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Introduction

In my 1970s childhood, fathers were still reasonably mysterious to me.

At the houses of my friends, in those after-school moments when neighbourhood kids gathered to bounce on someone’s trampoline, swim in someone’s pool or climb someone’s backyard tree, the dads were mostly invisible – their presence felt, sometimes, via a photograph above a fireplace, or the smell of Imperial Leather in the bathroom, while mothers brought clichés to life in the kitchen, stirring pots and baking things.

In many families, things are different these days.

In many families, they’re the same.

One thing that hasn’t changed? How present fathers were in our young lives – or whether they were present at all – shapes us and influences us in ways that we don’t always fully realise until we are adults. For those of us who become parents, the impact of our own father-child relationship resonates over time, as expressions we never imagined ourselves saying get said, punishment threats we never dreamed of making get made, and feelings of worry and hope and pride we never thought possible take over our daily thoughts.

In my own life, I had two fathers.

One was the dad who raised me in suburban Adelaide – the father who showed me how to cook butter beans, still in the can, over a campfire, and who would be waiting in his car at the school gates in time to drive me home when the rain was too heavy.

The other was a man I barely knew – the birth father who played his own definite part in my existence but who was someone whose own identity was hidden from me until my mid-twenties. That was the reality of being a child of the adoption era, in 1968, when my birth, out of wedlock, made me just one of many thousands of babies with similar stories, and my birth father became a name locked away in a filing cabinet somewhere, far from everything I knew to be real.

For other people, the story is less complicated.

David Koch is proud to call his father the biggest influence on his entire life. His dad was one of a couple of important male role models in his life and is a man David still refers to as his hero.

Santo Cilauro remembers a close bond with his dad too – a bond that is still important today. It is made stronger by a mutual love of soccer and a connection to their Italian heritage, as well as a shared interest in philosophy and a love of poetry.

Joe Hildebrand’s memories of his own father aren’t as rosy.

For Joe, growing up with a father who put his own needs before those of his children left Joe with a palpable sense of loss and anger – and a determination to be a hands-on, loving father in the lives of his own children.

Sometimes, the dad who is not there leaves a bigger impression than the father who is, and for radio host Jo Stanley, the loss of her dad in a plane accident when she was four years old has left a legacy she has found difficult to reconcile. Watching her husband parent the daughter they raise together still brings back memories – or a reminder of her lack of them – about what it means to be a dad.

As technology and social mores evolve, with donor-assisted conceptions delivering apparently fatherless children into the world, the role of a father is shifting again, in ways we still can’t completely understand.

Nature vs nurture is always a fascinating question. In my own life I’m still working through my response to it.

Things my father taught me? The list is a long one.

My connection to those memories comes in unpredictable waves and, as I get older, the curious thing is the connection seems even stronger.

Recognising who we really are can be a lengthy process, yet there’s no doubt that our past links us to our future. When Wordsworth wrote that ‘child is the father of man’, he understood that our experiences of childhood leave their mark on generations to come, but it’s definitely not the end of the story – and, in fact, for some, it’s the motivation for a new beginning.

Danny Katz

Pictured: Danny Katz’s dad, Mike.

Danny Katz exercises his humour muscle as the weekly Modern Guru columnist in the Good Weekend magazine. The Canadian-born writer is the first to admit that his idea of fun could be seen as a little juvenile but it works brilliantly for his best-selling children’s books, including Spit the Dummy, Dork Geek Jew and the Little Lunch series. There are lots of ways Danny believes he doesn’t take after his dad but when it comes to telling stories, genetics are a powerful influence.

I was a little scared of him as a child. Dad was quite an imposing-looking fellow. He looked like he’d stepped straight out of Victorian England – a big white beard like something from the Royal College of Scientists. He is sort of an intellectual, a music-lover and a big thinker, so, for me, he is almost a heroic figure.

His name is Mike but sometimes it’s Michael, like when Mum is angry at him about something. Both my parents are from Canada, they started a family in Canada, but we wound up in Australia because Dad is a geologist and there was plenty of work out here. His specialty is mining geology, and Australia was having a mining boom in the 1970s so he came here to teach university students about ore extraction and opencast mining and geotechnical-foundation-boring, which he will tell you is anything BUT boring.

