- Title
- Fathers in Australia: a contemporary snapshot
- Creator
- Smyth, Bruce M.; Baxter, Jennifer A.; Fletcher, Richard J.; Moloney, Lawrence J.
- Relation
- Fathers in Cultural Context p. 361-382
- Relation
- https://www.routledge.com/Fathers-in-Cultural-Context/Shwalb-Shwalb-Lamb/p/book/9781848729483
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- During school holidays, Tony (in his early 40s) and his 8-year-old daughter Jess enjoy fishing for trout together in a dinghy on Tumut Ponds, just down from the town where Tony grew up. Tony used to go fishing here with his father and now shares his special place with his daughter. Tony loves spending one-on-one time with Jess. But to do so requires coordination of his paid employment, voluntary work and. family time. A complex mosaic of flexible work hours, working from home, part-time work, paid leave, school holiday programs, and mutual child-minding arrangements with other families helps the family juggle the many competing demands of modem life. All of this is further complicated by the fact that Jess's mother recently left her job to return to part-time study. Scrawled notes on the kitchen calendar bear testimony to the family's hectic schedule. But the schedule collapses when Tony gets called out to fight bushfires. Two years ago he spent weeks travelling interstate fighting the Victorian bushfires. Contributing his skills and experience as a Rural Fire Service volunteer is extremely important to Tony. It also provides him with that archetypal domain of the Australian male - a really big work shed. Jess wants to be a fire fighter too one day, and Tony would like her to become involved in the Rural Fire Service. It encapsulates values that his father passed on to him and that he wants to instil in his daughter: self-reliance, a sense of competence, and community service. It also signifies the ability to distinguish the important things in life - like going fishing together - from the demands of daily life. Tony is a modern Australian father.
- Subject
- fathers; contemporary Australia; psychology
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1344894
- Identifier
- uon:29520
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781848729483
- Language
- eng
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