On April 22 2007 I planted some pumpkin seeds. Before Jack was even conceived!

The pumpkin seeds grew into shoots, then into vines then into .. well .. not much. Not a single pumpkin did we reap.

In January 2008, Jack was born.

In June 2008, the pumpkin vine died .. only to reveal that there was a single pumpkin growing right there in the middle of it all!

Jack is now 6 months old so it’s time to start him on vegetables.

How fantastic it is that his first taste of vegetables come from our own garden. I can proudly say: I tilled the soil, planted the seed, watched it grow, harvested the fruit, peeled, sliced and cooked it. Mashed it up, froze it, defrosted it, and finally today: fed it to Jack.

I was talking to Fatima of my belief that there are two roles Jack might take at school, and she pointed out a third. My two involve being noticed: the bully and the bullied. But Fatima points out that there is a third, those that aren’t bullies or bullied. Though I’d class those as ‘not noticed’ — those that “fly under the radar”.

What would I prefer?

That’s a difficult question. Of course, on the surface of it, I’d hate for him to be the bully. But then as I was bullied throughout my school life, there’s no way I’d want him to be the bullied — to the point where I will be as involved as I can in every school he is at in order to affect the most pressure on the system to care for him better than I was cared for.

So do I want him to fly under the radar and go un-noticed? No, not really. To be unnoticed is too close to being insignificant. I want a life of significance for Jack. I want him to be a man that men respect.

With that in mind, if I could control everything in Jack’s life, I’d want him to pick a fight with the toughest guy in school on the first day. It doesn’t matter if he wins or loses, so long as he doesn’t go on fighting on the second day. Once someone shows they’ve been willing to fight, the typical bully will tend to avoid them alone and go after easier prey. Jack would ideally then become the oil-on-choppy-seas and possibly the protector of the bullied.

But I don’t control every moment of his life, so I must just ensure I’m there for him all the time — no matter what role he takes on. I will encourage him to fight back (no matter that that is seen by school policy to be ‘wrong’. And I will encourage him, once he has the respect, to always lead by word and by example.

My number one goal in life is this: That I raise Jack to be a man of significance.

Jack is waking himself up in the morning and spending a good half-hour chattering contently to himself before I get him up for cuddles before mum gets up for a feed.

He’s grinning at-will and has the most gorgeous smile (see the evidence to the left). He still sometimes forgets to hold his head erect when he smiles and so a smile accompanied by a head-drop looks most coy.

He has favorite toys that he’s most happy to grab, though grabbing is entirely for the purpose of putting the object into his mouth.

Current faves: the hanging monkeys you can see to the right of his face. They have tassels on the bottom that brush his face or hands and make him explore. He also has a purple giraffe that came with the playmat whose neck is long and thin and thus easy to hold.

I’ve been meaning to write a blog post entitled “What is art: I’m right, you’re wrong.” But it’s a difficult one to write. Basically I think there’s a lot of ‘art’ produced today that is better filed under ‘decoration’ and even ‘rubbish’ and a lot of the time ‘wank’. So I have a carefully built up ‘art meter’ in my head that has been working for years on a definition of art. However writing it down in plain English has so far been an elusive task, despite several aborted attempts.

But now Bill Henson’s photography has given me cause to skip that post (for now) and talk about an actual, controversial case.

Bill Henson’s use of nudes is not new.

Several years ago Fatima and I went to the Ian Potter Center at Federation Square to see one of his exhibits. There were nudes in that collection. I tell you this so that I have at least some credibility. I’ve actually seen some of the work. I’m not just hearing about it on the radio or hearing it from a friend of a friend over a latté.

What has happened here is that the Ridiculous Right has gotten wind of his work (How did it take so long? Where have they been all this time?) and decided that any depiction of a nude teenager is child pornography. There can be no discussion: the girl is naked, thus is child porn. They then reported child pornography to the NSW police department, who had no option but to investigate. The police then went to the gallery that was about to open a Bill Henson exhibit and removed his photographs, pending investigation. The Ridiculous Right’s media soapbox — early evening ‘current affairs’ type TV programs — reported on this with all the moral outrage they could muster. Calls for jailing this ‘dangerous pornographer’ rang in the streets. One thing I’ll give the Ridiculous Right: They’re great at sound-bytes.

