Dads On The Air, often shortened to DOTA, is a community radio program which began in western Sydney in August of 2000 with a small group of extremely disgruntled separated men who had no experience of radio and no resources. The author of Chaos at the Crossroads: The Birth of Dads On The Air, William John Stapleton, worked as a mainstream journalist and was the only one with any media experience.
The series of short books in the Chaos at the Crossroads series tell the story of the long struggle for family law reform in Australia, not just by separated fathers, their supporters and their lobby groups, but by grandparents and other family members cut out of children's lives by the discriminatory and destructive sole-custody model purveyed by the court.
Chaos also tells the story of how, from the humble beginnings of a disheveled group of disgruntled separated fathers, Dads On The Air became the world's most famous radio program dedicated to fatherhood issues.
The program evolved with the information revolution. The technology which would allow a small group of people with few resources to make available a weekly 90 minute radio program and give it the penetration and power it went on to achieve simply had not existed five years before. Dads On The Air has over time interviewed almost all the world's leading national and international activists, advocates, academics and authors.
