Opinion Piece/Media Release:

The Restoration of Fatherhood in Australia

By Warwick Marsh

Warwick Marsh is the founder of the Fatherhood Foundation with his wife Alison. They have 5 children and have been married for 32 years. Warwick is on the board of a number of non profit organisations and has been working in the community on a voluntary basis for 17 years.

Warwick's background is as a musician and creative communicator/TV producer. He has produced over a dozen albums and over 20 TV shows. Warwick is also the editor in chief of Australia's longest running weekly electronic ezine for Dads called 'fathersonline' which started in 2002.

The Fatherhood Foundation has produced Fathers Day and Mothers Day TV community service announcements for national TV over the same period.

In 2001 Warwick received a Centenary Medal from the Governor General for service in musical leadership for young people and the Aboriginal community and his international missions and aid work.

'All in all it seems to go, but you don't know what you got till it's gone', first sung by Joni Mitchell in 1970 could well be the theme song of Sonora Dodd, the founder of Father's Day.

Sonora Louise Smart Dodd was sixteen years of age when her mother died in childbirth with her sixth child. Sonora was her mother's only daughter and shared the burden with her father William in the raising of her five younger brothers.

Sonora was so inspired by her father's sacrificial love for his children that she held him in great esteem. When she heard a church sermon about the newly recognized Mother's Day, Sonora felt inspired to give fatherhood recognition as well. She approached the Spokane Ministerial Alliance and suggested that her own father's birthday, Sunday 5th June, be the day to honour fathers.

The Alliance chose the third Sunday in June instead and the first Father's Day in the world was celebrated on 19 June 1910 in Spokane, USA.

Although President Coolidge supported the idea of a national Father's Day, it was not until 1966 that President Lyndon Johnson signed a presidential proclamation declaring the third Sunday of June as Father's Day in the USA.

Australia and New Zealand celebrate Father's Day on the first Sunday of September.

Seventy-six other countries around the world now celebrate Father's Day.

Big things grow from small beginnings!

Germaine Greer, the famous Australian feminist, does not share Sonora Dodd's desire to honour fathers. She says,

"Women's liberation, if it abolishes the patriarchal family, will abolish a necessary substructure of the authoritarian state, and one that withers away, then Marx will have come … The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together." Gloria Steinem said, "We must overthrow the whole … patriarch."

However Andrea Dworkin was a little bit more colourful with her thoughts on men and patriarchy in general.

"I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig."

Such thinking has pervaded our culture - our academia, media and politics for the last three decades - With what result?

David Blankenhorn, in the groundbreaking book, 'Fatherless America', said that, "Fatherlessness is the most harmful demographic trend of this generation."

Ronnie Williams, aboriginal elder, poet, preacher, singer and storyteller from WA who passed away in 2004 said, "Why is it that white Australians greet each other as 'you old bastard'? Is it because they still suffer the rejection from their forbears in England as transported convicts and still carry the fatherhood wound deep in their sunburnt soul?"

Almost 1:4 Australian children live in a home tonight without their biological father present in the home.

In a survey a few years ago, the greatest fear young children had about growing up was not the atomic bomb, but that their mother and father were going to break up.

Because of the enormous bias still contained within the family courts system against the male of the species, when fathers and mothers do break up, it is usually the father that is pushed out of the picture.

For many other children their fathers are working such long hours, combined with long transit times to and from employment, they often grow up without knowing their father's love and communication. Daddy is always tired and the lights are on, but no one's home.

It could well be argued that the majority of Australian children are experiencing the pain of fatherlessness in one way or other even up to this present time.

Fatherlessness, according to Dr Bruce Robinson, costs Australia 13 billion dollars per year.

Fatherlessness increases the likelihood that children will grow up in poverty, increased crime, drug abuse, youth suicide, child sexual abuse, mental health problems, levels of child obesity, poor health, poor nutrition and lower levels of educational performance for children.

In spite of what radical feminists may say about the ills of patriarchy, fathers are foundational for the development of healthy children and strong families. There is no doubt that many of these radical feminists have suffered terribly due to patriarchal betrayal in the form of sexual abuse as Adrienne Burgess, pro-father feminist, points out in her ground breaking book called 'Fatherhood Reclaimed' published in 1997.

Susan Falundi, another respected feminist, took the debate on the 'masculine crisis' to another level when she published 'Stiffed - the Betrayal of Modern Man' in 1999.

Perhaps Dr Warren Farrell summed it all up in his brilliant book, 'Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say', published in 2001.

