Illustration: Michael Leunig

Illustration: Michael Leunig

In days gone by, a "bastard" was somebody born out of wedlock; a child with no responsible or committed father. Such a person was also deemed to be "illegitimate", but how a human being, once born, could be somehow less than authentic, is difficult to imagine.

But customs change and, more than ever, wedlock is seen as a padlock and there are many children of unmarried parents getting about who may have been defined as bastards in the olden days - not that they don't get called bastards now, but that is for a different reason.

In the modern world we all know what a bastard is - and we know a bastard when we see one - and such bastards are frequently quite the opposite to being illegitimate; in fact they are, more often than not, men in high positions and with letters after their names.

The word bastard is no longer a technical term; it is a word kept in the instinctual lexicon of the people, to be used in the everyday pronouncing of judgement on a man of appalling character. It says a lot. It is fascinating to wonder how the word to describe an unfortunate "fatherless" child has become a term to indicate a very nasty person. Perhaps there is a link.

When we hear a man described a "rotten bastard" (it is usually applied to males only), are we in fact hearing an unconscious cultural diagnosis that could translate as "a man who lacked good fathering"? And may we therefore reasonably speculate that a man who lacks good fathering is at a greater risk of becoming a very nasty piece of work - or, in other words, a modern bastard: a man who is not a "real" man in the fully developed sense, and as such, is an illegitimate man - regardless of his worldly success or rank in society?

Thus we come to the question of masculinity and the old subject of manhood - the matters that seem so irrelevant or uncomfortably medieval to many with the modernity mindset.

Yet to young men who happen to carry these old mysteries close to their heart (and sometimes only as concealed or confused instincts), the idea of becoming a man is something that intuitively arouses them, whether they be trying desperately to face it or even more desperately to avoid it.
Avoiding maturity is, for many men, not just a cute hobby, but a life's work - often handsomely rewarded in the infantile popular culture of the West. It is easy for modern man to avoid initiation - and also very difficult to find it. How does a young man become a real man?

The scariness of manhood to males may be symbolically seen in the many stories of indigenous Australian boys who ran away and hid in the bush as the time of initiation approached. The older men would go after these frightened boys and force them to face the rituals that would bring manhood and knowledge about the age-old skills of spiritual and physical survival. It's hard for boys to grow up in a world where it's difficult for men to mature - in a culture that finds maturity unattractive and imagines it to be limiting and boringly sane. Boys want to hide from it.

It would seem necessary for the modern economy that men, enmass, never quite achieve the freedom or the moral integrity and dignity of maturity. How cumbersome that would be: a world of men who refused to submit limply and mindlessly to immoral wars and a diet of demeaning cultural frippery and amusements. Being a bit bastard can have its worldly advantages.

And does it matter that a male becomes a man - isn't modern personhood enough, and even an improvement? We heard from feminists in the 1960s that all men were bastards and all men were rapists. This was a dismal graffiti for a boy to discover back then. Who would dare to be a man?

And who will dare say what a man is - not in the prescriptive and fundamentalist way but in the existential sense: in a way relating to integrity and spirit, and in fluid ways that allow for individual difference including sexuality? Is there still, in spite of modernity, a distinct, evolved, beneficial and vital quality to be had that we may call manhood - without which a male's life is diminished and even disgraced, with all the loss to the female world that is implied in this disaster of impoverished masculinity?

And if there is such a thing as masculinity beyond gender, a matter of central character, then who fosters and teaches it most truly, naturally and effectively ; who, except the father?

So what, apart from being a sperm donor, is a father? What does he do? What can he do? What can he be to ensure that his son will not become a bastard?

He has so little time to do this - he sees too little of his boy. His boy hardly knows him in the real sense - he may know him in ideal and carefully administered recreational moments, but not in the full, messy and conflicted sense: the real man.

When I was a boy my own dad told me in a smiling and wistful way that it's a wise man that knows his own father. This mystified me considerably and at once I considered the possibility that I had been conceived as a result of my mother being impregnated by a man unknown to me. It suggested rather forlornly also that this is how a lot of lives get started, more than a young boy might imagine: that things are not always as they appear - an idea worth discovering at a tender age.

Later I realised that my father's words referred to something else: the fact that not many men really get to know or understand their dads very well - a situation that leaves many fathers and sons feeling sad and mothers feeling disappointed or annoyed with something that appears to be a parental failure.

But I rather liked and respected my father's mysterious and tender private world and felt no need to penetrate or understand it too much. It seemed dignified and meaningful - his modest entitlement and personal consolation for a life of hard work and innocence lost. But when he died I got to know my father like never before. It was an astonishing surprise.

A huge store of buried ordinary memories began to gradually open; like envelopes containing intimate letters. The dimly remembered story of father and son began to appear - and the invisible umbilical cord between the souls of dad and his boy began to manifest and transfer the exquisite truths that had been waiting: thousands of seemingly inconsequential moments between us, small acts and gestures in the dawn, small conversations and small pictures at night; his bearing and his stride - visions and sensual memories going back to the beginning, to summertime, the backyard, happy him holding tiny me, naked to his bare chest, its wonderful huge hairiness like nothing I had ever known.

My father, the provider: his death provided such unexpected light upon his gifts to me and how he had fathered me. All the hairy wisdoms, warnings and convictions, his scarred hands, his wounded dignity and gentle pathos, his divine humour - all of it had been passing across to me in fleeting moments that I thought I was not noticing. But I was. For better or for worse it was going in, to the bottom of my innocent little heart. I was being fathered.
In the modern world, it may be that a living father can only be half a father to a boy - the dead father is the other vital half: the half that grows the boy up once and for all.

This may seem a bleak idea but it could be a redeeming truth. It could well be the adapting wisdom of nature at work in a world where a father is commonly an absent slave in a fast and ruthless economy - a sort of emergency-ration fathering, where every tiny morsel is precious and matters, so long as it aches with yearning and truthfulness and love. Our Father, who art in heaven.

Though we find horrifying and tragic stories about boys from broken homes who pour petrol on an old vulnerable man and set him on fire for their pleasure - and though we witness presidents and prime ministers who, in their bastardry, their vanity and lust for power, have rained fire and death down from the sky upon defenceless innocents and awarded each other medals of "honour" for doing so - we may also take heart in the eternal mysteries of nature and love, wherein a father, beleaguered and exhausted and far from peace though he may be, can still somehow touch his son with sufficient truth and honour, as well as a sense of the world's great dangers and great beauties - enough for the boy to grow up to be a man, a flawed man of course and with many failures perhaps, but not a bastard.