His geology career has allowed him to travel a lot. For a lot of my younger years it felt as though he was always away on overseas trips or sabbaticals, visiting some exotic country somewhere. He’s had the most extraordinary life.

Dad was two different dads. My parents had my sister and me in the 1960s, then there was a ten-year gap, then they had another two kids – my younger brother and sister. Dad was a completely different father for my younger siblings. For us, he was the old-fashioned, kind of distant dad, and for my younger brother and sister he was like a modern dad. He was more involved in their lives and has a much more relaxed relationship with them.

My two younger siblings got the best of Dad, I think, but, in a funny kind of way, I feel we saw the more creative side of him because when he was young he was very interested in ideas and we were always being exposed to amazing literature and art and movies and music.

When he was with us, he was incredible. He was a natural storyteller – still is. Whenever we were travelling, or on a camping trip, he would tell us an improvised story every night, using the events of the day as a starting point. I often felt he missed his calling. He would have been an incredible writer or a kids’ entertainer. He has this effortless ability that I envy – this way of entertaining a room. And he can be hilariously funny. Often unintentionally. Just to look at him, you have to laugh.

When we were kids, he filled us with the raw material that sort of shot us off in our different directions. We have all chosen careers that in some way reflect stuff he is interested in. My sister and brother have jobs that involve a lot of travelling. My other sister works in the movie business. I’m a writer. We have all been inspired by Dad in some way.

Dad is a scientist but he was obsessed with music and was a big Bob Dylan fan – a bit of a hippie. His record collection was the most eclectic thing I have ever seen. He would have Broadway musicals and Leonard Cohen and comedy albums – it was all messed up. And then there was this huge collection of Jewish folk song albums – it all fed into me. We listened to My Fair Lady at least once a week, or West Side Story. I am still obsessed with musicals – good musicals. West Side Story is as good as it gets.

Dad was fascinated by humour and his library is expansive. He has so many books about jokes, or the science of joke telling – even though he can’t tell a joke to save his life. But all that stuff combined is what made me choose the several careers that I have chosen.

He definitely gave me music. He gave me a passion for music and writing and comedy. The family used to do this thing that we all looked forward to on a Friday night. It was called Fun-Fun. Dad would play a Broadway musical on the record player, or a comedy record, and we would all perform. He would have all these weird props, like a cane, or a top hat, and he would do a little act – then we would do a little act. Terribly unfunny for anyone else, but we would crack ourselves up. He gave me an interest in performance that turned into a real thing later in my life when I did drama at university and started performing in comedy shows. Many of them were just as painfully unfunny as my Fun-Fun performances. I blame Dad.

One of Dad’s other big passions is movies. The university where he worked had a student film club and he used to take me to screenings at the weekend. There was always some bizarre double bill. There’d be Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries in the first half, then a short intermission, then Emmanuelle the Anti-Virgin in the second half. I was just thirteen or something. Or there’d be Fellini’s Satyricon, followed by The Case of the Smiling Stiffs. Very confusing. Of course we didn’t always stay for the second half but it definitely had a big effect on me, in many, many ways. Even ended up studying film at uni, wanted to be a filmmaker for a while there. Dreamed of making great art-house soft-porn masterpieces.

My dad is an obsessive traveller and so the whole family were lucky enough to travel the world several times over – usually to look at rocks. Dad has the most incredible slide collection. He took thousands of photos – mostly of rocks. Sometimes he would take photos of me and my siblings but, turns out, he just wanted us to stand next to a rock so he could record how big the rock was. He used us for scale. That’s the photographic documentation of my childhood. An incredible boulder somewhere in Cambodia or Sri Lanka, with me and my sister standing way off to one side of it, almost out of the shot. And the boulder is the only thing in focus.

When Dad travelled without us, he would always send postcards. That was his ‘thing’ and he still does it whenever he travels today. He will send a postcard every week and write some terrible joke about some town he is in. He would always bring back lots of weird presents too. I guess they were guilt presents for being away from home. Mongolian Fonzie-jackets made of Yak leather. A set of blow-darts from Borneo. A lot of the stuff never made it past customs.

