Dad to Me

As far as childhood pissing contests go, having a dad in the army is hard to beat. While other fathers are yawning their way through paperwork, your pops is flying helicopters or jumping out of them. But, as we grow up, visions of 'Top Gun' glory can morph into the 'Thin Red Line': we go from war is FUN to war is hard and brutal and boring and thrilling and... COMPLICATED.

Two men, two fathers who know this better than most are Ben Pronk and Tim Curtis. Co-hosts of the Unforgiving60 podcast, they're veterans of the Australian Defence Force's elite Special Air Service Regiment (SAS). Now globetrotting crisis management consultants, Ben and Tim both grew up in military households then tried their hands at the trade.

Many childless people in their 30s are asking themselves the billion dollar question: should I have children? In this episode, Jump Daddy turns the mic weapon on Dr Tom, who comes out with a shock of a shortcut...

**SPOILER AHEAD** 

Dr Tom is a sperm donor to friends in a same sex couple, Georgia and Giules. The result of his trips to the clinic, then Georgia and Giules’ pregnancy and parenting, is a beautiful 5 year-old called Teddy. In this first part of episode 11, we hear the tale of Ted from the deadbeat donor’s side: the pre-planning, the process of donation (money shot), why Dr Tom thinks he passed the donor test (probably his calves), and where this new form of family-friend relation has taken everyone involved since. The big question: what’s it like to help spawn a child, without having one?

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We hear about a new model of parenthood, from two new dads, Rob and Ivan. They’re a married couple leading a growing family with the birth of their daughter, Pia. In just two years, these two fathers went from seriously thinking about having a kid to holding the result in their arms. It’s a fascinating account of the possibilities and problems facing more and more prospective parents. From inquiries on fertility to a hypothetical termination, these men have faced the biggest questions asked of adults conceiving a child—and all before a single embryo has been implanted. Of course, there’s lotsa laughs along the way, but also something more valuable. This episode is full of that elusive element: genuine, unabashed optimism. Feels good, man.

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This episode is an homage to the dads we have lost. While we can’t interview these departed fathers directly, we ask their children to voice them again through memories, stories and the objects they left behind. The texts, the birthday cards, the updated Oxford English Dictionary. Our main thread of conversation is about Jump Daddy’s father Des, a larger than life character who strewed French erotica round the joint as readily as he ran for parliament. This episode was recorded in Des’ favourite den, a beach-shack he had a major hand in decorating. So we conjure the man through his eccentric domestic effects and his birdshit-prone gravestone. And interspersed with these tales of Des are many other remarkable, singular, and moving stories about dads gone but not forgotten: Richard, Bob, Graham, Phil and Frank.

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Good thoughts, good words, good deeds—so goes the old adage of Zoroastrianism, the oldest monotheistic religion in the word. And so lives Zareer, star dad of episode 8. Zareer is a helluva character. Born in Secunderabad India to a Parsee family, Zareer moved with his wife and young family to Sydney Australia in the late eighties. Instead of taking the easy way out and repeating his father’s life as a medical doctor, Zareer decided to pursue his great passion for the French language, and eventually found himself able to monetise it by teaching tongue-tied anglos how to parlez at the multinational bank BNP Paribas. But that pocket description doesn’t capture the warmth, charm and all round wisdom of this larger than life character, a man who will discourse of karma one minute and break the vacuum cleaner with his pure technophobia the next. Yuhan—Zareer’s son—has been rightly puzzled by dad all his life, and now he wants answers on: why the change from medicine to arts? What are Zareer’s biggest disappointments, regrets, fondest memories? And what did Zareer wish he’d told his own dad when he was still on this earth? Hear these two beautiful souls put their creed into practice and think good, speak good, and do good—by each other and the world.

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Eiji and Taichi, father and son, are always on the move. Eiji grew up in a tiny mountain village in rural Japan. He left to go to university in Tokyo, where he met his wife Michiko. But soon enough, not even the bright lights of Shinjuku sufficed. When a business opportunity came up, Eiji somehow convinced Michiko - now seven months pregnant with their first and only child Taichi - that it'd be a great idea to move to a country they barely knew anything about: Australia. Fast forward 35ish years, and the moves have kept coming. Taichi, a tech bigwig, is now based in Silicon Valley, while Eiji and Michiko have decided to live out their blessed dotage near Eiji's home village back in Japan. Lost? Us too. But one thing you'll find in this episode is a poignant tale about the energy, the cost, and the guilt of choosing to split oneself all over the world. Did Eiji think about the long term consequences of choosing to settle in a place a long way from his parents? Did Taichi, when the wheel came full circle? Tune in for a story about migration and strain, love and gratitude. Oh, and Taichi and Michiko's interesting custom of talking to each other across a shower curtain.

