Parent Profile 04-Sep-2011
He has been on Catch Phrase (winning a heap of prizes, including a VW Polo) and Wheel of Fortune. He had his own segment, The Big Doodle, on the Disney channel, where he was known for three years as Cartoon Dave to 14 million people in Australia, Hong Kong and China. Now he appears on Network Ten’s Toasted TV and Channel 7’s It’s Academic. And he regularly visits schools and libraries, teaching children how to create and draw their own cartoon characters. It seems cartoonist and children’s author, Dave Hackett, knows how to work with an audience.
Yet a lot of Dave’s time is spent working from the family home he shares with his wife, Kim, three children, Finn (14), Sami (9) and Eden (4), their three chooks, Queenie, Audrey and Sophia, a small grey cat, Tilly, and a height-challenged pony named Trigger. It’s here, in their little house on a big patch of green land sprinkled with fruit trees that Dave draws and writes each day. So far he has had five novels (the UFO: Unavoidable Family Outing series), two picture books and a handful of how-to cartooning books published.
Where do you live and why? We live in the glorious town of Eumundi, up in the hills looking over Cooroy Mountain. We’ve been here for a year and a half, having spent the previous fifteen years in Sydney’s Blue Mountains. Knowing that my work allowed us to live virtually anywhere in Australia, (we had considered moving away from the Blue Mountains for some time). We did some research, came up for a quick look, and immediately fell in love with Eumundi.
Is the journey of fatherhood what you expected? There’s a lot more to fatherhood than the few tiny paragraphs they put on the parenting brochures, that’s for sure. It might sound a little cliché, but for all the hit-the-ground-running-and-keep-going-till-you-flop-into-bed lifestyle of being a parent, I wouldn’t swap it for anything (not even cake).
What are your biggest parenting frustrations? At the moment we’re at the start of our action-packed ‘15-year-stretch of having a teenager at home’, which presents a pretty steep learning curve, with a lot of flying-in-the-dark moments as parents. It seems that everything I thought I knew at 14 is being thrown back in my face!
What delights you most about fatherhood? It’s often the small things. The funny, innocent things your children say, and the questions they ask. Just watching them run along the grass will always bring a smile to my face (if you’ve seen them run, you’ll know what I mean).
What has been your most life defining moment? Deciding, at twenty-three, to lay-by a diamond ring, and not long after, asking my girl to marry me. I honestly have no idea where my life would have taken me had I not made such a positive, life-changing decision. We’ve been together now for 18 years – by far it’s the best decision I’ve ever made!
How did you get interested in cartooning? I’ve been drawing since I was tiny, but I can remember a long time being less-than-brilliant at it. I’ve been drawing cartoons ever since I ordered an 85 cent puzzle book from my primary school’s book-club. The puzzles were nice, but it was the cartoons at the bottom of each page that really caught my eye. For the next few years I copied them, practised them, adjusted them and reinvented them until eventually I’d come up with my own style. It was quite possibly the most important 85 cents I’ve ever spent!
What does a typical day look like at your place? Weekdays, it’s like an episode of The Amazing Race: “Teams must get up at 5:30am and write 1000 words of their latest novel before waking up the children, making school lunches, sorting out breakfast and beginning the drive to school relay by 7:50am. After dropping three children at three different locations, teams then share breakfast and think about starting work at 10:00am. Set alarm for 2pm and begin the retrieval of children from all three schools, before throwing down afternoon tea, supervising homework and racing out the door to piano lessons/musical practice/other after-school activity. Teams need to be back home in time to start dinner, eat dinner, clean up dinner, and prepare for the repeat performance the following day… Ready….Go!”
What would be an ideal day for you? (Bear in mind that this is an ideal day, and the chances of it actually happening are on a par with emailing the queen and having her accept an invitation to come to our house for a banquet of vegemite sandwiches, followed by a Gilligan’s Island TV marathon), but here goes:
Wake up in Italy to breakfast in bed, followed by a gondola ride and a scoot through some wineries. After a gourmet lunch, lie on the grass under a big old tree and have an afternoon snooze, winding up with Harry Connick Jr giving a live performance on our back deck for our family and a handful of our closest friends.
How do you balance family and work demands? Having worked from home for the past fifteen years, the flexibility of my hours is a huge plus. The fact that I can write or draw at any hour of the day makes it possible for me to be a lot more hands-on at home than some other dads. It means that I’m often around for school assemblies, plays, etc, and my hours also allow my wife and me to pull a ‘Monday Funday’ (movies, lunch, a walk on the beach) every now and then, too. On the down side, my work takes me interstate a little too, but usually it’s only for a few days at a time, which is not too drastic.
What advice has had the biggest impact on you? One of my early career mentors (who recently passed away) told me that whatever I did, to always do a quality job. When you have something out in the world that represents you, you want it to be saying good things about you.
What’s the motto you live by? Life is an adventure. We only get one shot at it, so it makes sense to explore, see, do, try and create as many interesting chapters to our lives as we can.