Mum was incredible when Dad was away. She did pretty much everything, all the heavy-duty parenting stuff – and Dad didn’t have to do much at all. He was simply an interesting human. He actually served no practical purpose around the house but he was just this really interesting person that we enjoyed being around. It’s still like that. He merely has to pull one goofy face and we are cacking ourselves stupid and I know Mum is thinking, ‘I did all the work and he’s reaping all the love and affection.’ Of course, he wasn’t away for my entire childhood, but it felt like it. When you’re a kid and your parent goes away for a month or two, it feels like forever.

Dad is a very ambitious man. He came from a working-class Jewish family in Toronto and he was the first in his family to get a university degree. His parents were immigrants from Poland. They got out of Poland in the early 1900s and went to Canada. He grew up in a very relaxed, unconventional household where he was pretty much left on his own. He just sort of existed on the streets like a wild street kid. His family lived in this tiny apartment with everybody crammed in – lots of siblings, relatives – so it was kind of chaotic.

Dad’s father was a bit of a writer. He wrote books about Yiddish proverbs in his free time – trying to keep all the old proverbs alive. My father was brought up in a family where literature was highly prized – books were a record of ancestry and tradition – and he passed on that passion for books to his kids.

I think Dad chose geology because it was a field where there was plenty of work but, really, he could have gone in many different directions. He was interested in being a filmmaker at one stage. He was always writing as well – poetry or stories or diaries. He fancies himself as a bit of a Kerouac-style writer, very free-form. About ten years ago, when his university career wound up and he had a bit of free time, he started writing his memoirs. He wrote them just for himself – about growing up in Canada and his early adventures. For his seventieth birthday, we had his memoirs professionally bound and made copies – one for each family-member. It was beautifully designed by my wife, Mitch, who is an illustrator. It looked great and that was our gift to him. He was incredibly moved.

Dad and Mum are Jewish, but not very religious. We did Shabbos every Friday night. Followed, of course, by our traditional Jewish pastime, Fun-Fun. And, every year, the whole family got together for Passover, which is Dad’s big annual showman-day – we still do Passover every year, never miss it. Dad takes charge of the ceremony. He sits at the head of the table and reads from the Haggadah, which is the book that tells the Passover story about Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. He tells the same terrible jokes each time about how ‘Moses went forth, but came fifth’. Or how the Jewish people eat the Matzo balls, and other parts of the Matzo too. Excruciating. But the night wouldn’t be the same without those jokes.

It’s always a great night and Dad shines. It’s also one of the few times I’ll see my parents drink booze. They’ll have four tiny little glasses of sickeningly sweet Passover wine and they’re completely hammered. It’s the closest most Jews get to alcoholism.

Dad shines at Hanukkah too. It’s a Jewish holiday where you light candles, spin these tiny spinning tops called dreidels, eat disgusting potato cakes that have been deep-fried in crude oil, then finish up the evening by booking yourself in for gall bladder surgery. Dad’s not the sportiest guy in the world but he’s very good at spinning those tiny dreidels – he’s The Sultan of Spin. He can make a dreidel spin on a coffee table for a whole minute. It’s amazing to watch. The guy spins anything, he can’t stop himself – he loves to spin his wedding ring on the table. He’ll spin a pencil on its tip. He’ll spin a banana; I’ve seen him do it, an actual banana. Spinning stuff may be his greatest skill.

We were always very conscious of our Jewishness. Dad’s obsessed with Jewish history. I’m not sure that he believes in God – I mean, he’s a scientist and he sees the world rationally – but I know the Holocaust had a tremendous effect on him. He was seven or eight when the war ended and he was in Canada, so I think he was completely oblivious to what was happening in Europe. Then the survivors came to Toronto. Canada took a lot of the Holocaust survivors and they were broken people. Dad didn’t really understand it all at the time. As a kid, he had no idea what these people had been through.

Years later, he told me that he was listening to a radio programme where they were listing all the children who had died in a particular concentration camp – these kids were all born in the same year he was born, in the same part of Poland where his parents came from – and it just struck him: it could have been him. That really impacted on him.