“It wasn’t OK for a 14-year-old model fully dressed to be on the catwalk for Australian Fashion week, [so] it’s definitely not OK for naked children to have their privacy and childhood stolen in the name of art.” – New South Wales Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell

Even the Prime Minister was able to get in a good “revolting” in a TV interview, “Kids deserve to have the innocence of their childhood protected,” he said.

Child protection advocate Hetty Johnston says, “It’s child pornography by any name you want to call it.”

But then the tide began to turn. The arts world did a double take and said “whuh?” Unfortunately of course, a more moderate view doesn’t come in nice sound-bytes. But still, the Media began to turn. Even the bastion of the Ridiculous Right here in Melbourne, the Herald Sun, was able to see the argument enough to run a full page cover story dedicated to Prime Minister Rudd’s apparent close association with the “arts world” at the recent 2020 summit.

So let me amongst the voices with no sound bytes: this is not pornography.

Henson’s work is amazing and not in the slightest bit erotic or titillating. His images are provocative in that they show people truly ‘raw’.

If we’re to ban his work because it depicts naked children, we’ll need to go back to a lot of earlier work by the renaissance artists and paint some pants on them. The images are as titillating as a Michaelangelo statue.

Anyone who ‘gets off’ on these images, despite Henson’s intent, is already finding a lot worse on the interweb. They don’t need tasteful nudes, by a respected artist, hanging in a gallery, to get them all excited.

When considering publishing this piece, I had to answer one question that stumped me for a minute: Would I let Jack, as a teenager, pose nude for Bill Henson to exhibit?

But it only stumped me for me for a minute. If I believe in the photographer; If I believe Jack wants to do the modeling; If I believe Jack to be mature enough to make such a decision; If I believe Jack could understand that these photographs would be available to his school friends and work colleagues for years to come and he was OK with that; then there is absolutely no way I would stand in his way.

On the left you’ll see a picture of Dad messing about with my nephew, Toby. Of course, dad never met Jack and that’s something that continually has a real impact on me and I miss Dad all over again. I’m glad I have these pictures of Dad and Toby because they show me what a great poppa he was and would have been to Jack.

There’s a certain intimacy in being someone’s ‘mate’ that we don’t often acknowledge. Everyone knows the Aussie greeting “G’day Mate”, but this is more. This is when you refer to someone as your mate. I think an Australian social networking site would need to include it as an option: there’d be acquaintances, friends and then right at the top, mates.

One of my favorite ‘mate’ memories of Dad was when were in Lara and I was somewhere between about 16 and 18 years old. Dad was looking for me for some reason and he asked mum if she knew where I was. But rather than ask for me by name he asked “Do you know where mate is?”.

It’s a privilege to be someone’s mate, and really special to share that bond with your dad. I hope I share that with Jack all his life.
For now, I miss my Dad. My mate.

We’re due on the 15th of February, but Jack decided to come early. What a great way to start life! He’s officially full term from week 37 and he made it five days past that.

Jack was born on January 30th, 2008 at 1526 (3:26pm) at Werribee Mercy Hospital. He weighed 3200g (7.1 pounds) and was 49cm long (19.3 inches). He has 10 finger, 10 toes and everything else you’d expect. Including two proud parents!

While he was born at Werribee Mercy on Wednesday, it’s only today that we’ve arrived home .. from Monash Medical Center.

After Fatima gave birth, they checked all her vitals and she looked fine. But then two hours later an attempt to shower left her faint. Checking her blood pressure revealed she’d dropped down to 80 over 50! Emergency doctors were called for and she was taken first to WMH’s emergency department and then by ambulance to Monash while Jack was left at WMH. In the end it looks like it wasn’t too much to worry about – just blood loss during delivery. Monash topped her up with two units of blood and she’s been apples ever since. Well, almost.

