Today is my Dad's birthday and he's away on holiday with my Mum. I would normally call him in NZ, but this year it has to be an e-mail which I hope he will be able to pick up from somewhere.

While writing the e-mail on a cold December day in the UK, I began thinking about my relationship with him and remembering a few of the things that have always made him - in my view at least - a good man and great father.

My dad is the oldest of 6 kids in a working-class family and grew up in a pretty rough part of Auckland. Like most men of the day, my Granddad exercised his fatherly duties largely through a combination of discipline at the end of a stick or belt and a hefty number of chores around the place. And as the oldest child, my dad was often expected to shoulder extra responsibility for his siblings from an early age, which of course he did. Rough neighborhoods breed tough kids and my dad was no exception. Any kid that bullied a member of the McKenzie clan could expect to be paid back with interest!

With six kids to feed and a mortgage to pay, money was always pretty scarce and like all kids of their generation, my Dad learned from an early age how to make his own entertainment with very little. One year he and two of his brothers built a soapbox go-cart, using a few bits of scrounged timber, the wheels of an old pram and a handbrake consisting of a lever and rope arrangement. After testing it a little they found they could ride it down a hill and slide into their driveway, by yanking the handbrake, which also brought the go-cart to a stop. As their confidence grew, they proceeded further and further up the hill until they reached the top. During their last run, the brake rope snapped and the go-cart with all aboard proceeded to crash through the garage door. Granddad was apparently far from pleased and by all accounts a sound thrashing was administered.

Despite the lack of lucre and a relative scarcity of encouragement for education, my Dad earned himself a place at Auckland university (the only member of his family to do so) where he studied the natural sciences with a major in chemistry. I understand that he largely financed himself with various part-time jobs. Later, he also undertook a range of further education. He had also learned to play the piano and partially supplemented his uni studies by gigging a local band or two.

After my folks were married, my Dad left Uni, but continued pursuing his studies in other fields. He learned the fundamentals of both accounting and the law and also put his chemistry expertise to work studying pharmacology for awhile. In the years that followed, he was able to draw on all these skills in one way or another.

He had other interests too; he was apparently a pretty fair rugby player in his youth by all accounts and still enjoys watching the game. He also did a fair bit of diving, beginning with the old-fashioned canvas/perspex mask and surface-based petrol pump arrangement and later switching to the new SCUBA technology, which he used for a fair bit of spear fishing alone. He also enjoys photography and built his own darkroom in a small cupboard in the basement of our place in Glenfield. He got a few wedding and birthday gigs where his photos helped to supplement the family income a little further in later years.

I was born in Auckland and we lived in Glenfield, when I was pretty young. One of my earliest memories happened on the 20th July, 1969 when the Apollo team landed on the moon. My Dad picked me up and walked out onto our veranda, pointed at the moon and said to me: "There's men up there now son".

All young families struggle to make ends meet and my family were no different. But my brother's illness added extra pressure on the family finances. My dad worked three different jobs to make ends meet. He would get up around 5am and clean the toll booths on the Auckland Harbor Bridge, then go to work with my granddad all day digging drains. After a brief break for dinner and a wash, he would then drive to a pub after closing time and clean it. Finally returning home around 1am, he would collapse into bed and begin the whole cycle over again the next working day.

We moved to Te Puna, about 15 miles north of Tauranga when I was 6 and my brother 4, where my folks put down roots for the next 40 years. Dad always had an impressive aptitude with most things mechanical (and in later years electronic) and is pretty much an all-round handyman. There's not a lot of DIY skills that you can teach a man who built his first house from the remains of a steel-girder barn structure in six weeks!

In the years that followed, both my parents worked extremely hard to make the orchard work and to raise their two boys, one of them very poorly. They both worked long hours, 7 days a week to make ends meet. But as they were both working from home, both my brother and I had ample opportunity to spend time with one or both of them (mostly working at whatever job we had been tasked with).

Like all McKenzie men, Dad has a real temper and his wrath was often terrible to behold. I can remember many occasions when he was struggling in the shed with some particularly stubborn piece of misbehaving machinery (with the doors firmly shut) when there would be a roar and a string of expletives, followed by the clang of a spanner being hurled at the offending item. At these times, we wisely gave the shed a wide berth until his rage was spent. He would eventually emerge from the shed in a calmer frame of mind, but we would still mind our manners until we were sure his anger was fully subsided.