If you go into his library, he has all types of literature – but there are several shelves with nothing but books about the Second World War and the Nazis. Like many Jews, he needs to know why it happened. Whenever there is a Nazi documentary on SBS – and there are a lot of them – he has to watch it. He has spent a lot of time trying to understand the Holocaust. It affects him very deeply. How could it not? He passed that down to me. I also read a lot about the Holocaust, think about it constantly. And as Dad did with us, I want to make sure my kids know what happened, the scale of it. How it must never happen again.

Dad is very much an oddball. He works on so many different levels. He is such a deep thinker, but if you were to meet him you wouldn’t think that at all because he is so child-like and nutty. He doesn’t have a huge circle of friends. He is a bit of a lone wolf and enjoys time alone. He is his own best friend – something that I’ve also got from him: I just have no need for a big social circle. I love seeing people but if I go for a couple of weeks without seeing anyone, it’s totally cool.

I feel Dad’s getting a bit more isolated these days because of his deafness. He refuses to wear a hearing aid. It infuriates all of us. He says he doesn’t like how it makes him feel. He doesn’t want to appear to be ageing. He wants to be forever young.

He loves being around children and would choose the company of children over adults any day. If he is out at any function, you can see he doesn’t suffer fools gladly – he will move away from people he thinks aren’t interesting enough and gravitate toward the children in the room. He can’t stand dull people.

When his grandchildren are around, he is like a sun. He just sits there and all the kids get caught in his gravitational pull. They end up running in circles around him, laughing hysterically. He doesn’t need to do anything. Simply make funny faces or say silly, made-up words. He’s got this childish thing about him, a childish sense of wonder, a childish naughtiness, bundled inside the body of a bald, bearded geologist. He is very charismatic.

That is one way I have tried to be like him – in creative play. Those were the times I really remember connecting with my dad, so I tried to be like that with my own kids.

Mum was not really a creative ‘player’. She was too busy holding it all together, doing the bulk of the parenting. Dad had the luxury of time, because he didn’t have to do all the day-to-day domestic stuff. He had the luxury of just taking us aside and making up some game or story, and that’s what he has given me as a gift. It’s truly a great gift.

I think he is a happy man. Grandchildren have brought him tremendous, genuine happiness. He said to me just recently that they have given him a new lease of life.

He adores Mum. I never saw Mum and Dad as a hugely romantic couple but they are best mates and they’ve lived an amazing life together and travelled everywhere. Dad opened Mum’s world up to all these experiences. She would have stayed in the quiet suburbs of Toronto but he gave her a life of adventure and I believe she’s always been really grateful for that.

They have worked out a strange ‘help each other’ arrangement. Dad makes people laugh and Mum does everything else, and that is okay. She cooks and cleans and does all the house business – she does everything for him and he loves it. Whatever works. I’m sure she would love him to cook a meal one day but it ain’t going to happen.

We don’t actually know how Dad survived as such an independent traveller all those years. Mum’s theory was that he was a spy – she really did think that. We don’t know what the hell he was doing – he was off here, off there. He spent a lot of time outdoors too, going on field trips to Broken Hill or the bush somewhere, working under the sun way too much, so now he is forever having to get his skin checked and things cut out.

What’s beautiful now is that the relationship between them has changed and he has definitely softened as he’s gotten older. Now they hold hands. He buys her presents and there is definitely a new, sweeter Dad, a more romantic Dad. He will go with her to shows or movies that he doesn’t really want to go to, you know, which is really nice.

I grew up in Sydney, but I moved to Melbourne when I fell in love with Mitch, a Melbourne girl. When we started a family of our own, it was a little bit heartbreaking for me, as my kids didn’t get to see their grandparents on a regular basis. But we all get together for fantastic family holidays every year. We rent a house in Jarvis Bay or somewhere on the coast, and it truly is a fantastic week. Everybody relaxes, hangs out, reconnects. We really love it. We spend a lot of time in the ocean and eat good food.

