Welcome to the Dads on the Air archives, with hundreds of programs dating back to 2003. You can browse by month or year, or search the entire archive for a specific topic or name. Find a show you heard a long time ago, download or stream individual programs, or just poke around by clicking “Click to read more…” next to each program for a detailed show description.
Thursday, July 14, 2022 at 9:00AM 
With special guest:
Matthew Spencer decided to make a big change in his life after 20 successful years as a journalist.
The challenge he took on was not going to be easy and there were no guarantees. Matthew chose to enter the highly competitive field of writing a crime novel and as with a lot of ventures he needed a bit of luck along the way.
Thursday, June 23, 2022 at 9:00AM 
With special guest:
Anthony Smith
… in conversation with Bill Kable and Ken Thompson
1901 male deaths by suicide were recorded in 2012 along with another 634 females meaning a total of 2,535 Australians lost their lives in this way. There has been no significant improvement in the period since these figures became available.
Our guest today, Anthony Smith, argues that these figures are conservative and the belief of the people working in this area is that the figure for men should be some 500 higher. Reasons for this conservatism include the shortfall in the number of Coronial enquiries and the general reluctance of Coroners to brand a sudden death as suicide because this only makes it harder for the surviving family members to deal with the tragedy.
Thursday, May 19, 2022 at 9:00AM 
With special guest:
Isaac Bacirongo
…in conversation with Bill Kable
When you are born and raised in Australia you know little about life as a refugee despite it being a frequent topic for conversation and opinion. Most of us have never spoken to a refugee.
Our guest today is Isaac Bacirongo who arrived in Sydney in 2003 with his wife and ten children as refugees after surviving the effects of Rwanda’s civil war in his own country, Congo.
Thursday, June 8, 2017 at 9:00AM 
With special guest:
Mates is a word Australians have felt comfortable with for a long time. It resonates with young and old, male and female as a description for someone we will be there for, to lend a hand if necessary. So when Mates4Mates began in 2013 as an initiative of the Queensland RSL most Australians knew what their activities would consist of.
Our guest today is Simon Sauer, the CEO of Mates4Mates who prior to this had a distinguished career in the RAAF and now supports his injured Defence Force Mates.
Thursday, January 26, 2017 at 9:00AM 
With special guest:
1901 male deaths by suicide were recorded in 2012 along with another 634 females meaning a total of 2,535 Australians lost their lives in this way. There has been no significant improvement in the period since these figures became available.
Our guest today, Anthony Smith, argues that these figures are conservative and the belief of the people working in this area is that the figure for men should be some 500 higher. Reasons for this conservatism include the shortfall in the number of Coronial enquiries and the general reluctance of Coroners to brand a sudden death as suicide because this only makes it harder for the surviving family members to deal with the tragedy.
Yet even on the numbers we have available it is hard to understand how we could allow so many men to die from this cause without there being headlines in the newspapers. There is more coverage when a whale beaches on an isolated sandy shore.
Thursday, December 29, 2016 at 10:00AM 
With special guest:
When you are born and raised in Australia you know little about life as a refugee despite it being a frequent topic for conversation and opinion. Most of us have never spoken to a refugee.
Our guest today is Isaac Bacirongo who arrived in Sydney in 2003 with his wife and ten children as refugees after surviving the effects of Rwanda’s civil war in his own country, Congo.
In his book Still a Pygmy Isaac tells us about his struggles to save his identity as a Pygmy from extinction. In Africa Pygmies are regarded by some other groups as less than human. Against that background Isaac fought to go to school and get an education. He went on to establish successful businesses, owned several properties and a fleet of cars but all that was lost when the invading army arrived.
Thursday, June 16, 2016 at 9:00AM 
With special guest:
The health of Australians in terms of life expectancy is good by world standards.
However when we examine life expectancy it is often forgotten in these times of women demanding greater empowerment that males in Australia die more frequently than females in all age groups. Male life expectancy is 4.6 years less than females and the gap has increased not declined since 1900. In remote and very remote areas average male life expectancy is 4 years lower than in more populated areas. For Aboriginal males the average life expectancy is only 59 years a full 6 years less than for Aboriginal females. Furthermore male health extends beyond the purely biological aspects and encompasses a range of issues affecting the health and wellbeing of men and boys.
Against this background the Government introduced Australia’s first Men’s Health Policy in 2010, some 30 years after the Women’s Health Policy appeared. We ask our guest today Dr Gary Misan what changes have we seen since the 2010 introduction of the Policy and to what extent has it been picked up at the state and regional level.
Thursday, June 2, 2016 at 9:00AM 
With special guest:
Charity starts at home.
Philip Penfold, our guest today, was born and raised in Maitland NSW. When he spent 18 months in the USA he witnessed first-hand how community minded the Americans were and it inspired him to do something for his own hometown.
Philip did not have to look too far before he realised that homeless men in the Hunter region desperately needed someone to care. This led to the establishment in 2011 of Hunter Valley Men’s Crisis Support which provides assistance to homeless men in Maitland/Lower Hunter. This support group aims to give blokes a hand up when they are at their lowest point. They do this by providing practical, short-term assistance to men experiencing or at risk of homelessness or financial difficulty.
