When it comes to Father’s Day, Bryan Brown is resolute: “Everything I know about fathering I learnt from my mother. In fact, everything I know about being a man.”

Nigh on 76 years ago, when the famous actor was just out of nappies, his father left his mother, Molly Brown, and thereafter the son saw the man who sired him no more than 10 times.

Actor Bryan Brown says everything he knows about fatherhood he learnt from his mother. Credit: Tim Bauer

Though he regarded him as “quite a nice bloke”, the primary memory the star of films such as Breaker Morant and Cocktail has of his salesman father is one of absence.

“There was a couple of times,” he says, “where he told mum that he’d take me fishing, and I’d take my fishing rod and wait out front of our housing commission house in Panania from very early on a Saturday morning, when he was going to come.

“And then by nine o’clock mum would come out and say, ‘Look, I think probably something’s happened that he can’t make it’. And then by about noon I’d wander back in, realising that mum was right and he wasn’t going to come, he was never going to come.”

This brings us to Australian author and parenting educator Steve Biddulph, who wrote the seminal 1994 book Manhood. Its first step to becoming a man? “Forgive your father.”

I mention that, while I loved that book, that step never resonated for me as I had nothing to forgive my fine........

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