It seems that one of the blood tests that WMH was used to check for an infection. It was split in two (excuse the lack of proper medi-jargon) and checked for cultures. Just one of the samples suggested an infection. The other was clear. Jack is fine. Fatima is fine. But then Monash needed to re-test just to make sure there wasn’t something going on. Which meant another night at Monash. And then the test still wasn’t finished, so she was supposed to be another night there. But we’d all had enough of hospitals by this stage (and Monash isn’t the nicest of Hospitals despite excellent medical care and fantastic staff) so we begged and they let us come home today. We have to phone tomorrow just to make sure she’s OK. And we have to go rushing back there if we notice anything at all. But it all looks good to me.

During the whole saga we’ve got a few people we need to thank:

• Christina, who was Fatima’s birth partner (I was there, but I have a really weak stomach so I wanted someone else there!)
• Jacqui, who came running when Fatima was taken into emergency.
• Mum, who provided me with a bed and a hug each night Fatima was at Monash
• The midwives at WMH, especially those in the Special Care Nursery who looked after Jack the first night Fatima was at Monash
• The midwives at Monash, especially Christine who let Fatima borrow her personal mobile to tell me she was OK and Tiffany who was excellent at helping us in our first couple of days with Jack

Enough jibber jabber already, here’s some photos

Right about the time I last updated this site, my dad was diagnosed with leukemia. The doctors tried a course of chemotherapy, but it didn’t do anywhere near as much as they’d hoped. So they suggested a transplant would be the way to go.

His brother and sisters were tested for compatibility and the doctors settled on Olive, his oldest sister. Olive was a great match and so the transplant went ahead. He wasn’t hit with the ‘guest versus host’ disease that was the big risk, mainly due to the medication he was on. In fact he was in remission and all looked good when Fatima and I drove to Sydney on the June long weekend. Dad and June, Fatima and I went out and really enjoyed ourselves at a seafood buffet.

Unfortunately, shortly after that it all took a turn for the worse. Very quickly really. My sister Jacqui was visiting him in August when the guest-versus-host kicked in at the same time as he caught pneumonia. She telephoned and suggested it might be good to come up to Sydney to visit him soon. Shortly after she rang back to say ‘this week’, then again ‘today if you can’. I quickly changed my plane ticket (thankyou JetStar for understanding!) and managed to get to see my dad just one more time. We arrived at the hospital about 5 minutes before he died. I told him how much I loved and respected him, and I played a cassette tape Fatima had recorded for him. I can’t describe it any other way than ‘lovely’.

I always thought it would be ‘yucky’ to be in a room with a dead person, but it wasn’t. I really appreciated that at one point the others left for one reason or another and I was left alone with Dad’s earthly remains. In that time I was able to be angry with him for leaving, to be sad for myself that I’d lost a great friend and thankful for the life he’d lived.

The funeral was a great celebration. People say that, but it really was. We didn’t know many people there and most of it washed over me. But the recessional was “The Holy City”. It was a great song to go out on and it made my heart break for people who are left wondering what happens after you die.

Afterwards we took Dad to a cemetery that we’d found a way off from June’s place. It was the perfect place for Dad. It’s surrounded by gum trees and is really quiet. If it weren’t a cemetery, it’s just the sort of place Dad would have gone camping. Actually, knowing Dad, that may well have not stopped him.

The Friday before he went was the day of our 12-week ultrasound. So that was the day we knew we were having a boy. So it was great to be able to share with Dad the name we’d chosen years before. He’ll never get to meet his grandson, so sharing that was really special.

Wow, I’ve written a lot more than I thought I could!

The past few months have been an excitement of ultrasounds, doctors, obstetricians and planning. The 3D image to the left is the ultrasound at 12 weeks. Tomorrow we go back for the next scan (19 weeks! It’s going so fast!)

I don’t think it’s that common, but we actually picked names for our kids before we got married. I can’t remember, but it may have even been before we were engaged. Now we know it’s a boy, we know what his name will be, though we’re not telling anyone*.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve painted his room. It’s predominantly blue with a rainbow of pink, gold, green and purple. We’ve bought a white cot, which will look great with the colors, and are on the lookout for a similarly sturdy change table. I’m really amazed at how wobbly most of them are. I’m not laying my boy on a wobbly table!

This is the dating scan they did at about 6 weeks

This is at 12 weeks

The Baby’s room colors

*See coming post Re:Dad