On many levels, being in a different city from Dad was very helpful for me. Merely getting away from my parents freed me creatively. It made me take more risks with my writing, because I didn’t have to worry so much about whether they liked my work or hated it. The distance can be helpful.

I think Dad is proud of me but it’s hard to tell. He is pretty unimpressible. Not that I ever needed to hear him say it, because Mum would tell me four thousand times a minute, Jewish mother that she is. Whatever I did, she would be impressed. I could have left a turd on her dining table and she would be like, ‘Oh darling, it’s beautiful!’ I’m pretty sure, in the early stages of my career, there were times when Dad hung his head in despair, thinking, ‘What the hell is he doing?’ and ‘Why is he a comedian? He’s not even funny – not like me.’

Now, I believe, Dad and I have reached a sort of relationship where we just goof around. It’s always fun. I can’t talk to him about heavy stuff – I go to Mum if there are personal problems or parenting questions or whatever. Nine and a half minutes is all my dad and I need for a catch-up chat. He’ll say, ‘How’s the car running?’ I’ll say, ‘Yeah, not bad, the car’s good.’ Then he’ll ask what I’ve been up to, and I’ll ask what he’s been up to. Then we’ll eat pistachios and throw the shells into the garden. And after nine and a half minutes, he’ll stand up and say, ‘Better check what your mother’s doing.’ That’s it. We’re done. You never go to him for deep and meaningful. But I guess I am not scared of Dad anymore, though I still want to impress him. He is – and always will be – a god-like figure to me. He’s lived a big life. He managed to escape his working-class upbringing and get a university education – unheard of in his family. And then escape Canada and see the world, which was also unheard of. I admire that. He always did what he wanted.

Ann Peacock

Pictured: Andrew Peacock.

Photograph © Alamy

Ann Peacock grew up in the media spotlight, as the daughter of Lady Susan Renouf and Liberal politician Andrew Peacock. As a child, her father’s divorce from her mother made front-page news – just part of her training in the art of living a life of public scrutiny that would see her succeed in a high-profile role at Melbourne’s Crown Casino. Throughout various scandals and political upheavals, there were many lessons her father taught her – how to handle pressure and keep smiling was an important one.

One of my earliest memories of my dad is how he would always be so happy to see us. He’d come in from work and, physically, you could see him relax. He was home with his family and there was this aura around him – he was comfortable. Of course, Dad was already a politician by the time I was born so I grew up seeing him handle that high-pressure public life. At home, though, he could walk in the door with his briefcase, and the briefcase would be thrown to the ground, and there were big hugs and that sense of wonderful happiness and lots of love.

What you see with him is very real. Dad’s a man who gets on with people from all walks of life. I’ve never seen him deliberately turn on a different personality for different circumstances. Obviously, when you’re out and about, you watch your manners and you’re considerate towards others, but those are natural things that you should do all the time anyway. I do think, though, that a lot of people in the public eye sometimes feel they need to sort of push their shoulders back and be at their absolute best. When Dad was home, there was an extra level of relaxation.

He was a very strict father but I’ve got fantastic memories of him always being there for us. He’s got an incredible brain and is able to communicate on the most extraordinary, intellectual subjects. To be able to talk politics with him and go back over his time in New Guinea, Pakistan and America – it’s fascinating. It’s like reading a novel that’s come to life when you hear his stories. The experiences he’s had have been quite phenomenal and I know how lucky we are, as daughters, to have been able to learn some of that history from him.

If you’re born into something, that’s what you know. If someone asks you what that’s like, the answer is simply ‘home’.

I know nothing else. I can tell you what it’s like to be the daughter of a politician but, really, it’s just the story of what it’s like to be a daughter and full stop.

Dad can snap a little bit. I can snap a little bit too. Sometimes, I catch myself doing it and think, ‘Don’t be like that.’ Dad has a lot of patience and I don’t, so when I snap, I snap faster. But when I was a kid and he snapped, he could really snap.

The relationship naturally evolves as you get older together. But do you ever stop being a parent? My mum, down to her very last day, never stopped being a parent: she could still tell me what to do. Now I have a teenage son on the cusp of his life, and I’ve got to give him a bit more independence, but can I do that? I mean, my parents have always told me what to do – both of them – and I’m in my fifties.

