Bryan Brown met his dad just 10 times. He was determined to turn up for his kids

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.

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 father for. But, I imagine, Brown must still be struggling to forgive?

“There was nothing to forgive,” he says.

“I didn’t hate him and wasn’t angry about his actions. It was just: ‘oh, well, yeah’. It was like he was just another man, not my father. My mother was so important in my life, so rock-solid, that he wasn’t someone to whom I was really attached.

“To be angry, you need to have been counting on someone in the first place, and I never could. When I was at school, I was the only bloke that came from what was called a broken home, right? Everyone else had a mother and father, so I would just tell everyone that he was killed in the war.”

To be fair, his father did reappear just long enough to give him something singularly wonderful – though it would take him a long time to realise the circumstances.

About 20 years ago, Brown and his wife Rachel Ward, a fellow successful actor, were at a Katoomba hotel with Molly, and Brown’s sister Kristine and her husband, when the subject of his father came up over dinner.

“We were talking about mum’s past life and she said, ‘Your father left when you were just a baby and then …’”

The penny dropped. Brown did some quick calculations.

“‘Hang on, mum, Kristine’s 2½ half years younger than me, so how did dad get you pregnant with her when by then he was long gone?’.”

A long pause.

“Well,” his mother said, remembering a time long gone, “he came back and visited for just one night and sweet-talked me into bed.”

Laughter all around.

“And that was that,” Brown says. “That was the best thing he ever did in his life for me. He gave me my precious sister.”

It is on the subject of his mother that Brown, who is currently fronting a Father’s Day campaign for R.M. Williams, is most effusive.

“The other reason I don’t need to forgive my dad is because mum just gave me and Kristine so much we just didn’t need him,” he says.

“Mum gave us love. She saw us educated. She put food on the table and a roof over our head. We were terribly secure because mum was looking after us so well.”

And so he learnt to be a father from her?

“She taught us about total devotion to your children, and provided everything, but she also made sure there were barriers, that we knew right from wrong, and when we were wrong she let us know, full-blast,” he says.

“Not that my sister had to deal with that much but I was a bit of a larrikin and f---ed around as a young buck in the suburbs.

“And if I disobeyed her, or came back later than I said I would, she’d be strong. But it is through those little things that you get to understand stuff, you know? Every day that goes past I’m reminded of how lucky I was to have her as my mum.”

And yet, does he – like me – sometimes compare the wonderful parenting received with the parenting he gives, and shift a little uncomfortably?

“Yes. I know I’ll never be as good as mum was to us but I’m still lucky to have her example to follow. I’ve let myself down a few times but, in the end, Rachel and I have three great kids.”

In a showbiz industry rife with affairs, marital breakdowns and multiple marriages, Brown and Ward have put together 44 years! Surely, in their world, one could count such marriages on the fingers of one hand?

“No. There are other marriages that last,” he says. “I’m not sure it’s any different to anywhere else. Everyone’s got strain on marriages, with their work and all that sort of thing, and it’s never a lay-down misere. You’ve got to work at all that stuff. And we worked hard raising our kids, too.”

I suggest that, with his two daughters and son, if ever they said, “Dad, let’s go fishing”, Brown’s reply would be, “You bloody beauty, grab the rods and I’ll see you in the car in one minute.”

“Yes. I think availability and punctuality became a big thing for me because of my own experience, right? If you say you’re going to do something, for f---’s sake, do it,” he says.

It is as good a tip as any for this Father’s Day.

Bravo, Molly Brown. Good job.

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