Dad has always been a fairly straight talker, not afraid to voice his opinion and with little time for "authority for authorities' sake". This of course has not exactly endeared him to a fair number of folks who are used to being treated with more deference, for which he mostly cares not a jot. Sometimes however, his views have been expressed in ways that even the more generous hearts amongst us would be hard pushed not to be offended by and Mum has been forced to make the odd blushing, red-faced apology on his behalf over the years (most of the offended parties being too shit-scared to demand an apology from him directly). He and I are very much alike in this respect; we sometimes need to be told reminded by our nearest and dearest that there is a difference between "frank/forthright" and "bloody-minded/insult".

But this general refusal to "suffer fools gladly" has a positive side; a passion to see right prevail and justice done, not just through the machinations of the government, but also with some level of active participation as a citizen in a modern democracy. It was Dad who taught me from an early age that rights and privileges come with responsibilities which must also be accepted and undertaken. It was my Dad who took me to the local polling station on election days, where he explained why it was important for me to be active in the democratic process and if necessary to protest and fight to retain my rights. But he was also unafraid to break the law when he felt (rightly in most cases) that the law in question was about screwing money out of people without providing anything in return. He once told me: "If a law is patently wrong or unjust, it is every honorable man's duty to break it". It's a maxim that in later years I have proudly taken to heart.

While my Mum was often the daily disciplinarian (a job that understandably taxed her sanity), Dad's no-nonsense approach concerning bad behaviour was something that made both my brother and I quake. Many was the time that he would hand me a pair of secateurs and send me to the bottom of the orchard to cut a willow stick, with the promise that if he lashed the stick against a fencepost and broke it, I would be sent to fetch another and a double helping of corporal punishment would be administered on my return. Often the eventual stripes I received were inconsequential, compared to the walk which he wisely knew gave me the chance to contemplate the error of my ways and was for me at least, the harshest part of my punishment. But once punishment was administered, as far as he was concerned the slate was wiped clean and no more was said. I always respected him for that...

When I was 13 or 14, the family were playing a game of Monopoly and he accused me of cheating (I hadn't been) and told me to get showered and get to bed. I marched through to the bathroom and while showering and in a fit of my own righteous anger, I punched the formica-covered chipboard wall with all the strength I could muster. A clean, size-12-fist-sized piece of wood vanished into the space between walls.

When I had dressed and mustered my courage, I went to tell my Dad. He examined the hole and without a word disappeared into the garage, returning minutes later, armed with an electric jigsaw, a tube of sealant and a plastic soap dish. The hole was squared off, the soap dish fitted and sealed in similar silence and he simply looked me straight in the eye and pointed to my bedroom. Needless to say, I hastily complied with his obvious order! No more was ever said about that incident for years.

Both he and my Mum always made time for us. But being boys, it was generally Dad who took a more active interest in our various boyhood hobbies and interests, with poor Mum often (but not always) on the sidelines at times. I can remember many games of bushel-box cricket with wooden tangelo cases as wickets, set up on a sloping strip of land alongside the shed. Dad mowed a small square of empty nursery land in the bottom block, which was used by the whole family both as a makeshift tennis court and boomerang throwing arena and we all spent a fair few happy hours there. Dad also helped us collect matchbox cars, build model airplanes and even constructed a large chipboard table in our attic on which we built a fairly impressive model railway setup.

During my college years, I developed an interest in the then emerging field of computing. My school was one of the first in NZ to get a small compliment of Poly workstations, but because my math's grades were not up to scratch, I was not permitted to undertake formal classes. It was my Dad who spotted an ad in the local paper for a "Learn to program in BASIC" course, being offered by the Manakau Technical College just outside of Auckland. He took me out of school for a week and we attended and completed the course together. He then shelled out for an early TRS-80 clone with a promise that I would repay my half of the cost by working it off on extra chores around the place. In the years that followed, it became an interest that we continued to share and which I would eventually make a career out of.

We've had our disagreements over the years as I'm sure all fathers and sons have, some of them slight and some serious. My teenage years were marred with the sorts of things that most angry young men seem to go through; a fair bit of boozing (and not a few drugs), a lot of street fights in the local town on a Friday night, a couple of brushes with the law and one serious car crash. In short I was a particularly difficult little bastard who seriously tested the patience of both my parents at times. But my Dad seemed to understand that this was part of the growing up thing for boys and when he was forced to square up to me and set me on my arse, he mostly tried to do it as painlessly as possible. When at 17 I made the decision to leave home and move to another town, he never tried to impose his will, although he was worried about the direction I was taking. He simply did what he had always done; he listened to my plans and offered what help and advice he could.

The strong work ethic that my folks both instilled in me from an early age, together with my Dad's philosophy of justice and righteousness, have served me well ever since. It's no exaggeration to say that a fair portion of whatever success I have been had in this life is due in no small part to him and what he taught me.

Thanks Dad.

Happy birthday.

Love you.