearranged my schedule and headed over to Gloria Jean’s Coffee Shop to catch up with Chuck Brewster (Chuck being a shortened term for Charles in American terminology). I must confess that I have a tendency to scepticism for many things that come from America.  My ...

Gillette has jumped on the #metoo bandwagon, and in the process has derogated masculinity. I have a lot of sympathy for the #metoo movement, because one in four women and one in six men have been sexually assaulted. From my counselling experience, those figures are understated.  It happens a lot more than people realise. It almost happened to me. I was a young naive man in my late teens with a ...

My coal mining friend told me a story one day that still sends shivers down my spine. He was working many kilometres underground under the mountains that make up the Wollongong escarpment with his friend a fellow miner. He and his friend had completed a long shift extracting coal from the depths of the mine. They were travelling in a group in a coal train from the coalface back to the ...

I have heard so many men complain to me, “My wife is very high maintenance”. In most cases this statement shows a distinct lack of understanding of the fairer sex. The truth of the matter, from a man’s point of view, is all women are high maintenance. A man’s needs are very simple: food, s*x, sleep. OK, that’s a huge over-simplification, but there’s more truth in it than we care to ...

One of the joys of being in the men’s movement is meeting people on the journey. The men’s movement is filled with poets, artists, musicians and ratbags of which I am chief. My friend Noel Giblett is one of those many poetic minstrels and for the purpose of this newsletter, I am calling him ‘the musical man’. Before I tell you about Noel and his latest album, Surrender, let me tell ...

One of the ways International Men’s Day was celebrated, on Tuesday 19 November 2013, was by holding a Men and Fathers’ Strategic Roundtable at Parliament House, Canberra. Thirty-three delegates from many parts of the men and fathers’ movement actively participated. Three of the delegates were indigenous, seven were women and a few others came as observers. During the lunch break, Carolyn Managh from M&C Saatchi released The Modern [Aussie] Man White ...

Earlier this year, I was contacted by Stuart Barlo from Lismore. He asked if I would come and speak at the inaugural district Lismore Man Day Conference. Stuart has been receiving our weekly Dads4Kids newsletter to encourage dads for almost ten years. He has been reading the jokes for all that time, and still gets a laugh, which I think is good news. I was humbled by the invitation, so after ...

Men are leaders. They will either lead goodly or badly. For almost 40 years men have been demonised by radical feminists and a compliant media because the radical feminists have rightly observed that almost all of the world’s problems have come from inerrant men. Look at the long list of dictators responsible for the deaths of 153 million people in the 20th Century. All of them (top 36) are men. Mao ...

Firstly, I would like to thank all of you who contact me; it’s your support and kindness that keeps me going. I was out on the town one night this past week. One of our volunteers is a muso, and he and his band were playing a gig in a local hotel. It was a great night, mainly because of the fact that a whole lot of our other volunteers turned ...

I was travelling through Queensland a few weeks ago opening new Dads in Distress groups, and was convening a meeting that was being held in the back of a new church that had been established in an industrial estate. It was a new meeting and so we didn’t know what to expect, how many would turn up or what would happen. As I sat there at the back of this huge ...

Today, the Sydney paper carried a story of a well-known identity, Rene Rivkin, who suicided weeks after splitting from his wife of 32 years. It was front-page news in most of the major papers. A local newspaper here carried a similar sad story of death. It was a well-known local radio announcer here. The newspaper here failed to say what had happened, only that the death was considered not suspicious. We, ...