'Father's issues will be to the early twenty-first century what women's issues were to the late twentieth century… For the first time in history, the sexes have an opportunity to redefine love, to create not a women's movement blaming men, or a men's movement blaming women, but a gender transition movement.

In the past, we have been challenged by a paradox: political movements have been led mostly by unhealthy people, but few healthy changes have occurred without political movements.

In the future, we are challenged with the possibility of a movement producing healthy changes being led by mostly healthy people.

This will happen only if men do their homework, study their internal worlds, have the courage to take their perspectives to the external world, and invite women to join them.

Men can't say what men don't know, and women can't hear what men don't say.'

It has been interesting to watch the changes in attitude to men and fathers in Australia over the last seven years. Fathers were seen as optional extras by academics, politicians and most media commentators when Warren Farrell made his bold prediction.

Father's Day 2007 is showing Mr Farrell to be a modern day prophet with an uncanny sense of timing. Holly wood is releasing movies with strong positive fatherhood themes at an incredible rate of knots. 'I am Sam' starring Sean Penn, 'Evelyn' with Pierce Brosnan, 'Life is a House', 'Finding Nemo', Dear Frankie', 'Pursuit of Happyness' and the brilliant Aussie movie starring Eric Bana, 'Romulus My Father'.

The music world is doing much the same.

Our poets and celluloid storytellers, the high priests of our modern culture, are tending to the father wound of our broken society.

The good news is that the fatherhood and men's movement in Australia is going from strength to strength.

On 20 June 2007, 34 leaders from within the men's movement gathered in Federal Parliament House for an historic Men and Father's Family Friendly Policy Forum. www.fatherhood.org.au

Interestingly enough many of the leaders within the men's movement are women such as Maggie Hamilton, who spoke passionately about the needs of men and fathers from her recent book, 'What Men Don't Talk About'.

Other brilliant speakers were Judi Geggie, University of Newcastle-Family Action Centre, Dr Pamela Henry and Natalie Gately, both lecturers in law at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia, who spoke about the endemic anti-male bias found in the Family Law Court and Child Support Agency.

The Labor Party fielded 5 Shadow Ministers and the Coalition also rose to the occasion with the presence of senior coalition ministerial leaders.

Topics such as the desperate ongoing problems within the Child Support Agency and Family Law Court, the poor state of men's health, the shocking situation with male suicide, increasing sexual exploitation of women and children, indigenous men's health, the great need to affirm marriage and support families and the struggle that boys have in a femocentric education system.

All these issues were articulated as never before to political parties that now realise they have to win the hearts of men, who at 49.2% are the largest voting minority group in the nation.

Men are excited because the founder of Father's Day, Sonora Dodd, is no longer the lone voice of the last few decades of feminist history.

The theology that 'all men are bastards' and need to be beaten to a bloody pulp on an indiscriminate basis, is finally losing its hold on the academic, media and political worlds.

The words of Bettina Arndt, that 'no gender has a monopoly on vice' is finally being accepted without demur. The winners in this battle are our sisters, our wives, our mothers and grandmothers.

The ultimate winners are our children.

We can no longer accept the failed notion of 'I over we'.

The heartbroken pursuit of hedonistic individualism will always result in more fatherlessness and even more broken hearts and broken families.

No government on earth can continue to fund an ever increasing fatherless society.

No civilisation has ever lasted more than a few generations of fatherlessness, nor can ours.

As Arnold Toynbee a British historian said "Civilisations die more from suicide than murder."

The sacrifice of Sonora Dodd's father in giving himself up for the purpose of raising his six children in the aftermath of the civil war was indeed a noble act. It is an act that every good father performs in one way or another when he puts his family first on a daily basis.

This Father's Day, and for many to come, the words of Andre Dworkin will have a hollow ring to them because more Australian men are following in the footsteps of Sonora Dodd's father than ever before and putting their family first. The 'we' is becoming more important than the 'I'.

Men are studying their internal worlds. Men are inviting women to join them in their struggle for true gender reconciliation.

For the first time in history the sexes have an opportunity to redefine love. After all, the greatest thing a man can do for his children is to love his children's mother. Indeed, for our culture to prosper and succeed, we need fathers who are responsible, committed, loving and involved in the lives of their children.

Our children know this, our women know this, and their voices are finally being heard by the media, academia and government of our land.

The restoration of fatherhood in Australia is good news for all of us.

Fatherhood Foundation
PO Box 542,
Unanderra NSW 2526

02 4272 6677
or 0418 225 212