Fatherhood: Canberra musician Creswick on getting dads talking

His parents, musician Creswick and writer Abbey Mackay, had planned it all perfectly, and perfect it was. A home birth, in Brooklyn, filled with October sunlight - it couldn't have been better.

But there's only so much you can plan when it comes to bringing a baby into the world. Four years later, Creswick, aka Liam Budge, chuckles at the thought that he ever believed he knew anything about parenting, about what it would mean to be a father.

"For some reason, I had, maybe not a resistance, but just a preference to really focus on the birth," he says.

"And then suddenly, here's the rest of my life. I probably should have done a little bit of forward thinking."

New York was already an intense place to live, especially for a jobbing musician. By the time Julian was a few months old, it was deep into the North American winter, and the couple would rug him up against the minus-10-degree cold, just trying to take some air.

Eventually, they decided to return to their hometown for a while.

So much for a less intense experience; they arrived back in Canberra just in time for the Black Summer bushfires, and then the pandemic set in.

But as all his planned projects were shut down, and the pair surrounded themselves with the wider family that had drawn them home, Budge found himself reflecting on parenthood more broadly.

"Moving back to Canberra has allowed me to be a father in a less stressful way, just because my son is extremely active, he loves the outdoors," Creswick says.

"I still really wanted to have this creative outlet, so I was doing a lot of film work, and I was filming these really elaborate home movies, essentially of Julian.

"I started to kind of concoct ideas of potential avenues for creative projects. And because historically speaking, with the projects that I've done, I've always been really interested in grappling with broader topics, and doing a deep dive on them rather than writing individual songs about different topics."

The home movies he made to fill idle hours gradually morphed into a different kind of film project, one that will soon take shape at The Street Theatre. In His Words: Voices of Fatherhood is a cinematic response, set to live music, to the different experiences of fatherhood.

The pitch: nine fathers, nine interviews, nine lives, although Creswick - he's presenting this project under his alternative moniker - originally approached around 100 men to take part.

"The idea was that I would have a really broad spectrum of experiences and backgrounds," he says.

"I've got some fathers who had really problematic relationships with their own fathers, some who had really great relationships with their own fathers.

"We talk extensively about how this shapes the way that we experience fatherhood, and how this actually shapes the way that we move through the world and try and be the best fathers that we can be."

We're sitting in the vast rehearsal space at The Street Theatre; the work is one of the theatre's first Early Phase commissioning projects, from conceptualisation right through to production.

The show, like many produced at The Street, challenges the boundaries of storytelling. An award-winning songwriter and jazz musician, he has composed original songs with multiple influences, to accompany his filmed interviews. The songs are linked to the stories themselves, and he has assembled a stellar group of jazz luminaries, one of whom, Brett Williams, is also an interview subject in the film.

He says his creativity has often led him down rabbit holes of inquiry, but he's conscious of needing to move beyond his own comfort zone.

"I'm interested in other people's experiences that are different to my own - I'm very conscious of not being in my own echo chamber of experience," he says.

"To build that sense of shared experience, the commonalities around fatherhood, and also just encourage people to have these really vulnerable discussions."

He's brought in a range of cultural backgrounds - one father is gay, for example, another from an Indian background - as well as age groups. The youngest is 32, while the oldest is in his mid-70s. That subject, Peter Conway, has died since the interview was completed; others have progressed from new dads to those with more wisdom they thought possible.

One, Sam Gupta, says participating in the film made him think more deeply about his own family life, and where along the way he knowingly became a parent. He knows Creswick from the school gate - his son Som goes to the same school as young Julian - but when he agreed to participate in the project, he had no idea how it would change his thinking.

"It makes you realise things that you've taken for granted, and things that challenge you as a father," he says.

He moved from India to Australia when he was 19, and while he had a traditional Indian upbringing, he says his own father taught him lessons he's only now realising were the stuff of life.

"Fortunately, I had a very positive relationship with my dad," he says.

"For example, my dad, when I was in school, I was a teenage boy, he may have seen me with few friends. And he came and told me one day, 'You know my stand on cigarettes, right?' And I said, 'Yeah, I do'. He said, 'Look, as a kid, you will be tempted to experience things. You may even start doing things that I don't like. I don't want the world to tell me that your son is smoking, doing something that he shouldn't be doing. You come and tell me, it's my problem and how I deal with it'."

It's the kind of lesson - of closeness, honesty and authority - he hopes to impart to his own son one day, because it's one of many small moments in life that has formed him.

"I've always believed this - I don't think there are major things in life that define people, I think it's always those very subtle, profound moments in life that shape the person you become," he says.

"And they are sometimes so silent and small and mild and gentle, that you would typically not feel anything."

Creswick himself also had a positive relationship with his own dad, and still does.

"But my dad had a difficult relationship with his own father and his father passed away, sadly, when he was 11 years old," he says.

"This was also something that was a catalyst for me being really interested in this topic, because I'd seen the impact that that had had on my own dad, and how my own dad had almost had to build his own sense of masculinity. Because he didn't have that role model in his upbringing, those formative years.

"And he was a great father.

"So me having a really steady role model of a father ... that definitely informed being interested in having these difficult conversations with men who may have not had that really great experience."

Jazz wunderkind Brett Williams - who will be performing alongside Creswick during the show - can certainly relate.

Born in the United States and now based in Melbourne, he has been struck by the differences in parenting styles between modern Australia and his own upbringing, religion being the most striking.

He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where his father was a second-generation pastor. "I was growing up with those kinds of roles, those religious roles [regarding] what the man is supposed to be," he says.

"As I grew older, I started to see it for what it was and had to just unlearn a lot of things in my self-growth."

He sees his own son, Moon, as a chance to reverse his own history, in a way.

"He's our first baby and it's been such a whirlwind and a fun journey - you realise how blank of a canvas a little baby is," he says.

"They're so new into the world and you want to just give them everything, and give them the right tools. You start off, younger, being not so impacted by the world and then you start to get shaped by society."

He says his father never encouraged emotion of any kind, much less life-changing conversations.

"His approach was, keep the emotions tucked away," he says. "So those things of feeling sad or wanting to cry, even in ways of just physical touch and affection - I grew up with having to just bury those feelings."

And although the fathers in Creswick's film come from diverse families, Williams was struck by the common message they all carried.

"We're all individually trying to change the narrative that we grew up with as young men ... and to be able to give our kids what they need."

Creswick, meanwhile, has only deepened his own interest in the topic; the project was originally conceived as the first of several volumes. There's certainly more than enough material out there.

"Most of the fathers commented that this was the first time they've had an extended discussion about fatherhood," Creswick says. "I don't know if there's very concerted efforts to speak about it in depth. I think there's maybe very surface-level chat.

"But certainly with my friends, before this project, I've never really had a situation where I've gone, okay, let's just talk about what it means to be a dad."

At one stage, he mentioned the project to a new acquaintance, a middle-aged woman, and she immediately asked why he wasn't doing a project about motherhood. Another person, a man, told him he was "brave" to embark on such a project.

"Really, this isn't an exclusionary project, it's actually really just platforming and shining a light on something that is a huge lived experience for a lot of people," he says.

"I think it is important to make note of the fact that this isn't in defiance of something, this is really just a celebration of the discussion around it.

"I really enjoy creatively exploring things that are very personal to me, because it allows me to get deeper into a subject matter."