Dad to Me

[Note from St. Quentin: This week’s dad interview is a bit quieter than the rest of the episode, so you may want to turn up the volume at times.]

Ross is a man of the lab and the land. He shuttles between being a world-class cancer researcher and a part-time walnut farmer. But neither the professorship nor the nuts were handed to him on a platter. Ross was saddled with a learning difficulty from a very young age, a condition which once left him written off as the dunce of the class; and many years later, his daughter Pip - herself now a brilliant young novelist and poet - struggled with exactly the same thing. Listen in as Pip tries to prise Ross open on the big dad issues: how Ross would like to be remembered by his grandson, how he thinks the role of the father has changed since his day, and what he’d do differently if he had his dad time all over again. Come for the real talk, stay for Ross’s dad art.

More on our guests and their work:

Pip Smith: author of Half Wild

http://www.pipsmith.net/about

Professor Emeritus Ross Smith: NanoMed co-founder and co-CEO

https://www.nanomed.com.au/about/team/professor-smith/

Ian is an accomplished screenwriter with a velvet pen and silver tongue. His big breakthrough was writing the screenplay for Blue Murder, a successful mini-series about Australian police corruption and the underworld of organised crime. Ian can write a good interrogation scene. But he’s never been subjected to the probing interrogation of his daughter Nina, a qualified performance artist now turned sexologist in training. Listen in as Nina and Ian talk over the hard questions: the loss of a mother and ex-wife, the difficulties of combining creative and paternal duties, and the big one on Nina’s lips, asked from direct experience - ‘would you think any differently of me if I ended up with a woman?’

See the faces (and immortal works) behind the voices in this episode:

Insta: https://instragram.com/dadto.me

Micko is a virtuoso cellist. He played in one of Poland’s premier classical ensembles before moving with his wife and two sons to Australia, after the fall of the Berlin wall. That much is clear. But as for the rest, the enigma of Micko is hard to comprehend: a sausage smuggler, an advocate of cucumbers as pharmaceuticals, a man who listens to WWII documentaries without much clothing, a slippery soul who managed to get out of spying for the Polish secret service without incurring their ire. On these and other matters, Micko’s son Berbeć has been scratching his head for years. Listen in as he finally gets the chance to resolve the mystery of the ‘performance artist who has been in character my whole life’.

See the faces (and immortal works) behind the voices on this episode:

Insta: https://instragram.com/dadto.me

Launching January, 2021: A new podcast featuring Dr. Tom, Jump Daddy and the world's hottest fathers. The series asks the questions grown children have always wanted to ask their own dads, but have always seemed too awkward, out-of-place or scary. Featuring families from across Australia and the world, this is a show that mixes big laughs with even bigger breakthroughs.