Lessons Of The Father

Jack Eales would give his son the same piece of pre-match advice: “Remember, John, it’s only a game – go out there and enjoy yourself.” Photo: Getty Images

John Eales is exactly the bloke I expect him to be as we chat in the foyer of a medical research facility in North Sydney.

Second-rower tall, of course, and fresh-faced for his 44 years. But also courteous and charming. Standing beside him is the eldest of his four children, 16-year-old Elijah, to whom Eales speaks with a tenderness you wouldn’t instantly associate with a former warrior of international rugby.

Eales and I have met to reminisce not about the glory days of Australian rugby – he shone in the Wallabies’ World Cup-winning campaigns of 1991 and 1999, the latter as captain, as well as five (five!) victorious Bledisloe Cup series – but rather, on the eve of this year’s Melanoma March, about his father, who died 10 years ago in June from this deadliest form of skin cancer.

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I tell Eales I don’t want to rekindle distressing memories, but he waves one of those giant hands that used to tap down lineout ball and says to ask him anything I like. He has a story to tell that you could take a lot from – about fathering, values, masculine strength, love and mortality.

Like most fathers of his generation, Jack Eales was neither particularly tactile with his kids nor much involved with the domestic drudgery that society (not entirely unreasonably) nowadays expects men to share equally with their partner.

“But he did the typical male job,” reflects Eales. “He was always the handyman around the house. Loved his garden. He had his priorities right. He was very strong on values and the idea that you need to respect yourself while looking after others. And you were never in any doubt that he was an exceptionally loving man.”

Perhaps his best quality as a dad, Eales proffers, was his willingness to let his children fail. It’s through life’s setbacks, Jack Eales reasoned – in sport, at school, in virtually anything – that young people grasp important truths. Luck evens out. Hard work trumps talent. Process is more important than outcome.

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As for John’s status as an all-time great of Australian rugby . . . does he owe that to his Dad? Well, maybe not, but then again . . .

While Jack Eales preferred cricket to the rougher sports, he was a teacher by profession and analytical by nature, and would encourage his son to think about performance to a degree not typical of most young sportsmen. What flaw in technique, for example, had caused that tackle to be missed? Or that pass to land in the first row of seats? Why had the team’s scrum impersonated a deck of cards that day? These are the type of questions father and son would discuss in the car on their way home from competition.

“The effect,” says Eales, “is that it forced you to think more about what you were doing and why you were doing it.”

The father also put sport in perspective. From John’s time in the Under-8s through the 86 Tests he played for the Wallabies, Jack Eales would give his son the same piece of pre-match advice: “Remember, John, it’s only a game – go out there and enjoy yourself.”

Though fatal illness snuck up on Jack Eales, you wouldn’t say it came out of nowhere. Melanoma doesn’t work that way. Unlike other forms of cancer, it is neither entirely random nor spontaneous.

The fair-skinned Jack Eales grew up under the scorching sun of the Queensland bush in an era when no one thought much of having their skin roasted several times a summer.

Although later he took to wearing a hat during spells outdoors, one of the harsh truths about melanoma is that its seeds are sown in the first 10 or 20 years of life, when for some unfortunates a fire is lit in the melanocytes that neither the immune system nor any amount of sun-smart behaviour thereafter can put out.

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The skin of most non-Aboriginal Australians isn’t dark enough to cope with the strength of sunlight we get in this country. This helps explain why Australia’s skin-cancer rates are the worst in the world, why melanoma is the fourth most common form of cancer for Australian men, and why among 20-34-year-olds it kills more often than any other single cancer.

For many years towards the end, Jack Eales would visit a skin specialist to have non-melanoma spots burnt off his face and neck. In 2001, surgeons excised a melanoma from his back. Then, come late 2004, his health took a calamitous turn.

“My Dad would be out for a walk with Mum and he would start to walk a little to one side,” recalls Eales. “He just wasn’t feeling right and had some dizziness. So he went to his local doctor, who sent him off for a scan, and the results came back in January 2005 showing he had a couple of tumours in his brain that had metastasised from the melanoma.”

Having heard the news from his Mum, Eales was on the phone that same day.

“You think as the oldest boy you ring your Dad to offer comfort, but I remember I hardly got a word out,” says Eales, who cried his way through the call while Jack assumed the role of comforter.

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This was no reason to be hard on himself, decided Eales, who believes men shouldn’t expect to be articulate in the most trying circumstances. His response was to turn to the pen. He does this sometimes, he says, to clarify his thoughts.

“I went away and wrote him a letter, and in the letter I was able to say some things that I wanted to say on the phone but couldn’t, and one of those things was that ‘I’ve never told you how much I love you’, and after that I could say it in person.”

And he said it often. This was one of the three musts of those final months: to make explicit a sentiment that had hitherto been implicit.

The second must was to convey his gratitude for everything his Dad had done for him. And the third was to exude strength, to reassure the dying man that the family would all be there for one another when the time came.

You are never ready to lose your father, Eales says, but in his case the warning he received allowed him to make the father-son relationship more “complete” than it would have been had his Dad gone suddenly.

Jack Eales died in hospital on June 19, 2005 at the age of 66.

He lives on in John’s memory as a beloved father and inspiration. He lives on as the man at the centre of a plethora of joyous memories that eventually overwhelmed the sadness of loss. “The thing about the great teachers we’ve all had is that their influence doesn’t stop when they leave us,” says Eales. “It continues on forever, and Dad’s influence is like that.”

And, pragmatically, Jack Eales survives as a cautionary tale on the sun’s capacity to kill. Eales and his wife, Lara, are vigilant when it comes to the sun habits of their four children (Jack’s grandchildren): Elijah, Sophia (14), Lily (12) and Evie (7).

“This is a preventable cancer,” says Eales. “Genetics play a part, but your behaviour plays a much bigger part. We need a bit of sun, but we need to manage our exposure.”

Jack Eales taught no more important lesson than his final one.

John Eales is an ambassador for Melanoma Institute Australia, the world’s leading research and treatment facility dedicated to preventing and curing melanoma.

To register to march-for-a cure in this year's Melanoma March, or to donate, visit melanomamarch.org.au