Thursday, September 10, 2015 at 9:00AM 
With special guest:
1901 male deaths by suicide were recorded in 2012 along with another 634 females meaning a total of 2,535 Australians lost their lives in this way. There has been no significant improvement in the period since these figures became available.
Our guest today, Anthony Smith, argues that these figures are conservative and the belief of the people working in this area is that the figure for men should be some 500 higher. Reasons for this conservatism include the shortfall in the number of Coronial enquiries and the general reluctance of Coroners to brand a sudden death as suicide because this only makes it harder for the surviving family members to deal with the tragedy.
Thursday, July 9, 2015 at 9:00AM 
With special guest:
We hear a lot about “the Intervention”, Aboriginal incarceration rates, and problems in Aboriginal communities. Not so much about the positive stories relating to the original inhabitants of Australia.
In today’s program we have an opportunity to listen to Dale Huddleston who is a renowned Aboriginal artist and musician, Chairman of the Burrunju Aboriginal Corporation and Outreach Worker for the Gugan Gulwan Youth Aboriginal Corporation in Canberra.
Thursday, June 25, 2015 at 9:00AM 
With special guest:
When you are born and raised in Australia you know little about life as a refugee despite it being a frequent topic for conversation and opinion. Most of us have never spoken to a refugee.
Our guest today is Isaac Bacirongo who arrived in Sydney in 2003 with his wife and ten children as refugees after surviving the effects of Rwanda’s civil war in his own country, Congo.
Thursday, April 9, 2015 at 9:00AM 
With special guest:
The Reverend Bill Crews is known to all levels of society simply as “Bill”. For the past 40 years he has worked with the people who have “fallen through the cracks” and in the process has been recognised as one of the National Trust’s 100 National Living Treasures as well as receiving many other major awards.
Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 10:30AM 
With special guests:
This week on Dads on the Air we talk to two members of the recently established “Proposal for a White House Council on Boys to Men”, Tom Golden and Jack Kammer from the USA. They are two leading members of a multi-partisan Commission of thirty-four nationally-known scholars and practitioners, who have submitted a proposal that President Obama create a White House Council on Boys to Men.
The mere presidential announcement of a White House Council on Boys to Men makes visible an invisible crisis. A White House Conference on Boys to Men to present “best practices” within one year after the Council is created, will prove invaluable to the future well- being of our Men.
Designed to tackle a nationwide crisis of boys and men, the Commission identifies the following five main components:
Each of the five crisis components is potentially handled by a different department of the government; therefore coordination and prioritisation is best handled at the White House level.
With a Short-Term Investment of One million dollars, the Long-Term Savings will add up to Many billions of dollars. (For example, boys who are cared for become men who care for–men who pay taxes for schools rather than drain taxes for prisons.) The quality-of-Life Savings will be Priceless.
Tom Golden, LCSW is the author of two books about men’s unique paths to healing. The first is titled Swallowed by a Snake: The Gift of the Masculine Side of Healing and the second is called A Man You Know is Grieving: 12 Ideas for Helping Him Heal From Loss. Tom has given workshops on this topic in the U.S., Australia, Canada and Europe. His work has been featured in the NY Times, the Washington Post, on CNN, CBS Evening News, ESPN, the NFL Channel and others. Tom serves on the Maryland Commission for Men’s Health and lives outside Washington DC.
Jack Kammer, MSW, MBA returned to school at the age of fifty-four to earn Masters degrees in Social Work and Business Administration. He did so to document, highlight and take action on male gender issues and the social problems that arise when those issues are ignored and mishandled. He specialises in the Race and Gender effect on marginalized African-American men and boys in urban settings. He is also the author of If Men Have All the Power How Come Women Make the Rules: and other radical thoughts for men who want more fairness from women and Good Will Toward Men: Women Talk Candidly About the Balance of Power Between the Sexes. He has a new book (2009) for boys and young men, titled Heroes of the Blue Sky Rebellion: How You and Other Young Men Can Claim All the Happiness in the World.
Editor
Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 10:30AM 
Scott Longden
With special guests:
This week we feature a fascinating interview with Professor Bill Mitchell from the Centre of Full Employment and Equity at the University of Newcastle. He is one of the academics who is predicting that there could be a million Australians on the dole queues by the end of next year. On this week’s show he explains just how easily this could come about and also talks about the devastating social consequences for the nation - how severe the impacts are on fathers, families and children.
Also this week we run extracts from an interview with Scott Longden from the Fatherhood Project in Northern NSW. He talks about how important it is for fathers to get involved with their children from birth, and how men can help each other in prenatal classes to become the best fathers they can. For too long fathers have been seen as an almost irrelevant adjunct to the birth, whereas in reality fathers are vital to their children from their earliest days.
We finish the show with Sue Price from the Men’s Rights Agency, who talks about the frequency with which men are being jailed for alleged abuses which occur sometimes decades before they are actually jailed, often on extremely flimsy if not non-existent evidence.
Listen Now (MP3)
Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 10:30AM 
With special guests:
Plus the next instalment of the radio drama Hero Joe, produced especially for Dads on the Air.