At seventy most dads are actively reducing what they own, so anything that adds an object to the house works against him: what lands is something used up, something done together, or a better version of the one thing he uses every single day.
By seventy the direction of travel has usually reversed. For fifty years the house filled up. Now it is being emptied, often deliberately, sometimes because a move is coming.
A present that arrives in that context has to be worth the space it takes, and most presents are not.
What was happening the year he was born
A dad turning 70 this year was born in 1956. Not a rounding: it is this year’s calendar in Brisbane minus 70, worked out when the page was built, so it is still right next year when everything else on a page like this has quietly gone stale.
- In Australia that year. Television started in Australia on 16 September 1956 when TCN 9 Sydney went to air, two months before Melbourne hosted the Olympic Games.
- The car. The Holden FE, released July 1956. The first fully restyled Holden, and what replaced the FJ.
- Number one. Que Sera, Sera, Doris Day, eight weeks from 15 September. Kent Music Report, compiled retrospectively.
- What a week’s work paid. The federal basic wage was 246 shillings a week, twelve pounds six.
Which puts his teenage years in the 1970s, and that is the more useful fact of the two. The picks below come from the seventies dad page rather than from an age bracket, because taste formed at fifteen is what a gift has to hit.
The house is getting smaller, not bigger
This is the whole brief. A man who spent last weekend taking three boxes to the op shop does not want a fourth box arriving, however nice the thing inside it is.
Which leaves three safe shapes: something he uses up, something that happens rather than sits, and a replacement for a daily object rather than an addition to the collection. The replacement is the underrated one. The kettle, the radio, the chair cushion, the reading light. He has been putting up with the old one for years.
Time with people, and be specific about it
The most wanted gift at seventy is usually company, and the least useful way to give it is to say so on a card. Book the thing. Put a date on it. Drive him to it.
An experience with a grandchild in it is worth more than the same experience alone, and it is the one category where the money is never the point.
What not to buy for a 70th
A subscription he has to cancel later. It is a small ongoing job disguised as a present.
Anything that needs assembling, unless you are the one assembling it. Anything with instructions in six-point type. And another mug, which at seventy is close to a running joke in most families.
The shortcut is the decade Dad was fifteen in
Vinyl bought with paper-round money, the first arcade cabinet in the milk bar, and a first car he can still describe in detail.
That is what a reference has to hit to be his rather than generically old, and the decade page below sorts the catalogue by exactly that.
