It started sometime between the second and third courses at Christmas lunch.
Fresh from swallowing a mouthful of herring and potato pancake, with another shakily loaded to go, he could no longer hold it in.
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Pauline Hanson - 20 years on
The One Nation leader has delivered her maiden Senate speech. See how it compares to the one she delivered two decades ago.
"How's that Pauline, eh," he said, gleefully defiant. Not a question, but a statement of victory.
"I'm glad she's back. She'll stir things up in the state election too. Can't wait."
My dad rode the One Nation wave in 1998 and was bitterly disappointed when it crashed not too long after.
The re-emergence of the party, particularly in his home state of Queensland, is thanks to people like him, who never stopped believing in the message – Australia first.
It doesn't bother him that he would not have been allowed in to Pauline Hanson's version of Australia.
Displaced by WWII, he fled Lithuania with my Oma, leaving behind family, wealth and status and grew up in refugee camps across Europe. Germany. Italy. Others. Tents and uncertainty were just a way of life.
After years of bureaucracy and paperwork, they hopped on a boat and hoped for the best, landing in Melbourne, and another displaced persons' camp. They were lucky. They spoke enough English to pick up more quickly, changed their names to better suit Australian palates and began attempting to repay a country that would not truly accept them for decades.
As working class as they came, Dad could never vote Labor, having absorbed the "reds under the bed" message too deeply during his political awakening, while the memories of his childhood were still fresh.
A conservative voter through thick and thin, he became disillusioned during the early Howard years, when working all his life still saw him struggle to put food on the table for his three children.
And then along came a Queensland firebrand, who inarticulately articulated his anger and frustration, standing up and talking about the way things used to be and who was to blame for the change.
It didn't matter that he spent his life forced to smile through being called "the wog" and "the mad Russian", despite being neither, or refusing to teach his children the language he fought, laughed and loved his mother in, because he was insistent they be "fully Australian", or that he too suffered the isolation, fear and anger directed at "the different", until his accent faded enough to blend.
He assimilated. So why couldn't they? He gave up everything. So why wouldn't they?
Pauline Hanson said the things he felt. And now, almost two decades later, he feels she still does.
"She speaks her mind, she's an agitator. What have the others ever given us? "They're all rubbish. Rubbish. At least she's different." He was preparing for a fight.
It didn't matter that all "the others" had given him was education and medical care for his children. A state school system which has led to affordable tertiary study and produced a journalist, a teacher and (almost) a lawyer.
A series of strokes saw him forced to give up work before he was ready, leaving him with no savings, and panic and frustration delivered along with every new bill.
He's nostalgic for an Australia that never existed, but especially never existed for him. And, like millions of others, he is willing to vote for anyone who offers a chance they'll provide it. He voted for Palmer in the Senate at the last election. He would have voted Trump.
He'll vote One Nation every chance he gets. It's not Hanson's policies, but her dialogue which attracts him. The "bloody academics" and the "bastard politicians" don't understand that, he says.
"But they will. They'll see." The polls, and the mood, are on his side.
And if nothing changes?
"At least we tried. At least we tried to shake the system up. What are you doing?"
Christmas lunch rolled on. And so does the One Nation steam train, powered by people like my dad - beaten, but still desperate for a chance to fight.
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