I rang Dad a little while ago and had to tell him that I’d booked a holiday. He was chatting to me about a couple of different places he was going to, so I let him chat for a bit and then I said, ‘Now, Dad, I don’t want you to get cross at me but I’ve got something to tell you’, and he said, ‘Oh, darling, I won’t get cross at you’, and I said, ‘I’m pretty sure you will, so you have to promise.’ Then I told him I’d booked an overseas holiday. Having been Minister for Foreign Affairs, he has concerns about me travelling pretty much anywhere, especially given the current threat of global terrorism. So, as expected, I received a lecture. Fortunately, these days, most of the lectures I get from Dad happen over the phone, which is great because he doesn’t know what I’m doing during the lecture. Face to face, I’d probably be rolling my eyes. No, I wouldn’t – I have too much respect for him – but that’s what I’d be thinking. I absolutely respect him, though, as a parent and as a man who has devoted so much time and love to not only me, but also my sisters. He did such an incredible job of making us feel secure and happy. He’s just always been there for us.

When we were growing up, we did feel, sometimes, that he wanted to have a son, as well as daughters. My dad certainly didn’t show any sign that he wanted a son more than he wanted daughters but our best family friends at the time had two boys and a girl and he always got on really well with the boys; maybe it was just us girls thinking that. Now, as a grandfather to three boys – my two and my sister’s son – he is absolutely sensational, but you couldn’t fault him either as a father to three girls. Seeing your father as a grandfather to your own children is interesting. When he comes back to Melbourne to visit us, he is very relaxed about them but he still has extraordinarily high standards and values. Respect is very high on that list. That’s what I was brought up with – in a very strict household – and I hope that I’ve brought those principles into my children’s upbringing because, to me, they are the strongest elements I was raised on, as well as love, of course – and I want to pass that on.

When I grew up – back in the old days, as my boys would say – the strictness was more about knowing your place. Your place as a child was the old ‘be seen and not heard’. Quite important people would come to the house and we’d have to display our very best manners when greeting them. It all comes back to respect – that was everything to him. Of course, we were young, so we didn’t really know who these important people were, except one or two. Basically, it was an opportunity for us to be placed in our bedrooms and left to our own devices. One time, that meant we lit a cigar under the bed and smoked our heads off until we got caught; another time, we ate all the chocolates from the chocolate box until we felt terribly ill. It was a bit of fun and naughtiness.

Dad did lots of travelling – he was often overseas. The realisation of what his job really involved finally came home in 1976, when, halfway through the school year, we were sent to boarding school. He was the Minister for Foreign Affairs at the time and he and Mum had separated, so really the only option for us was to go to boarding school because there was nobody else at home.

I was in grade 6 and, for me, boarding school was what parents would threaten you with if you’d been a little bit naughty, so suddenly, halfway through a school year, we thought, ‘What have we done wrong?’ It was a lonely time, but a necessity, given the circumstances. I had some amazing experiences there – great, fun experiences, as well as great learning experiences through sadness, too. That’s what growing up involves in your teens.

I would speak on the phone with Dad often. The school was in Corio, and every Sunday we were allowed out with a visitor – so every Sunday he was in town, he would drive down and take us out for lunch. Now that I’m a single parent, I am enormously grateful for the sacrifices he made.

If I’d been travelling the world and was dealing with the pressure of being a government minister, I’d have wanted to relax whenever I had a couple of hours off, but every Sunday that he could get away he would drive down that highway to see us.

We did a few family holidays, but, obviously, that was difficult for him, given his work. I learned to waterski with him, and waterskiing remains one of my passions. I developed it further when I went away with Mum, but he started me off, so I’ve always felt a special bond with him because of that. We had some amazing holidays at Christmastime in America with him – really wonderful memories.

Dad loved people. If you’re a politician, that’s important because you work for the people. I love people too; people from all walks of life, just as he does. I try to be a good communicator and to listen – both things he taught me. Dad’s excellent at genuinely listening and getting the best out of people. As I said – all walks of life. He’s interested in you.