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We suspect - though we can neither confirm nor deny - that the dad of this episode is a spy. Known to some as ‘The Colonel’, to others as ‘The Ropy Tea Planter’, to others as ‘El Tigre’, to yet others as ‘Dodi Al-fayed’, this poised James Bond of a father has suavely criss-crossed the world with his winning moustache. From humble beginnings in Derbyshire, to boarding school in southern England, to Cambridge, to Venezuela, Egypt, India and Australia, where he eventually rediscovered his lapsed Christianity, The Colonel has inhabited many places and assumed many identities. But it’s time for daughter Kat - onetime high flyer of the corporate world, now turned personal trainer - to pin down this Protean figure once and for all. Listen up as Kat taps The Colonel’s phone and gets the down-low on his formative moments travelling the world, some possible regrets about life prior to his religious reawakening, and his intimate relationships beyond the family.

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Kim is the rock and roll dad you wished you had. From a solid start trotting around 70s Europe via highly unconventional means, to his mature gig as a Jack Nicholson lookalike, Kim has the role of hip architect down pat. But there have been a lot of kinks and twists along the way. Listen in as Kim’s daughter Ems—also an outstanding architect and architectural historian—gets him on some real pressure points: pride and regret in fatherhood, marital conflict, anger and ill-health, and that all important staple of every middle-aged dad’s existence: routine. Come for the honest reckoning with the past, stay for the recommendation on what one does under the influence of quaaludes.

N.B. Ems interview portions were recorded remotely from halfway around the world; expect a little variation in the audio here 'n' there.

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Once upon a time, Rob was the face of Melbourne weather. Not because he has a terrible face. Far from it. He was the slickest and most dapper local weather presenter in all of Australia; in the words of the network that poached him, ‘the best in the business’. As a longtime TV anchor with a good inbuilt barometer, Rob is used to handling high pressure systems. But he hasn’t yet faced the tempest of his son Nick’s point blank questions. Join us as Nick - himself an actor and educator - blasts Rob with questions about his bad old student days, his ideal state of flow, and the effect of his relationship with his own distant father on Rob’s mode of parenting. And hear Rob thinking ahead on the future: his moving conflict of pessimism over climate change (on which he has been agitating for many years), pitted against the optimism he needs to feel for his little granddaughter Juniper.

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[Note from St. Quentin: This week’s dad interview is a bit quieter than the rest of the episode, so you may want to turn up the volume at times.]

Ross is a man of the lab and the land. He shuttles between being a world-class cancer researcher and a part-time walnut farmer. But neither the professorship nor the nuts were handed to him on a platter. Ross was saddled with a learning difficulty from a very young age, a condition which once left him written off as the dunce of the class; and many years later, his daughter Pip - herself now a brilliant young novelist and poet - struggled with exactly the same thing. Listen in as Pip tries to prise Ross open on the big dad issues: how Ross would like to be remembered by his grandson, how he thinks the role of the father has changed since his day, and what he’d do differently if he had his dad time all over again. Come for the real talk, stay for Ross’s dad art.

More on our guests and their work:

Pip Smith: author of Half Wild

Ian is an accomplished screenwriter with a velvet pen and silver tongue. His big breakthrough was writing the screenplay for Blue Murder, a successful mini-series about Australian police corruption and the underworld of organised crime. Ian can write a good interrogation scene. But he’s never been subjected to the probing interrogation of his daughter Nina, a qualified performance artist now turned sexologist in training. Listen in as Nina and Ian talk over the hard questions: the loss of a mother and ex-wife, the difficulties of combining creative and paternal duties, and the big one on Nina’s lips, asked from direct experience - ‘would you think any differently of me if I ended up with a woman?’

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Micko is a virtuoso cellist. He played in one of Poland’s premier classical ensembles before moving with his wife and two sons to Australia, after the fall of the Berlin wall. That much is clear. But as for the rest, the enigma of Micko is hard to comprehend: a sausage smuggler, an advocate of cucumbers as pharmaceuticals, a man who listens to WWII documentaries without much clothing, a slippery soul who managed to get out of spying for the Polish secret service without incurring their ire. On these and other matters, Micko’s son Berbeć has been scratching his head for years. Listen in as he finally gets the chance to resolve the mystery of the ‘performance artist who has been in character my whole life’.

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