My dad had some great musical tastes that he passed on to me – I still love listening to Carole King and Glen Campbell. There’s also the love of the Essendon Football Club, and of horse racing. Equally important to both of us has been simply being together. He loved and adored his mother – my Nanny – and over the years I’ve collected some little china pieces that are very similar to what she collected. A few years ago, he gave me some of her pieces that he’d kept after she passed away. When I look at those pieces now, although they are Nanny’s, they are a connection between Dad and I, so that’s a real joy. The pieces are really special to me and I’ve positioned them in important places in my house, where I see them every day.

Dad loves sports cars and he had this gorgeous gold Firebird and a beautiful little red MG. It was always a real thrill to go in one of the cars with him. He taught me how to drive at his farm up in Cape Bridgewater – we all used to drive around the property in this old Suzuki. Then, a couple of months after I first got my licence, he was away in Canberra and I was using one of his cars as my car when I wrote it off in an accident on Hoddle Street. He was not a happy man that night when I told him what I’d done, but he pretty quickly jumped to the train of thought that, as long as I was alive and okay, it wasn’t the end of the world.

I remember, in the last year of school, I used to tell him nearly every week about what I wanted to be, or what I wanted to do, and in the end he got seriously fed up and said, ‘This has gone on for far too long – you’ve changed your mind every week.’ One week my aim was to be a primary school teacher. I did my work experience at Balwyn Primary. The next week it was a policewoman, then actress, then we got back to policewoman, then we’d go back to actress, back to teacher and then it was air hostess. After air hostess, I said ‘radio’ and that’s when he said, ‘enough’. My first job was in radio – for three years. After that, I joined the newsroom at GTV 9 reading the weather for two years, then it was hospitality, back to GTV, then on to Crown where I remain after twenty-three years – still loving my job.

Dad was the sort of person who would guide me. He’s not one to say ‘no’ and you say, ‘why?’ and he says, ‘because’. That’s not him. He’d always want to give you the pros and cons and talk about them with you.

I really wanted to leave school at the end of year 11, but he worked hard over the phone, while he was overseas, at the end of that year, telling me all the reasons that I needed to stay.

Then, at the very last second, he turned around and said, ‘I’m asking you to do this for me.’ Dad’s partner at the time was Shirley MacLaine, who I was absolutely in awe of, so when she gave me advice as well, I absolutely listened to them both and stayed at school.

It was all about me getting that extra year of discipline. He didn’t necessarily mind that the results might not be great; I was never seriously fabulous with my results. His whole reasoning was based on me doing that extra year, because he thought I was too young to go out into the workforce and that I needed another year of discipline and learning. I’m so grateful that I did.

Herald Sun

Right down to her last months before she passed away, Mummy was always so thrilled when he came to visit her. The last time he did so was when he stopped on his way to somewhere overseas. It was my birthday and we had a little party in Mum’s hospital room. She was telling all the nurses that he was coming, and she was so proud of him and everything he had done in his life. I would say she always loved him. I think he was her greatest love, despite her marrying a couple of times subsequently. She loved the memories they had together and she loved being Mrs Peacock – she really did – but it didn’t work out.

I’d like to think Dad’s greatest happiness was being a family person. It’s been hard for him to be such a person because he was bringing the three of us up on his own. He was also simply a great Australian. He devoted many, many years to Australia and Australian politics and that was something he was enormously proud of – he’s still proud of it now. He remains humbled when people give thanks for things he’s done for the community.

The lessons I hope I’ve learned – from both him and Mum – are to be a good person, respect yourself and respect others. Humility is another special thing he taught me. I heard him say once that he has no regrets. He’s happy, he’s content – absolutely.

Even after doing it for so many years, I get really nervous before any public speaking. Dad tried to help me with some advice and I do try to take it. It’s very simple: three deep breaths. But even though it sounds simple, finding the time to get those breaths when people are checking on you, asking if you need anything, asking if everything is okay, can be hard. So during that time, I’m thinking, ‘I need that confidence’, and in that forty-five seconds just before I start speaking I’m making sure I find the time needed. I’m getting my Andrew Peacock in me – just getting my dad in me. Then it’s all okay.